(soft rock music) >> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Source Summit North America 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome to a special Cube coverage here in Los Angeles, California for The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube. This week I'll be co-hosting with Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman who will be here shortly. He's out getting data from the keynotes and scouring the community for information. Two days of coverage of line up here. Open source is changing the world. More than ever, open source is continuing to accelerate. Over 23 million developers now actively programming with open source. Where the world economy is now based on open source, relies on open source, and where open source and code is changing culture. Jeff, had a great keynote from the Linux Foundation open source community, and really this is an accumulation of many, many years of coverage for us in the developer community. Kind of sitting above all the different communities like Stack Overflow, all the different source foundational communities: Open Stack Summit, Cooper Netty's, KubeCon, now CNCF, a variety of other shows, and obviously industry shows. And this is now, we're seeing where open source is becoming so mainstream on a global scale, we're seeing something unprecedented in the history of the computer industry and that is the role of open source in society. And I think the number one message we're seeing is that the Linux software has been around for 25 plus years. Linus Torvalds was on stage today kind of like reminiscing. He's been Time Man of the Year, he's won the Nobel Prize in Computer Science, the Millennial Award I think it's called. Essentially the top award. 17th most important person in this decade. Linux is now a main force. People are relying on open source, and then look no further than the Equifax pact that has changed 150 plus million people in terms of their, potentially identity fraud out there. It's from open source software, so you're starting to see the reliance of open source, where a sustainable ecosystem is continuing to grow, but security is a concern, and which projects to join. There's so much action, I called it open bar and open source. There's so much goodness flowing in from Google, IBM, you name the companies out there. People are being paid to learn and write code at this point in history. This is a historic moment for the open source community. As society starts to be molded by the shape of code in the keynote they call it a Do-Acracy. For doers and builders who are changing democracy on a global scale. This is the big theme and obviously a slew of announcements on a project basis: Certification for Cooper Netty's, new people joining, the CNCF and a variety of different projects. But certainly from our standpoint and theCUBE, we covered a lot of the game of this past eight years. Certainly the Cloud and big data, and the software ecosystem. Software-defined Data Center to software eating the world, Data Science eating the world. This is only going to continue with things like Blockchain, virtual reality. And as fake news and bought networks in the cloud continuing to change the notion of what the source is, not just source code, source of information. More than ever, the role of communities will play a front and center role in all of this. >> Yeah I think that's as big of a deal as the software piece, John, is the role of communities that open source creates. And it's a different way of thinking about things. It's a different way of trying to get more innovation. It's acknowledging that the smartest people aren't necessarily in your four walls. So it's really an attitude, but I want to get your take 'cause there's a couple models of stewardship in the open source world. We're here at Open Source Summit in L.A. Linux Foundation event. Linux Foundation is taking on more and more of the stewardship of many of these projects, kind of bringing it under one roof. We see another model where the stewardship is kind of driven by one particular company, right, that's trying to build a commercial business around an open source stack, but there's a couple companies that have become almost the defacto steward for a new and evolving open source space. How do you see the pros and the cons against those two models. Ya know it's great is you got a great steward, it's maybe not so great is the steward is not so terrific and you get a conflict between the steward of the technology and the actual open source project. >> Well, Jeff, and this is the fundamental question on everyone's mind here, as we continue to see the communities grow. And also the scale out of communities as well as the number of overall lines of code. So a couple of key things, one is: We call it the ruling class, that's the elephant in the room here at the show is, we see it in politics, identity politics shaping our national level and certainly on a global scale. China blocking all block chain, ICOs, and all virtual currencies as of today. You're starting to see the intersection of geopolitics with code. Where the notion of a democracy, or democratization, or do-acracy, as one of the speakers has called it. You can think of code, lines of code, as a vote. You write a line of code, that's a vote into an ecosystem. And we're starting to see these notion of distributed labor, distributed control changing the face of capitalism. Ya know, it's really happening, and the value that corporations are creating in this new model is a real dynamic. And really what's happening is the change from a ruling class, even in the software world. The success of open source has always been based upon self-governance. Self-governance implies a group collective that manages and approves things. That group collective, some would argue, has not been inclusive over the years. Certainly the role of women in tech has been an issue. And so what you have developing is the potential for a ruling class of what shapes the future culture. Certainly there's a no-brainer with women in tech that there should be more women in tech because half the people in the world are women. They're users of software. Software is going to be relied on by all aspects of our world. Not just in Earth but also in Space. So, the notion of ruling class is changing and the inclusion is a huge deal. Onboarding new people. Building on individual successes, and building it together as a group relies on inclusion. It relies on inlcusion of people, and requires inclusion of how the self-governance goes forward. And again, this is a major concept in this world as it evolves because like I said, open source is relied on, people are leaning on it at a tier one level. Software that's powering the telescope in the North Pole, in the Antarctic to Space stations all use Linux. And this is, again, what we're seeing. Getting technology in the hands so people can use code to shape culture. That is ultimately a big thing, we're at a tipping point right now, were at an inflection point, whatever you want to call it. Open source is continuing to grow, and that culture-shaping notion of code equals culture, is really what it's all about, and the role of community is more important than ever. And inclusion is the number one factor in my opinion. >> The other interesting thing to get your take, John, is Android. So Linux has been around for a long time, everybody knows about Linux, and there was lots of flavors and it all kind of aggregated. Android is really growing as a significant factor, and I think it was announced here that Samsung has now joined the project. And there's a really interesting little gizmo now that you can take your Samsung phone, stick it in a docking station, and have it power a big giant screen and a keyboard. And so, ya know, as Android has developed as the power in the handheld devices, it's closer and closer, it's not surpassing what we have in these things. It's another big kind of shot in the arm towards the open source ecosystem that really wasn't as significant as it is today. >> Well I mean the Android Operating System is again, just an operating system in the minds of the tech world. Obviously consumers use it, device, huge market share iOS Android and even other operating systems. Who knows, maybe it'll be the year of Linux on the phone, at some point. But you're starting to see software powering devices. This is the internet of things phenomenon. This is where you start to see trends that build out of that notion, like Blockchain, like A.I. are going to start impacting lives. And that's one thing that Linus Torvalds was saying on stage was, the most rewarding thing in his career with all the accolades aside; the fact that he's had an impact on people's lives has been the number one thing that motivates him. That's what motivates most people. So I would say that the Android significance is one of pure numbers. More market share, more penetration for the user experience. And the user experience is a cultural issue. Back to culture equals code. And, inclusively powering everyone to get involved and be part of it, either as a user or a participant in the community or a coder, really is about deciding the future, and if people do not get involved and are not included, then the ruling class will decide what's best for the culture, and that is not the theme here today. The theme here in open source for the next level is letting the code and the technologists in an open collaborative self-governing way be in communities, be inclusive and shape the culture, letting the code shape the culture. And Android, again, is another straw in the camel's back that allows for more penetration and more influence. More relevance, and continued relevance of technology. Providers, coders, communities and certainly individuals. And again, collective intelligence is a group phenomenon. That is a community powered theme. That is what's going on here and again, this is to me, is very radical disruption to the global society. >> Get your take John, 'cause then you get kind of forking and things kind of move and groove, it's kind of like a river, finds another path, right. And you had the container and docker really drove a lot of activation on the container side. Google comes out strong with Cooper Netty's, another open source project that we just heard at the VMworld a week ago. Pivotal get on stage with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger talking about kind of a new derivation that they're kicking out that's not Cooper Netty's. I forget what it's called, a different, cube-something >> John: PKS. >> PKS. >> John: A little container service. >> Continues to evolve and kind of fork. So what's your take on kind of how these things continue to morph. >> Well that's a good point, I mean you're talking about vendors in industry. Industry is a term that they use here it's kind of a polite term for saying companies with a vol for capitalism. And capitalism, one of the factors involved in what's going on here: corporate value is not a bad thing. But capitalism driving the culture is not what it wants. Distributed labor, distributed control, changing the face and capitalism is about the role of open source. So there's a role for industry and corporations. The issue is that as vendors, in the old model, which is put stuff out there, control the standards bodies and influence the industry through their proprietary mechanisms. That's changed and they don't have the proprietary nature but they can try to use their muscle and money. That's not happening anymore, and I think forking, as you mentioned, the ability to take a piece of code and build on it, whether it's a framework or libraries out there. And writing custom code is what Jim Zemlin was talking about with us is the code sandwich. That 90 percent of the software out there is open source and only ten percent is highly differentiated. That is the programming model. So, to me I think forking is a wonderful democracy dynamic in open source. If you don't like it, you can fork it. And if it doesn't make it, then the Do-Acracy voted with their code. So, this a term you call voting with your code. We can use the term in marketing called people vote with their wallet, vote with their feet. In communities, in open source they vote with their code. So to me, forking if a good thing that provides great opportunity for innovation. The issue of vendors pushing stuff out there is what I call the calling the bullshit factor. Communities that are vibrant and sustainable they can call bullshit on this right away. So, companies can't operate on the old model, they have to ingratiate in, they have to make real contribution, and they have to be community citizens. Otherwise you're going to get called out for pushing their vendorware. And that is interesting, and I'm not saying that they are doing that but Pivotal is a great example. Ya know, Pivotal put out a pretty good service, makes Cooper Netty's manageable, Google Cloud engines tied directly to it. So any updates coming from the Google Cloud engine gets updated into Pivotal, that's the value to users. If it sucks, if it doesn't work well, people won't use it. So, voting with your code, voting with your feet, is what people will do. So there's now a new level of triangulation or a heat shield if you will from vendor dominance, throwing their muscle around and even Microsoft is here with Linux. It's a huge testament to the success of Linux, and that's really what it's all about. >> Yeah, Microsoft is here, Intel is here. A lot of big companies are here and a lot of, in the early days, people had issues with the big companies coming in. But, clearly they're a huge part of the ecosystem, they write big checks, they help fund nice events like this. So the last question for you John, before we get into it: Two days of wall to wall coverage, what are you looking for? What are some of the questions that you've got on top of your mind that we'd hope to get some answers over the next couple weeks, or couple days, excuse me. >> Well I saw a great quote up on stage, was called May The Source Be With You. And, it was kind of a Star Wars reference: May the force be with, may the source code be with you, if you will. I'm looking for things that changed people's lives, 'cause the theme in open source now is the reliance of code in all aspects of global life here on earth and in space now as we see it. That the quality of life for society depends on open source. And again, 90 percent of most great software is written in open source, ten percent is differentiated and unique. That's the model they call the code sandwich. It's easy to code, it's easier to get involved. There's more communities that are robust and vibrant. If it impacts the quality of life, so that's one thing. The second thing I'm looking for is, we're looking at some of these new future trends and I've been really thinking a lot about lately as you know in theCUBE, is the role of Blockchains and these really disrupted technologies. We've started to see the power of the user in communities where there's technologies empowering the individual at the same time creating a group dynamic where the groups can build. So, individual success can be part of something that contributes to a group that can build on top of it. That's an open source flywheel that works great. I'm looking for Blockchain, I'm looking for those new technologies that are going to be in that vein. And of course, the outcome is: Does it impact lives, does it make the quality of life better? >> Alright. Well you heard it there, we'll be here for two days of wall to wall coverage. We're at the Open Source Summit North America in L.A. It's pretty funny, right next to Staples Center. John, I don't think we've ever been right downtown L.A. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone; I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE NEWS and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our SiliconANGLE NEWS MWC NEWS UPDATE in Barcelona where MWC is the premier event for the cloud telecommunication industry, and in the news here is Red Hat, Red Hat announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA, Samsung and Arm on Efficient Open Networks. Red Hat announced updates across various fields including advanced 5G telecommunications cloud, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, and radio access networks, RAN, and Efficiency. Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, has added support for NVIDIA's converged accelerators and aerial SDK facilitating RAND deployments on industry standard service across hybrid and multicloud platforms. This composable infrastructure enables telecom firms to support heavier compute demands for edge computing, AI, private 5G, and more, and just also helps network operators adopt open architectures, allowing them to choose non-proprietary components from multiple suppliers. In addition to the NVIDIA collaboration, Red Hat is working with Samsung to offer a new vRAN solution for service providers to better manage their open RAN networks. They're also working with UK chip designer, Arm, to create new networking solutions for energy efficient Red Hat Open Source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter project, or Kepler, has been donated to the open Cloud Native Compute Foundation, allowing enterprise to better understand their cloud native workloads and power consumptions. Kepler can also help in the development of sustainable software by creating less power hungry applications. Again, Red Hat continuing to provide OpenSource, OpenRAN, and contributing an open source project to the CNCF, continuing to create innovation for developers, and, of course, Red Hat knows what, a lot about operating systems and the telco could be the next frontier. That's SiliconANGLE NEWS. I'm John Furrier; thanks for watching. (monotone music)

(soft electronic music) >> Okay, we're back with Tim Yocum who is the Director of Engineering at InfluxData. Tim, welcome, good to see you. >> Good to see you, thanks for having me. >> You're really welcome. Listen, we've been covering opensource software on theCUBE for more than a decade and we've kind of watched the innovation from the big data ecosystem, the cloud is being built out on opensource, mobile, social platforms, key databases, and of course, InfluxDB. And InfluxData has been a big consumer and crontributor of opensource software. So my question to you is where have you seen the biggest bang for the buck from opensource software? >> So yeah, you know, Influx really, we thrive at the intersection of commercial services and opensource software, so OSS keeps us on the cutting edge. We benefit from OSS in delivering our own service from our core storage engine technologies to web services, templating engines. Our team stays lean and focused because we build on proven tools. We really build on the shoulders of giants. And like you've mentioned, even better, we contribute a lot back to the projects that we use, as well as our own product InfluxDB. >> But I got to ask you, Tim, because one of the challenge that we've seen, in particular, you saw this in the heyday of Hadoop, the innovations come so fast and furious, and as a software company, you got to place bets, you got to commit people, and sometimes those bets can be risky and not pay off. So how have you managed this challenge? >> Oh, it moves fast, yeah. That's a benefit, though, because the community moves so quickly that today's hot technology can be tomorrow's dinosaur. And what we tend to do is we fail fast and fail often; we try a lot of things. You know, you look at Kubernetes, for example. That ecosystem is driven by thousands of intelligent developers, engineers, builders. They're adding value every day, so we have to really keep up with that. And as the stack changes, we try different technologies, we try different methods. And at the end of the day, we come up with a better platform as a result of just the constant change in the environment. It is a challenge for us, but it's something that we just do every day. >> So we have a survey partner down in New York City called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, and they do these quarterly surveys of about 1500 CIOs, IT practitioners, and they really have a good pulse on what's happening with spending. And the data shows that containers generally, but specifically Kubernetes, is one of the areas that is kind of, it's been off the charts and seen the most significant adoption and velocity particularly along with cloud, but really, Kubernetes is just, you know, still up and to the right consistently, even with the macro headwinds and all of the other stuff that we're sick of talking about. So what do you do with Kubernetes in the platform? >> Yeah, it's really central to our ability to run the product. When we first started out, we were just on AWS and the way we were running was a little bit like containers junior. Now we're running Kubernetes everywhere at AWS, Azure, Google cloud. It allows us to have a consistent experience across three different cloud providers and we can manage that in code. So our developers can focus on delivering services not trying to learn the intricacies of Amazon, Azure, and Google, and figure out how to deliver services on those three clouds with all of their differences. >> Just a followup on that, is it now, so I presume it sounds like there's a PaaS layer there to allow you guys to have a consistent experience across clouds and out to the edge, wherever. Is that correct? >> Yeah, so we've basically built more or less platform engineering is this the new, hot phrase. Kubernetes has made a lot of things easy for us because we've built a platform that our developers can lean on and they only have to learn one way of deploying their application, managing their application. And so that just gets all of the underlying infrastructure out of the way and lets them focus on delivering Influx cloud. >> And I know I'm taking a little bit of a tangent, but is that, I'll call it a PaaS layer, if I can use that term, are there specific attributes to InfluxDB or is it kind of just generally off-the-shelf PaaS? Is there any purpose built capability there that is value-add or is it pretty much generic? >> So we really build, we look at things with a build versus buy, through a build versus buy lens. Some things we want to leverage, cloud provider services, for instance, POSTGRES databases for metadata, perhaps. Get that off of our plate, let someone else run that. We're going to deploy a platform that our engineers can deliver on, that has consistency, that is all generated from code. that we can, as an SRE group, as an OPS team, that we can manage with very few people, really, and we can stamp out clusters across multiple regions in no time. >> So sometimes you build, sometimes you buy it. How do you make those decisions and what does that mean for the platform and for customers? >> Yeah, so what we're doing is, it's like everybody else will do. We're looking for trade-offs that make sense. We really want to protect our customers' data, so we look for services that support our own software with the most up-time reliability and durability we can get. Some things are just going to be easier to have a cloud provider take care of on our behalf. We make that transparent for our own team and of course, for our customers; you don't even see that. But we don't want to try to reinvent the wheel, like I had mentioned with SQL datasource for metadata, perhaps. Let's build on top of what of these three large cloud providers have already perfected and we can then focus on our platform engineering and we can help our developers then focus on the InfluxData software, the Influx cloud software. >> So take it to the customer level. What does it mean for them, what's the value that they're going to get out of all these innovations that we've been talking about today, and what can they expect in the future? >> So first of all, people who use the OSS product are really going to be at home on our cloud platform. You can run it on your desktop machine, on a single server, what have you, but then you want to scale up. We have some 270 terabytes of data across over four billion series keys that people have stored, so there's a proven ability to scale. Now in terms of the opensource software and how we've developed the platform, you're getting highly available, high cardinality time-series platform. We manage it and really, as I had mentioned earlier, we can keep up with the state of the art. We keep reinventing, we keep deploying things in realtime. We deploy to our platform every day, repeatedly, all the time. And it's that continuous deployment that allow us to continue testing things in flight, rolling things out that change, new features, better ways of doing deployments, safer ways of doing deployments. All of that happens behind the scenes and like we had mentioned earllier, Kubernetes, I mean, that allows us to get that done. We couldn't do it without having that platform as a base layer for us to then put our software on. So we iterate quickly. When you're on the Influx cloud platform, you really are able to take advantage of new features immediately. We roll things out every day and as those things go into production, you have the ability to use them. And so in the then, we want you to focus on getting actual insights from your data instead of running infrastructure, you know, let us do that for you. >> That makes sense. Are the innovations that we're talking about in the evolution of InfluxDB, do you see that as sort of a natural evolution for existing customers? Is it, I'm sure the answer is both, but is it opening up new territory for customers? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, it really is. It's a little bit of both. Any engineer will say, "Well it depends." So cloud-native technologies are really the hot thing, IoT, industrial IoT especially. People want to just shove tons of data out there and be able to do queries immediately and they don't want to manage infrastructure. What we've started to see are people that use the cloud service as their datastore backbone and then they use edge computing with our OSS product to ingest data from say, multiple production lines, and down-sample that data, send the rest of that data off to Influx cloud where the heavy processing takes place. So really, us being in all the different clouds and iterating on that, and being in all sorts of different regions, allows for people to really get out of the business of trying to manage that big data, have us take care of that. And, of course, as we change the platform, endusers benefit from that immediately. >> And so obviously you've taken away a lot of the heavy lifting for the infrastructure. Would you say the same things about security, especially as you go out to IoT at the edge? How should we be thinking about the value that you bring from a security perspective? >> We take security super seriously. It's built into our DNA. We do a lot of work to ensure that our platform is secure, that the data that we store is kept private. It's, of course, always a concern, you see in the news all the time, companies being compromised. That's something that you can have an entire team working on which we do, to make sure that the data that you have, whether it's in transit, whether it's at rest is always kept secure, is only viewable by you. You look at things like software bill of materials, if you're running this yourself, you have to go vet all sorts of different pieces of software and we do that, you know, as we use new tools. That's something, that's just part of our jobs to make sure that the platform that we're running has fully vetted software. And you know, with opensource especially, that's a lot of work, and so it's definitely new territory. Supply chain attacks are definitely happening at a higher clip that they used to but that is really just part of a day in the life for folks like us that are building platforms. >> And that's key, especially when you start getting into the, you know, that we talk about IoT and the operations technologies, the engineers running that infrastrucutre. You know, historically, as you know, Tim, they would air gap everything; that's how they kept it safe. But that's not feasible anymore. Everything's-- >> Can't do that. >> connected now, right? And so you've got to have a partner that is, again, take away that heavy lifting to R&D so you can focus on some of the other activities. All right, give us the last word and the key takeaways from your perspective. >> Well, you know, from my perspective, I see it as a two-lane approach, with Influx, with any time-series data. You've got a lot of stuff that you're going to run on-prem. What you had mentioned, air gapping? Sure, there's plenty of need for that. But at the end of the day, people that don't want to run big datacenters, people that want to entrust their data to a company that's got a full platform set up for them that they can build on, send that data over to the cloud. The cloud is not going away. I think a more hybrid approach is where the future lives and that's what we're prepared for. >> Tim, really appreciate you coming to the program. Great stuff, good to see you. >> Thanks very much, appreciate it. >> Okay in a moment, I'll be back to wrap up today's session. You're watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, for a special program on Cloud Native at Scale, Enabling Next Generation Cloud or Supercloud for Modern Application Cloud Native Developers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. My pleasure to have here, me Madhura Maskasky, Co-founder and VP of Product at Platform9. Thanks for coming in today for this cloud native at scale conversation. >> Thank you for having me. >> So cloud native at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the next level of mainstream success of containers, Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the CI/CD pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code. It's accelerating the value proposition. And the Supercloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Supercloud as it fits to cloud native, it scales up. >> Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting. And I think the reason why Supercloud is a really good and a really fit term for this. And I think I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multicloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model's kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro-sites. These micro-sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private OnPrem infrastructure deployment, or it could be your Edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you got to refer that with a terminology that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think Supercloud is an appropriate term for that. >> So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge nodes. We're seeing not only Edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning, wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got IoT, OT and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions. Global infrastructure is a big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, these new challenges there. Can you share, because you got to have Edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that, it's a steady state. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un-engineered area yet, It hasn't been done yet, Spanning Clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water. It's happening, it's going to happen. It's only going to get accelerated with the Edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something, business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the Supercloud across multiple edges and regions? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in the context of this term of Supercloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two axis, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deployed, a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis, you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site, or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites, with one node at each site, right? And if you have just one flare of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these axis, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling, along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this, or when your scale is not at the level. >> Can you scope the complexity? Because, I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there. The technology is also getting better. We're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure. There's lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem because we're about at scale challenges here. >> Yeah absolutely, and I think I like to call it, you know, the problem that the scale creates, there's various problems. But I think one problem, one way to think about it is it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a famous saying between engineers and QA, and the support folks, right. Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic. It worked flawlessly on my machine. On production, it's not working. The exact same problem now happens in these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right. Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within these sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right. And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the Edge location where a cluster is running there. Or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site, where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it. Or they configured the cluster right. But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors add their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ballgame of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale, in a distributed manner, you got to make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >> Okay, so I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native, you know, you see some experimentation, they set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes. And then you say, okay, we got this. We configure it. And then they do it again, and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you got to scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches. You're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is, in when companies transition from, I got this, to oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem. Which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with P 0s and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right. And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi-folds. It goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters, and things work perfectly fine in those clusters, because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. And so as you give that change to then run at your production Edge location, like say your radial cell power site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, as you have these distributed clusters at scale. You got to ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that the security policies are configured properly. >> So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. But at scale, it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, can you share what Arlon is? This new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >> Yeah absolutely, I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now. Because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in OnPrem or in the cloud or at Edge environments. And what Arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, a Kubernetes native tool for complete end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters, all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what Arlon lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >> So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the bumper sticker. What did it do? >> There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is, think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say an auto manufacturing factory, or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right. Arlon, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of Arlon, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos, because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well-structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage where again, it gets processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the elevator pitch. If you have problems of scale, of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed, Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for those problems. >> So keeping it smooth, the assembly line, things are flowing, see CI/CD pipe-lining. So that's what you're trying to simplify that OPS piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really OPS, it's their OPS, it's coding. >> Yeah, not just developer the OPS, the operations folks as well, right. Because developers, you know, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps. And then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with. But then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secured properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly. Monitoring and observability is integrated. And so it solves problems for both those teams. >> Yeah, it's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OPS team have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >> Absolutely, yeah. And you know, Kubernetes really introduced or elevated this declarative management, right. Because you know, Kubernetes clusters are you know your specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it. And it does that using existing open source, well known solutions. >> And do I want to get into the benefits, what's in it for me as the customer, developer, but I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the current state of the product? You run the product group over there at Platform9. Is it open source, and you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? And what is the consumption? I mean open source is great. People want opensource, they can download and look up the code, but maybe want to buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through. Can you share open source and commercial relationship? >> Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why opensource? I think it's, you know, we, as a company, we have one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies, components, and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or OnPrem model, right. But so as we are a company or startup, or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right I think in my mind that we do are part of the duty, right. And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products, starting all the way with Fission, which was a serverless product that we had built, to various other examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why open source. And also open source because we want the community to really first-hand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind a black box. >> Well, and that's what the developers want too. What we're seeing in reporting with Supercloud is the new model of consumption is I want to look at the code and see what's in there. >> That's right. >> And then also if I want to use it, I'll do it, great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I want to move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way it is, but that's the benefit of open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Kakroff uses the dating metaphor, you know, hey, you know, I want to check it out first before I get married. And that's what open source is. So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source. This is how companies are selling. >> Absolutely, yeah, yeah. You know, I think two things, I think one is just, you know, this cloud native space is so vast that if you're building a cluster solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case, if they choose to do so, right. But at the same time, what's also critical to us, is we are able to provide a supported version of it, with an SLA that's backed by us, a SaaS-hosted version of it as well for those customers who choose to go that route. You know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need a partner to collaborate with who can support them for that production environment. >> I have to ask you. Now let's get into what's in it for the customer? I'm a customer. Why should I be enthused about Arlon? What's in it for me? You know, 'cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not going to be confident, and it's going to be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlon, if I'm a customer. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, are customers where this is a very kind of typical story that you will hear, which is we have a Kubernetes distribution. It could be On-Premise. It could be public cloud native Kubernetes. And then we have our CI/CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is, well before you can, your CI/CD pipelines can deploy the apps, somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters, and yeah properly configuring them. And as these things start by being done hand-grown. And then as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their homegrown DIY solutions for this. I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terraform automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source, or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits their problem. And so that's that pitch. I think OPS people would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with have been absolutely excited and have shared that this is a major challenge we have today, because we have few hundreds of clusters on EKS, Amazon, and we want to scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the ability to do that. >> Yeah, I think people are scared. I won't say scared, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because you know, at scale, small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And I think this is going to come up at KubeCon this year where enterprises are going to say, okay, I need to see SLAs. I want to see track record. I want to see other companies that have used it. How would you answer that question to, or challenge, you know, hey I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight. You know, I love the open source trying to free, fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >> Yeah, absolutely. So two parts to that, right? One is Arlon leverages, existing opensource components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically, one is Arlon uses Argo CD, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD opensource tools that's out there, right. Created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team, and it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Arlon also makes use of cluster API, CAPI, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right for lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products or open source projects that will find Arlon to be right up in their alley, because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo CD. Now Arlon just extends the scope of what Argo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to your point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform9 has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Arlon at scale, because you've been, you know playing with it in your DEV test environments, you're happy with what you get with it. Then Platform9 will stand behind it and provide that SLA. >> And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to, Platform9 customers that are familiar with Argo, and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >> Yeah, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where you know, initially, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a chord right away. But then we start talking about Arlon, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD. They start opening up, they say, we have standardized on Argo, and we have built these components homegrown. We would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of Arlon, before we even wrote a single line of code, saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, if you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >> All right, so next question is what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, look, I'm so busy. My team's overworked, I got a skills gap. I don't need another project. I'm so tied up right now, and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform9 help me? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenants of Platform9 has always been, that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this and a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right. So our goal behind doing that is taking away, or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right. And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like Arlon will integrate with what they have, so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today, and give you an inventory. >> So customers have clusters that are growing. That's a sign, call you guys. >> Absolutely, either they have massive, large clusters, right, that they want to split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today. Or they've done that already on say public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. >> So, especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and move things around, and reconfigure, and or scale out. >> That's right, exactly. >> And you provide that layer of policy. >> Absolutely, yes. >> That's the key value here. >> That's right. >> So policy based configuration for cluster scale up. >> Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >> If I asked you how this enables Supercloud, what would you say to that? >> I think this is one of the key ingredients to Supercloud, right? If you think about a Supercloud environment, there is at least few key ingredients that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a going back to assembly line, in a very consistent, predictable way. So that, Arlon solves. Then you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are going to happen, and you're going to have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And Arlon, by the way also helps in that direction. But you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Supercloud successful. And you know, Arlon is one of them. >> Okay so now the next level is, okay, that makes sense is under the covers, kind of speak under the hood. How does that impact the app developers of the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me seems, the apps are going to be impacted. Are they going to be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >> Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through. And any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge today where there's a split responsibility, right. I'm responsible for my code. I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own these stack end to end. I have to rely on my OPS counterpart to do their part, right. And so this really gives them the right tooling for that. >> This is actually a great kind of relevant point. You know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation, gone are the days of the full stack developer, to the more specialized role. But this is a key point. And I have to ask you, because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are going to do what they're designed to do, the question is what does the current pain look like? Are the apps breaking? What is the signals to the customer that they should be calling you guys up and implementing Arlo, Argo, and all the other goodness to automate, what are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it failed apps? Is it latency? What are some of the things that would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. >> Yeah, more frequent down times, down times that take longer to triage. And so your, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they have a number of folks in the field that have to take these apps, and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this, because the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges. So those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution. If you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you're looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small focused nimble OPS team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are the signals. >> This is the cloud native at scale situation. The innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application. Not where IT used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office, and the immediate terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now, if technology's running the business, is the business, company's the application. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on CSOs and CIOs now, and boards are saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Do you see the same thing? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CSO, CIO level, right? One, is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, the technology that's going to drive your top line is going to drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right. Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers, or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend providing those goods to their end customers. So I think both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >> Final question. What does cloud native at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, the magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >> What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee. Production is running absolutely smooth. And he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of, at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are just taking care of themselves. >> And the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CISO, they're at the beach. >> (laughing) Yeah. >> Madhura, thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on theCUBE. Thank you for your time. >> Fantastic, thanks for having me. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier here for special program presentation, special programming Cloud Native at Scale, Enabling Supercloud Modern Applications with Platform9. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>We're back at the red hat summit, 2022, the Cube's continuous coverage. This is day one. We're here all day tomorrow as well. My name is Dave LAN. I'm here with Paul Gillon. Matt Hicks is here. He's executive vice president of products and technologies at red hat. Matt. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Nice to see you face to >>Face. Thanks. Thanks Dave. Thanks fall. It's uh, good to be here. >>So you took a different tack with your, uh, keynote today, had a homage to ate a love lace and Serena VA Ramian, which was kind of cool. And your, your point was they weren't noted at their time and nobody was there to build on their early ideas. I mean, ate a lovely, I think it was a century before, right. Ram illusion was a, you know, decade plus, but, and you tied that to open source. You can give us your kind of bumper sticker of your premise there. >>Yeah. You know, I think I have a unique seat in this from red hat where we see, we see new engineers that come in that sort of compete on a world stage and open source and the, the best, which is easy to track just in contributions are not necessarily from the background you would expect them from. And, and it, for me, it's always really inspiring. Like you have this potential in, in people and open source is a great model for getting that out. We told the history story, cuz it, I think when you look over history, just some of that potential that's been ignored before. Um, sure. It's happening right now. But getting that tied into open source models, we think can hopefully let us tap into a little more than, than we have in the past. So >>Greatly. So when you're thinking about innovation and specific to open source, is it a case where I wonder, I really know the history here of open source. Maybe you can educate me. Is it the case where open source observes, uh, a de factacto standard let's say, or some other proprietary approach and says, Hey, we can build that in open and that's so the, the inspiration, or is it an innovation flywheel that just invents? >>I think it's both at this stage. So in the, in the early days, if you take something like Linux, it was a little more of, you know, there was the famous memo of like, this is gonna be a hobbyist project. We're just gonna light up X 86 hardware and have an operating system we can work with. That was a little more of like this standards were there, but it was, can we just build a better operating system with it, be >>Better than Unix cuz would live up to the promise of units. >>That's right. Where in Unix you had some standardization to models, but it wasn't open in that same sense. Uh, Linux has gone well beyond a hobbyist project at this point. Uh, but that was maybe that clone model, um, to units these days though, if you take something like Kubernetes or take something like Ansible, that's just more pure innovation, you didn't necessarily have a Kubernetes model that you're building a better version of it was distributed computing and how can we really make that tick and, um, bring a lot of great minds into that to build it. Um, so I think you see both of 'em, which is it's one of the things that makes open source fun. Like it, it has a broad reach at this point. >>There's one major area of software that opensource has not penetrated yet. And that is applications. I mean, we, there have been, you know, sugar CRM there have been open E R P applications and, and such, none of them really taken off and in fact tend to be drawn back to being proprietary. Why do you suppose opensource has been limited to infrastructure and has hasn't branched out further? >>Yeah, I think part of it is, uh, where can you find a, a model where lots of different companies are, are comfortable contributing into, if you have one solution and one domain from one company you're gonna struggle more getting a real vibrant community built around that. When you pick an area like infrastructure or core platforms, you have a lot of hardware providers, the use cases span from traditional apps to AI. You have a lot of places to run that it's a massive companies. So >>Volume really, it, >>It really is. You just have an interest that spans beyond companies and that's where we've seen open source projects really pick up and build critical mass. How about crypto >>Dows? I mean, that's right. Isn't that the, a form of open source? I mean, is it, isn't that the application really what exactly what you're talking about? It is true or >>It, well, if you look at cryptography encryption algorithms even go to, um, quantum going forward, I think a lot of quantum access will be driven in an open source model. The machines themselves, uh, will be machines, but things like kids kit, uh, that is how most people will access that. So it is a powerful model for getting into areas that are, um, pretty bleeding edge on it as well. >>We were talking, go ahead. We were talking before Andy mentioned that hardware and software increasingly intersecting. That was the theme we heard at the, at the keynote this morning. Yeah. Why do you believe that's happening and how do you see that? How does that affect what you do? >>Uh, I, I think the reason that's happening is there is a push to make decisions closer and closer to users on it because on one side, like law of physics and then on the other of it's just a better experience for it. And so whether that is in transportation or it's in telecommunications, so you see this push outside of data centers to be able to get at that data locally for it. Uh, but if that's the draw, I think also we're seeing hardware architectures are changing. There are, um, standards like arm that are lower power that lets you run pretty powerful compute at the edge as well. And I think it's that combination saying we can do a lot at the edge now and that actually benefits us building user experiences in a lot of different domains is, is making this pull to the edge, uh, really quickly. But it's, it's a, it's an exciting time to be seeing that happening >>And, and, and pretty powerful is almost an understatement. When you think about what the innovations that are going on. Right. I mean, in, in, in, in particular, at the edge mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, you're seeing Moore's law be blown. Everybody says Moore's law is dead, but you're seeing the performance of when you combine the GPU and the CPU and the NPU and the Excel. I mean, it blows away anything we've historically known. Yeah. So you think about the innovations in software that occurred as a result of Moore's law. What are the new beachheads that we could potentially see in open source? >>I think when you start taking the, um, AI patterns on this and AI is a broad space, but if you go even to like machine learning of optimization type use cases, you start, uh, leveraging how you're gonna train those models, which gets you into, you know, CPUs and GPU and TPUs in that world. And then you also have the, how am I gonna take that train model, put it on a really lightweight device and efficiently ask that model questions. And that gets you into a different architecture design. Uh, but that combination, I think we're gonna see these domains build differently where you have mass compute training type capabilities, and then push that as close to the user, as you can, to make decisions that are more dynamic than traditional codes. >>So a lot of the AI that's done today is modeling that's done in the cloud. Yep. And what you're talking about at the edge, and you think about, you know, vehicles is real time influencing. Yep. And that's, that's massive amounts of data. It's a different architecture. Right. And requires different hardware presumably and different software. So, and you guys, well, Linux is obviously there. Yeah. >>That's, that is the, where we get excited about things like the GM announcement you are in the square, in that, um, aspect of running compute right at the end user and actually dealing with sensor and data, that's changing there to help, you know, in this case, like driver's assistance capabilities with it. But I think that the innovation we'll see in that space will be limitless on it. So it's, it's a nice combination of it too. And you'll still have traditional applications that are gonna use those models. I think of it almost as it's like the new middleware, we have our traditional middleware techniques that we know and patterns. Um, they will actually be augmented with things like, um, machine learning models and those capabilities to just be more dynamic. So it's a fun time right now seeing >>That conversion a lot of data too. And again, I wonder how much of that is even gonna be persisted prob probably enough, cuz there's gonna be so much of it, how much it'll come back to the cloud a lot, but maybe not most of it, but it's still massive amounts relative to what we've seen before >>It is. And this is, you know, you've heard our announcement around OpenShift streams in those capabilities. So in red hat, what we do, we will always focus on hybrid with it because a lot of that data it'll be dropped at the edge cuz you won't need it, but the data you act on and the data you need, you will probably need at your indice and in your cloud. And maybe even on premise and capabilities like Kafka and the ability to pick and stream and stay consistent. We think there's a set of really exciting services to be able to enable that class of development where, um, hopefully we'll be at the center of, of that. >>You, you announced, uh, today an agreement with GM, uh, to, to build on their all to five platform, uh, auto industry, very proprietary historically, uh, with their technology. Do you think that this is an opportunity to crank that open? >>A absolutely. I think in, I've been involved with opensource for, for a while, but I think all of them started in a very proprietary model. And then you get to a tipping point where open source models can just unlock more innovation than proprietary models and you see 'em tip and flip. And I think in the automotive industry and actually in a lot of other industries, the capabilities of being able to combine hardware and software fast with the latest capabilities, it'll drive more innovation than just sticking to proprietary models. So yeah, I believe it will be one of many things to come there. >>You've been involved in open surf for a while. Like how long of a while people must joke about when they look at you, Matt, they must say, oh, did you start when you were five? Yeah. >>It's >>Uh, you get that a lot. >>I, I do, uh, it's my, my children, I think aged me a bit, but uh, but yeah, for me it was the mid nineties. That's when I started with, uh, with open source. >>It was uh, wow. So >>It's been a long, long >>Run. You made the statement in your keynote, that software development is, is, is messy. I presumably part of your job is to make it less messy. But now we talk about all this, these new beachheads, this new new innovations, a lot of it's unknown. Yeah. And it could be really messy. So who are the, who is there a new breed of developer that's emerging? Are they gonna come over from the cloud developers or is it the, is it the OT crowd and the, and the OT crowd? That's gonna be the new developers. >>I, I wish I knew, but I would say, I think you, I do think you'll get to almost like a laws of physics type challenge where you won't learn everything. You're not gonna know, uh, the depths of 5g implementation and Kubernetes and Linux on that. And so for us, this is where ecosystem providers are really, really critical where you have to know your intersection points, but you also have to partner really well to actually drive innovation in some of these spaces cuz uh, the domains themselves are massive on it. So our areas we're gonna know hybrid, we're gonna know, you know, open source based platforms to enable hybrid. And then we're gonna partner with companies that know their domains and industries really well to bring solutions to customers. So >>I'm curious about partnering, uh, cuz Paul cor may mentioned that as well as, as being critical, do you have sort of a template for partnering or is each partnership unique? >>Um, >>I think at this point, uh, the market's changing so fast that, uh, we do have templates of, uh, who are you going to embed solutions with? Who are you going to co-sell with? And co-create uh, the challenge in technology though, is it shifts so quickly. If you go back five years, maybe even 10 years, public cloud probably wasn't as dominant. Um, as it is now, now we're starting to see the uptick of edge solutions, probably being, having as much draw as public cloud. And so I think for us, the partnership follows the innovation on those curves and finding the right model where that works for customers is the key thing for us. But I wish there was more of a pattern. We could say it stays stable for decades, but I think it changes with the market on, we do that. >>But you know, it's funny cuz you you've, you see every 15 years or so the industry gets disrupted. I mean we certainly saw it with mainframes and PC and then the internet and then the cloud, uh, you guys have kind of been there. Well Linux throughout, I mean, okay. It built the, built the internet, built the cloud, it's building the edge. So it's almost, I don't wanna say your disruption proof cause that's just, that's gonna jinx you, but, but in, but you've architected the products in a way that they're compatible with these new errors. Mm-hmm <affirmative> of industry, >>Everything needs an operating >>System. Everything needs an operating system, but you've seen operating systems come and go, you know, and, and Linux has survived so many different waves. Why, how >>You know, I, I think for us, when you see open source projects, they definitely get to a critical mass where you have so much contribution, so much innovation there that they're gonna be able to follow the trends pretty well. If you look at a Linux, whatever the next hardware innovation that comes out is Linux has enough gravity that, um, it's open, it's successful, you're gonna design to it. The capability will be there. I think you're seeing similar things in Kubernetes now where if you're going to try to drive application innovation, it is a model that gives you a ton of reach. You have thousands of contributors. That's been our model though is find those projects be influential in, 'em be able to drive value in life cycles. But I think it's that open source model that gives us the durability where it can keep changing and tracking to new patterns. So, so >>Yeah, there's been a lot of open source that wasn't able to sustain. So I think you guys obviously have a magic formula. That's true. >>We, there is a, there is some art to picking, I think millions of projects. Uh, but you've gotta watch for that. >>Yeah. Open source is also a place place where failed products go to die. Yeah. <laugh> so you have to be sure you're not, you're not in that corner. >>Yeah. Well >>Look at Kubernetes. I mean the fact that that actually happened is it's astounding to me when you think about it, I mean even red hat was ready to go on a different path. What if that had happened? Who knows? Maybe it never would've maybe to your point about Ava Lovelace, maybe it would've taken a decade to, or run revolution. >>You know, I think in some of these you have to, you have to watch really closely. We obviously have a lot of signals of what will make good long term health. And I, I don't think everyone looks at those the same. We look at 'em from trademark controls and how foundations are structured and um, who the contributors are and the spread of that. And it's not perfect. But I think for us, you have to have those that longevity built in there where you will have a spike of popularity that has the tendency to just, um, fall apart on it. So we've been yeah. Doing that pretty >>Well conditions for a long life is something that's a that's maybe it's an art form. I don't know if it's a data form. It's a culture. Maybe, maybe it's >>Cultural. Yeah. Probably a combination some days I think I'm like this could part art, part science. Yeah. But, uh, but it's certainly a fun space to be in and see that happen. It, um, yeah, it's inspiring to me. Yeah. >>Matt Hicks. Great to have you back on the cube and uh, good job on the keynote really, um, interesting angle that you took. So >>Congratulations. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah. You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Dave ante for Paul Gillon red hat summit, 2022 from Boston. You're watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. 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More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube 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 applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, 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 you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, 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, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, 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, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, 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, 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 wanna analyze. And, 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 wanna get your opinion on our 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, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. 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, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways 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, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA 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, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, 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, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. 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, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, 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. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX 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 are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, 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 you can, you know, 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 gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. 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. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and 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, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna 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, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, 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, and the biggest thing our investors give is it 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 on 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? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, 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, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a 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 more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were 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, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube 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 applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, 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, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother 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 your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, 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, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, 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, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, 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, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, 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 I wanna get your opinion on our 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 query, 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, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave 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, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA 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, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, 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, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, 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, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. 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, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and 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. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, 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. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator 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, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, 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, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>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, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you 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, but you can, you know, 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 gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. 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. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, 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 lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna 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's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, 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, 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. Why 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 on 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? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this 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, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a 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 more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were 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, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

(gentle music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme is Data as Code; The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics. This is the season two, episode two of the ongoing series of covering the exciting startups in the AWS ecosystem around data analytics and cloud computing. I'm your host, John Furrier. Today we're joined by great guests here. Three guests. Wen Phan, who's a Director of Product Management at Ahana, Satyam Krishna, Engineering Manager at Blinkit, and we have Akshay Agarwal, Senior Engineer at Blinkit as well. We're going to get into the relationship there. Let's get into. We're going to talk about how Blinkit's using open data lake, data house with Presto on AWS. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to get into the deep dive on the open data lake, but I want to just quickly get your thoughts on what it is for the folks out there. Set the table. What is the open data lakehouse? Why it is important? What's in it for the customers? Why are we seeing adoption around this because this is a big story. >> Sure. Yeah, the open data lakehouse is really being able to run a gamut of analytics, whether it be BI, SQL, machine learning, data science, on top of the data lake, which is based on inexpensive, low cost, scalable storage. And more importantly, it's also on top of open formats. And this to the end customer really offers a tremendous range of flexibility. They can run a bunch of use cases on the same storage and great price performance. >> You guys have any other thoughts on what's your reaction to the lakehouse? What is your experience with it? What's going on with Blinkit? >> No, I think for us also, it has been the primary driver of how as a company we have shifted our completely delivery model from us delivering in one day to someone who is delivering in 10 minutes, right? And a lot of this was made possible by having this kind of architecture in place, which helps us to be more open-source, more... where the tools are open-source, we have an open table format which helps us be very modular in nature, meaning we can pick solutions which works best for us, right? And that is the kind of architecture that we want to be in. >> Awesome. Wen, you know last time we chat with Ahana, we had a great conversation around Presto, data. The theme of this episode is Data as Code, which is interesting because in all the conversations in these episodes all around developers, which administrators are turning into developers, there's a developer vibe with data. And with opensource, it's software. Now you've got data taking a similar trajectory as how software development was with code, but the people running data they're not developers, they're administrators, they're operators. Now they're turning into DataOps. So it's kind of a similar vibe going on with branches and taking stuff out of and putting it back in, and testing it. Datasets becoming much more stable, iterating on machine learning algorithm. This is a movement. What's your guys reaction before we get into the relationships here with you guys. But, what's your reaction to this Data as Code movement? >> Yeah, so I think the folks at Blinkit are doing a great job there. I mean, they have a pretty compact data engineering team and they have some pretty stringent SLAs, as well as in terms of time to value and reliability. And what that ultimately translates for them is not only flexibility but reliability. So they've done some very fantastic work on a lot of automation, a lot of integration with code, and their data pipelines. And I'm sure they can give the details on that. >> Yes. Satyam and Akshay, you guys are engineers' software, but this is becoming a whole another paradigm where the frontline coding and or work or engineer data engineering is implementing the operations as well. It's kind of like DevOps for data. >> For sure. Right. And I think whenever you're working, even as a software engineer, the understanding of business is equally important. You cannot be working on something and be away from business, right? And that's where, like I mentioned earlier, when we realized that we have to completely move our stack and start giving analytics at 10 minutes, right. Because when you're delivering in 10 minutes, your leaders want to take decisions in your real-time. That means you need to move with them. You need to move with business. And when you do that, the kind of flexibility these softwares give is what enables the businesses at the end of the day. >> Awesome. This is the really kind of like, is there going to be a book called agile data warehouses? I don't think so. >> I think so. (laughing) >> The agile cloud data. This is cool. So let's get into what you guys do. What is Blinkit up to? What do you guys do? Can you take a minute to explain the company and your product? >> Sure. I'll take that. So Blinkit is India's biggest 10 minute delivery platform. It pioneered the delivery model in the country with over 10 million Indian shopping on our platform, ranging from everything: grocery staples, vegetables, emergency services, electronics, and much more, right. It currently delivers over 200,000 orders every day, and is in a hurry to bring the future of farmers to everyone in India. >> What's the relationship with Ahana and Blinkit? Wen, what's the tie in? >> Yeah, so Blinkit had a pretty well formed stack. They needed a little bit more flexibility and control. They thought a managed service was the way to go. And here at Ahana, we provide a SaaS managed service for Presto. So they engaged us and they evaluated our offering. And more importantly, we're able to partner. As a early stage startup, we really rely on very strong partners with great use cases that are willing to collaborate. And the folks at Blinkit have been really great in helping us push our product, develop our product. And we've been very happy about the value that we've been able to deliver to them as well. >> Okay. So let's unpack the open data lakehouse. What is it? What's under the covers? Let's get into it. >> Sure. So if bring up a slide. Like I said before, it's really a paradigm on being able to run a gamut of analytics on top of the open data lake. So what does that mean? How did it come about? So on the left hand side of the slide, we are coming out of this world where for the last several decades, the primary workhorse for SQL based processing and reporting and dashboarding use cases was really the data warehouse. And what we're seeing is a shift due to the trends in inexpensive scalable storage, cloud storage. The proliferation of open formats to facilitate using this storage to get certain amounts of reliability and performance, and the adoption of frameworks that can operate on top of this cloud data lake. So while here at Ahana, we're primarily focused on SQL workloads and Presto, this architecture really allows for other types of frameworks. And you see the ML and AI side. And like to Satyam's point earlier, offers a great amount of flexibility modularity for many use cases in the cloud. So really, that's really the lakehouse, and people like it for the performance, the openness, and the price performance. >> How's the open-source open side of it playing in the open-source? It's kind of open formats. What is the open-source angle on this because there's a lot of different approaches. I'm hearing open formats. You know, you have data stores which are a big part of seeing that. You got SQL, you mentioned SQL. There's got a mishmash of opportunities. Is it all coexisting? Is it one tool to rule the world or is it interchangeable? What's the open-source angle? >> There's multiple angles and I'll let definitely Satyam add to what I'm saying. This was definitely a big piece for Blinkit. So on one hand, you have the open formats. And what really the open formats enable is multiple compute engines to work on that data. And that's very huge. 'Cause it's open, you're not locked in. I think the other part of open that is important and I think it was important to Blinkit was the governance around that. So in particular Presto is governed by the Linux Foundation. And so, as a customer of open-source technology, they want some assurances for things like how's it governed? Is the license going to change? So there's that aspect of openness that I think is very important. >> Yeah. Blinkit, what's the data strategy here with lakehouse and you guys? Why are you adopting this type of architecture? >> So adding to what... Yeah, I think adding to Wen said, right. When we are thinking in terms of all these OpenStacks, you have got these open table formats, everything which is deployed over cloud, the primary reason there is modularity. It's as simple as that, right. You can plug and play so many different table formats from one thing to another based on the use case that you're trying to serve, so that you get the most value out of data. Right? I'll give you a very simple example. So for us we use... not even use one single table format. It's not that one thing solves for everything, right? We use both Hudi and Iceberg to solve for different use cases. One is good for when you're working for a certain data site. Icebergs works well when you're in the SQL kind of interface, right. Hudi's still trying to reach there. It's going to go there very soon. So having the ability to plug and play different formats based on the use case helps you to grow faster, helps you to take decisions faster because you now you're not stuck on one thing. They will have to implement it. Right. So I think that's what it is great about this data lake strategy. Keeping yourself cost effective. Yeah, please. >> So the enablement is basically use case driven. You don't have to be rearchitecturing for use cases. You can simply plug can play based on what you need for the use case. >> Yeah. You can... and again, you can focus on your business use case. You can figure out what your business users need and not worry about these things because that's where Presto comes in, helps you stitch that data together with multiple data formats, give you the performance that you need and it works out the best there. And that's something that you don't get to with traditional warehouse these days. Right? The kind of thing that we need, you don't get that. >> I do want to add. This is just to riff on what Satyam said. I think it's pretty interesting. So, it really allowed him to take the best-of-breed of what he was seeing in the community, right? So in the case of table formats, you've got Delta, you've got Hudi, you've got Iceberg, and they all have got their own roadmap and it's kind of organic of how these different communities want to evolve, and I think that's great, but you have these end consumers like Blinkit who have different maybe use cases overlapping, and they're not forced to pick one. When you have an open architecture, they can really put together best-of-breed. And as these projects evolve, they can continue to monitor it and then make decisions and continue to remain agile based on the landscape and how it's evolving. >> So the agility is a key point. Flexibility and agility, and time to valuing with your data. >> Yeah. >> All right. Wen, I got to get in to why the Presto is important here. Where does that fit in? Why is Presto important? >> Yeah. For me, it all comes down to the use cases and the needs. And reporting and dashboarding is not going to go away anytime soon. It's a very common use case. Many of our customers like Blinkit come to us for that use case. The difference now is today, people want to do that particular use case on top of the modern data lake, on top of scalable, inexpensive, low cost storage. Right? In addition to that, there's a need for this low latency interactive ability to engage with the data. This is often arises when you need to do things in a ad hoc basis or you're in the developmental phase of building things up. So if that's what your need is. And latency's important and getting your arms around the problems, very important. You have a certain SLA, I need to deliver something. That puts some requirements in the technology. And Presto is a perfect for that ideal use case. It's ideal for that use case. It's distributed, it's scalable, it's in memory. And so it's able to really provide that. I think the other benefit for Presto and why we're bidding on Presto is it works well on the data lakes, but you have to think about how are these organizations maturing with this technology. So it's not necessarily an all or nothing. You have organizations that have maybe the data lake and it's augmented with other analytical data stores like Snowflake or Redshift. So Presto also... a core aspect is its ability to federate or connect and query across different data sources. So this can be a permanent thing. This could also be a transitionary thing. We have some customers that are moving and slowly shifting their data portfolio from maybe all data warehouse into 80% data lake. But it gives that optionality, it gives that ability to transition over a timeframe. But for all those reasons, the latency, the scalability, the federation, is why Presto for this particular use case. >> And you can connect with other databases. It can be purpose built database, could be whatever. Right? >> Sure. Yes, yes. Presto has a very pluggable architecture. >> Okay. Here's the question for the Blinkit team? Why did you choose Presto and what led you to Ahana? >> So I'll take this better, over this what Presto sits well in that reach is, is how it is designed. Like basically, Presto decouples your storage with the compute. Basically like, people can use any storage and Presto just works as a query engine for them. So basically, it has a constant connectors where you can connect with a real-time databases like Pinot or a Druid, along with your warehouses like Redshift, along with your data lake that's like based on Hudi or Iceberg. So it's like a very landscape that you can use with the Presto. And consumers like the analytics doesn't need to learn the SQL or different paradigms of the querying for different sources. They just need to learn a single source. And, they get a single place to consume from. They get a single consumer on their single destination to write on also. So, it's a homologous architecture, which allows you to put a central security like which Presto integrates. So it's also based on open architecture, that's Apache engine. And it has also certain innovative features that you can see based on caching, which reduces a lot of the cost. And since you have further decoupled your storage with the compute, you can further reduce your cost, because now the biggest part of our tradition warehouse is a storage. And the cost goes massively upwards with the amount of data that you've added. Like basically, each time that you add more data, you require more storage, and warehouses ask you to write the data in their own format. Over here since we have decoupled that, the storage cost have gone down. It's literally that your cost that you are writing, and you just pay for the compute, and you can scale in scale out based on the requirements. If you have high traffic, you scale out. If you have low traffic, you scale in. So all those. >> So huge cost savings. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Cost effectiveness, for sure. >> Cost effectiveness and you get a very good price value out of it. Like for each query, you can estimate what's the cost for you based on that tracking and all those things. >> I mean, if you think about the other classic Iceberg and what's under the water you don't know, it's the hidden cost. You think about the tooling, right, and also, time it takes to do stuff. So if you have flexibility on choice, when we were riffing on this last time we chatted with you guys and you brought it up earlier around, you can have the open formats to have different use cases in different tools or different platforms to work on it. Redshift, you can use Redshift here, or use something over there. You don't have to get locking >> Absolutely. >> Satyam & Akshay: Yeah. >> Locking is a huge problem. How do you guys see that 'cause sounds like here there's not a lot of locking. You got the open formats, and you got choice. >> Yeah. So you get best of the both worlds. Like you get with Ahana or with the Presto, you can get the best of the both worlds. Since it's cloud native, you can easily deploy your clusters very easily within like five minutes. Your cluster is up, you can start working on it. You can deploy multiple clusters for multiple teams. You get also flexibility of adding new connectors since it's open and further it's also much more secure since it's based on cloud native. So basically, you can control your security endpoints very well. So all those things comes in together with this architecture. So you can definitely go more on the lakehouse architecture than warehousing when you want to deliver data value faster. And basically, you get the much more high value out of your data in a sorted template. >> So Satyam, it sounds like the old warehousing was like the application person, not a lot of usage, old, a lot of latency. Okay. Here and there. But now you got more speed to deploy clusters, scale up scale down. Application developers are as everyone. It's not one person. It's not one group. It's whenever you want. So, you got speed. You got more diversity in the data opportunities, and your coding. >> Yeah. I think data warehouses are a way to start for every organization who is getting into data. I don't think data warehousing is still a solution and will be a solution for a lot of teams which are still getting into data. But as soon as you start scaling, as you start seeing the cost going up, as you start seeing the number of use cases adding up, having an open format definitely helps. So, I would say that's where we are also heading into and that's how our journey as well started with Presto as well, why we even thought about Ahana, right. >> (John chuckles) >> So, like you mentioned, one of the things that happened was as we were moving to the lakehouse and the open table format, I think Ahana is one of the first ones in the market to have Hudi as a first class citizen completely supported with all the things which are not even present at the time of... even with Presto, right. So we see Ahana working behind the scenes, improving even some of the things already over the open-source ecosystem. And that's where we get the most value out of Ahana as well. >> This is the convergence of open-source magic and commercialization. Wen, because you think about Data as Code, reminds me, I hear, "Data warehouse, it's not going to go away." But you got cloud scale or scale. It reminds me of the old, "Oh yeah, I have a data center." Well, here comes the cloud. So, doesn't really kill the data center, although Amazon would say that the data center's going to be eliminated. No, you just use it for whatever you need it for. You use it for specific use cases, but everyone, all the action goes to the cloud for scale. The same things happen with data, and look at the open-source community. It's kind of coming together. Data as Code is coming together. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> I do want to again to connect on another dot in terms of cost and that. You know, we've been talking a little bit about price performance, but there's an implicit cost, and I think this was also very important to Blinkit, and also why we're offering a managed service. So one piece of it. And it really revolves around the people, right? So outside of the technology, the performance. One thing that Akshay brought up and it's another important piece that I should have highlighted a little bit more is, Presto exposes the ability to interact your data in a widely adopted way, which is basically ANSI SQL. So the ability for your practitioners to use this technology is huge. That's just regular Presto. In terms of a managed service, the guys at Blinkit are a great high performing team, but they have to be very efficient with their time and what they manage. And what we're trying to do is provide leverage for them. So take a lot of the heavy lifting away, but at the same time, figuring out the right things to expose so that they have that same flexibility. And that's been the balancing point that we've been trying to balance at Ahana, but that goes back to cost. How do I total cost of ownership? And that not doesn't include just the actual querying processing time, but the ability for the organization to go ahead and absorb the solution. And what does it cost in terms of the people involved? >> Yeah. Great conversation. I mean, this brings up the question of back in the data center, the cloud days, you had the concept of an SRE, which is now popular, site reliability engineer. One person does all the clusters and manages all the scale. Is the data engineer the new SRE for data? Are we seeing a similar trajectory? Just want to get your reaction. What do you guys think? >> Yes, so I would say, definitely. It depends on the teams and the sizes of that. We are high performing team so each automation takes bits on the pieces of the architecture, like where they want to invest in. And it comes out with the value of the engineer's time and basically like how much they can invest in, how much they need to configure the architecture, and how much time it'll take to time to market. So basically like, this is what I would also highlight as an engineer. I found Ahana like the... I would say as a Presto in a cloud native environment, or I think so there's the one in the market that seamlessly scales and then scales out. And further, with a team of us, I would say our team size like three to four engineers managing cluster day in day out, conferring, tuning and all those things takes a lot of time. And Ahana came in and takes it off our plate and the hands in a solution which works out of box. So that's where this comes in. Ahana it's also based on open-source community. >> So the time of the engineer's time is so valuable. >> Yeah. >> My take on it really in terms of the data engineering being the SRE. I think that can work, it depends on the actual person, and we definitely try to make the process as easy as possible. I think in Blinkit's case, you guys are... There are data platform owners, but they definitely are aware of the pipelines. >> John: Yeah. >> So they have very intimate knowledge of what data engineers do, but I think in their case, you guys, you're managing a ton of systems. So it's not just even Presto. They have a ton of systems and surfacing that interface so they can cater to all the data engineers across their data systems, I think is the big need for them. I know you guys you want to chime in. I mean, we've seen the architecture and things like that. I think you guys did an amazing job there. >> So, and to adding to Wen's point, right. Like I generally think what DevOps is to the tech team. I think, what is data engineer or the data teams are to the data organization, right? Like they play a very similar role that you have to act as a guardrail to ensure that everyone has access to the data so the democratizing and everything is there, but that has to also come with security, right? And when you do that, there are (indistinct) a lot of points where someone can interact with data. We have... And again, there's a mixed match of open-source tools that works well, as well. And there are some paid tools as well. So for us like for visualization, we use Redash for our ad hoc analysis. And we use Tableau as well whenever we want to give a very concise reporting. We have Jupyter notebooks in place and we have EMRs as well. So we always have a mixed batch of things where people can interact with data. And most of our time is spent in acting as that guardrail to ensure that everyone should have access to data, but it shouldn't be exploited, right. And I think that's where we spend most of our time in. >> Yeah. And I think the time is valuable, but that your point about the democratization aspect of it, there seems to be a bigger step function value that you're enabling and needs to be talked out. The 10x engineer, it's more like 50x, right? If you get it done right, the enablement downstream at the scale that we're seeing with this new trend is significant. It's not just, oh yeah, visualization and get some data quicker, there's actually real advantages on a multiple with that engineering. So, and we saw that with DevOps, right? Like, you do this right and then magic happens on the edges. So, yeah, it's interesting. You guys, congratulations. Great environment. Thanks for sharing the insight Blinkit. Wen, great to see you. Ahana again with Presto, congratulations. The open-source meets data engineering. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, John. >> Appreciate it. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> This season two, episode two of our ongoing series. This one is Data as Code. This is theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBES coverage of Red Hat summit 21 virtual. I'm John Furry, host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, returning back CUBE alumni here to give us their perspective. Dave Linquist GM VP of engineering hybrid cloud management at Red Hat. Joe Fitzgerald, general manager VP of the management business unit Red Hat. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Congratulations, Red Hat summits, ongoing virtual. Great to see you. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks John. >> So I'd love to get the low down. A lot going on the productivity this year. Looking back from last year, a lot's been done and we've been in the pandemic now, now circling back a full year. A lot's happened- a lot of productivity, a lot of clear visibility on, on what's working, what's not, you guys got some great news. Let's just jump right into it. What's the big announcement? >> So one of the things that we announced here at Summit, John, is an expansion of our Red Hat insights brand. Basically we announced Red Hat insights for our RHEL platform back in 2015. Over the years, we've increased the amount of data and visibility into those systems. Here at summit, we've now announced Red Hat insights for both OpenShift, and for the Red Hat Ansible platform. So it's a pretty significant increase in the visibility that we have to the platforms. >> Oh, so can you repeat that one more time? So the expansion is through which platform style specifically? >> So Red Hat insights is a way that we connect up to different platforms that Red Hat provides. Historically it was for Red Hat enterprise Linux realm. We've now expanded it to the Red Hat, OpenShift family, the platforms as well as the Red Hat Ansible automation platform as well. >> So a nice broad expansion and people want that data. What's what was the motivation behind it? Was it customer demand? Was it more access to the data? Just, was it on the roadmap? What's the motivation- where where's this going? What's what's the purpose of all this? >> Well, I don't think customers say, Hey, please, you know take more data. I think it's customers say, can you keep me more secure? Can you keep my systems more optimized? Can you help me set more things to automatic? And that requires that you get data from these systems that you can auto tune on, auto- secure, auto optimize. Right? So it's really all those benefits that we get by connecting to these systems, bringing the telemetry data that config different kinds of information, and using that on customer behalf to optimize secure to the systems. >> You know, one of the biggest trends I think now for multiple years has been observability with cloud native, more services are being turned on and off enterprises are are getting a lot of pressure to be modern in their in their application development processes. Why is data more important than ever now? Can you guys take a minute to expand on that? Because this idea of telemetry across the platform is a very interesting announcement because you're turning that data into value, but can you guys expand where's that value coming, turning into? What is the value proposition? Where are people seeing the, the, the key key value points? >> Well, a couple of points, John, as you started out is in a hybrid cloud environment with cloud native applications and a lot of application modernization and the current progressiveness of DevOps and SRE teams, you're seeing a lot of dynamics and workloads and continuous delivery and deployments that are in public environments and private environments, distributed models. And so consequently, there's a lot of change in dynamics in the environment. So to sustain these high levels of service levels to sustain the security and the compliance, the ability to gather data from all these different points, to be able to get visibility into that data. It'd be able the ability to process that with various analytics and understand what when something's gone wrong or when an update is needed or when a configuration has drifted is increasingly critical in that in a hybrid cloud environment. >> So on the telemetry piece is that in open shift as well that that's supporting that as in there has that work. >> It's it's in OpenShift, as Joe mentioned, it's in braille it's in V2 Ansible and the OpenShift space we'd have an offering advanced cluster management that understands fleets of deployments, clusters, wherever they're deployed however they're running infrastructure public private hybrid environments. And it also collects in the context of the workloads that are deployed on those on those clusters to multi-question burn. >> I want to ask you guys a question. I get this all the time on theCUBE. Hey, you know, I need more data. I have multiple systems. I need to pull that data into one kind of control plane but I'm being pushed more and more to keep scaling operations. And this becomes a huge question mark for the enterprises because they, they have to turn up more, more scale. So this is becomes a data problem. Does this solve it here? How do you guys answer that? And what was the, what would be your response to that trend? >> Well, I think the, the thirst for data, right? There's a lot of things you can do with more data. There is a point where you can't ship all the data everywhere, right? If you think about logs and metrics and all the data it's too heavyweight to move everything everywhere. Right? So part of it is, you know, selecting the kind of data that you're going to get from these systems and the purpose you're going to use it for. And in the case of Red Hat, we take data from these different systems, regardless of whether they're deployed bring it in, and then we did predictive analytics against that data. And we use that telemetry that can take that health data right to do everything from optimize for performance or security costs, things like that. But we're not moving, you know, huge quantities of data from every system to Red Hat in order to, you know, pour through it. We are very selectively moving certain kinds of data for very specific purposes. >> Dave, what's your take on that because you know you got to engineer these systems. What's the optimized path for data? Do you keep it in the silo? Do you bring it together? What's the customer's view on, on how to deal with the data? >> Yeah. It is a complex problem. No doubt. You don't want it to be pulling all the data and trying to transmit all that data back into your analytics system. So you ended up curating some data, some of it you afford on often it's done under it will be done under control of policies. So that data that is sensitive, that should stay within the environment that it's in, will stay, but curated or alerts or information that's particularly relevant say to configurations, updates, any any of that type of information will go up into the analytics, into the insights. And then in turn, the alerts will come back down in a manner that are presented to the user. So they understand what actions need to be taken place whether there's automated actions or or they have to get approvals to maybe make an update to a certain environment. >> All right, you got telemetry, data power, the the advanced cluster management ACM. What's the overlap of the visibility and automation here. Can you guys talk about that? >> Well, let's say it's a great question, John what we'd like to do is we'd like to sort of separate the different areas. There's the seeing, right. And what's going on in these environment. Right. So getting the data analyzing it and determining what needs to be done. And then the, you know the recommendation of the automation. As Dave said, in a lot of environments, there's a process of either approvals or checkpoints or, you know evaluation of the changes being made to the system. Right. So separating the data and the analysis from the what do you want to do at this and making that configurable I think is really powerful. >> Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean I think that's the number one thing is like, you know everyone always asks, what do you optimize for do you optimize for the automation or the visibility? And I think, you know, there's always a trade-off and that's always interesting question David- love to get your thoughts. If someone asks you, Hey, I'm a I'm I have a team of people. What do I optimize for? The visibility or the automation or both? Is or is there a rule of thumb or is there a playbook? What w how would you answer that question? >> Well, there's a couple of things. I first, I think the, the ability to pull the data together to get visibility across the environment is critical. And then what becomes often complex is how the different disciplines, how the different parts of the system are able to work together on common understanding of the resources common understanding the applications. That's usually where systems start falling down. And so it's too siloed. So one of the key things we have with with our systems, particularly with OpenShift and row and with ACM and Ansible is the ability to have the common back lane and the ability to have a common understanding of the resources and the applications. And then you can start integrating the data around that common, those common data models and take appropriate actions on that. So that's how you ended up getting the visibility integrated with the automation. >> When you think about this, Joe about the security aspect of it and the edge of the network which has been a big theme this year and going into next year, a lot more discussion just the industrial edge, you know, that's important. You got to take all this into account. How do you, how would you talk about folks who are thinking about embedding security and thinking about now the distributed edge specifically? >> Right. So we thought it was complicated before, right? It goes up a notch here, right? As you have, you know, more and more edge applications I think at the edge, you're going to want automated policies and automated configurations in force so that when a device connects up to a network or is, you know analyzed that there's a set of policies and some configurations and versions that need to be applied to that device, these devices, aren't always connected. There's not always high bandwidth. So you basically want a high degree of automation in that case. And to get back to your early point there are certain things you can set like policies about security or configuration. You say, I always want it to be like this and make it so and there's other things where they're more you know, complicated, right. To, to address or have regulatory requirements or oversight issues. And those things you want to tell somebody I think this should be done. Is this the right thing to do? Is it okay? Do it, but at the edge you're going to have a lot more sort of lights out automation to keep these things secure, to configure. Right. >> It's funny. I was, some of the Ansible guys are talking about, you know code for code, changing code all the time and dynamic nature of some of the emerging tech coming out of the Red Hat teams. It's pretty interesting. You guys have going on there, but you know, you can bring it down to the average enterprise and main street, you know enterprise out there, you know, they're looking at, okay I got some public loud. Now I got hybrid. I'm going a hundred percent hybrid. That's pretty much the general consensus of all the enterprises. Okay. So now you say, okay, if I understand this correctly you got insights on REL, OpenShift and Ansible platform. So I'm, am I set up for an open hybrid cloud? That's the question I want to ask you guys does that give me the foundation to allow me to start the cloud adoption with an, a true distributed open way >> I'll I'll offer to go first. I think there's a couple of things you need in order to run across hybrid clouds. And I think Red Hat from a platform point of view the fact that Red Hat platforms run across all those different environments from the public cloud to on-premise and physical vert to edge devices. Now you have consistency of those platforms whether it's your traditional on REL, your container based workloads on shift or automation that's being turned in by Ansible. Those are consistent across all these different hybrid cloud environments. So reduces the complexity by standardizing those platforms across any and all of those different substrates. Then, when you can take the data from those systems bring them centrally and use it to manage those things to a higher degree of automation. Now you take an, another sort of chunk of complexity out of the problem, right? Consistency of getting data from all those different systems being able to set policies and enforce things across all those distributed environments is huge. >> Yeah. And then, you know, it fills in the gaps when you start thinking about the siloed teams, you know, the, the, I think one of the messages that I've been hearing out of Red Hat Summit in the industry that's consistent is the unification trend that's going on. Unifying development teams in a way that creates more of an exponential value curve rather than just linear progressions in, in traditional IT. Are you guys seeing that as well? I mean, what's your take on this? That's that piece of the story? >> Well, I think the shift that we've seen for the last few years actually quite a few years with DevOps and SRE is started to bring a lot of the disciplines together that you mentioned that are traditionally silos. And you're finding the effectiveness of that is really around many of the areas that we've been discussing here which is open platforms that can run consistently across a hybrid environment, the ability to get data and visibility out of this platform. So you can see across the distributed environment across the hybrid environment and then the ability to take actions in Bourse or update environments through automation is, is is really what's critical to bring things to to bring it all together. >> Yeah. I think that's such an important point, Joe. You know, I was talking with Chris right around and we we've covered this in the past red hats success with academics in the young people coming into in the universities with computer science. It's not just computer science anymore. Now you have engineering degrees kind of cross-disciplinary with SRS is SRE movement because you're looking at cloud operations at scale. That's not an IT problem anymore. It's actually an IT next gen problem. And this is kind of what, there's no real degree. There's no real credential for, you know large scale hybrid cloud environment. You guys have the mass open cloud initiative. I saw that going on. That's some really pretty big things. This is a, a change and, and talent. What's your, what's your view on this? Because I think people want to learn what what do I need to be in the future? What position? >> So John it's a great question. I think Ansible actually addresses a number of the issues you brought up, which is, you know historically there've been different tools for each of the different groups. So, you know, developers had their favorite set of tools and different, IT areas their favorite set of tools and technologies. And it was sort of like a tower of Babel. People did not share the same, you know sort of languages and tools. Ansible crosses both your your development test and operational teams. So creates a common language, now that can be used across different teams. It's easy to understand. So it sort of democratizes automation. You don't have to be deeply skilled in some, you know misspoke language or technology in order to be able to do some level of automation. So I think sort of sharing the same technology and tools I'd like an answer, more democratizing it so that more people can get involved in automating sharing that automation across teams and unifying those worlds is huge, right? So I think that's a game changer as well in terms of getting these teams work holistically integrated. >> Yeah. And there's also a better together panel on the Ansible and advanced cluster management session. Folks watching should check it out on on the virtual event platform on that point while I got you here on that point, let's let's talk about the portfolio updates for advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, what's new since the Ansible Fest, Ansible Fest announcements >> There's quite a bit that's been new since Ansible Fest. Ansible Fest well actually going back to Summit last year we introduced advanced cluster management. For years, we've been seeing the growth of Kubernetes with cloud native and clusters. And what ACM really allows enterprises to do is is scale out their deployments of OpenShift. Well, one of the things we found is that as you're deploying workloads or clusters or trying to take care of the compliance, the importance of integrating that environment with the breadth of capabilities that Ansible has in automation. So that's what we announced that at Ansible Fest following last year's summit what we've done is put a lot more focus on that integration with Ansible. So when you bring up, provision a cluster maybe you need to make some storage or security configurations on behalf of that cluster or if you're taking care of the compliance how do you remediate any issues with Ansible or one of the things that get shown a lot, demonstrate a lot with customers like is when you're deploying applications into production, how do you configure the network? Do the network configurations like a load balancer maybe a ticket into your service management system along with say a threat detection on your security. So a lot of advances with ACM and the integration with a broader ecosystem of IT, in particular with, with Ansible >> What's the ecosystem update for partners? And this has comes up all the time. I want to make sure I get this in there. I want it, I missed it. Last time we chatted, you know, the partner impact to this. You mentioned the ecosystem and you've got native Coobernetti's, non-native what's native to open. You guys have a lot of native things and sometimes it's just support for other clouds. So you start to get into the integration questions. Partners are very interested in what you guys are doing. Can you share the partner update on how they play and what impacts them the most here? >> Yeah. On the events, cluster management ACM front first with this integration with Ansible that actually allows us to integrate with the wealth of partner ecosystem the Ansible apps, which is huge. So that's, that's one, one space. And then the way ACM works, this policy desirous state model is we've been able to integrate with a large number of partners around particularly the security space model the service management space, where they, where we can enforce the use of certain security tools on the on the clusters themselves. So it's really opened up how quickly partner offerings can be integrated into the OpenShift environment at scale across all the clusters that you want, that you need to support it on what the appropriate configurations and policies >> I got to ask you on the insight side you mentioned the expansion across the platform. Now, if you go out and take out to the ecosystem, you know there's guard rails around governance how far can partners push their data in terms of sharing? That's something that might come up when you comment on that. >> Sure. So Red Hat, you know, takes, you know our customer data very seriously. We're a trusted partner to our customers. So the data that we get from systems we make sure that we are following all of the governance and oversight necessary to protect that data. So far, we have basically been collecting that data and using that data at Red Hat. Our plan really is to allow partners with the right degree of governance and control to be able to use some of that data in the future, under the right conditions whether it's anonymized or aggregated, things like that to be able to take that data and to add value to customers if they can enrich customers or or help customers by getting some access to that data without every vendor or partner, having to go out to systems and having to connect and pull data back. That's a pretty tough situation for customers to live with. But I think that fact that we're ahead is trusted. We've been doing this for awhile. We know how to handle the data. We know how to provide the governance. But our plan really is to enable partners to use that data ecosystem. I will say that initially what they had said about ACM and partners, Ansible has been working with partners on the automation side at a very large scale, right? So if you look at the amount of partners that are doing automation, work with us we have some pretty strong, you know, depth there. But in terms of working with partners, our plan is to take the data ecosystem, expand that as well. >> It's really a nice mix between the Ansible OpenShift and then REL, do you guys have great insights across now? I think the open innovation just continues to be every year. I say the same thing. It's almost like a broken record but every year it just gets better and better. You know, innovation out in the open you guys doing a great job and continuing and now certainly as the pandemic looks like it's coming to an end soon, post-pandemic, a lot more projects are being worked on a lot more productivity, as we said at the top. So to end the segment out I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on what happens next. As we come out of the pandemic, the table has been set. The foundation's there, cloud native is continuing to accelerate rapidly in the open OpenSource, going through them on another level. What's next what's, what's going to what's next for customers. Are they going to continue to double down on those? The winds they're going to shut down certain projects. What happens after this pandemic? How do people grow, Dave? We'll start with you. >> Well, I think, yes we all see the light at the end of the tunnel, John. It's great. And I think if a positive, is it really throughout this? We've been accelerated in the digitization and at modernization cross the board across industries. Okay. And that is really teaching all of us a lot about the importance of how do you start managing and running this at scale and securing this at scale. So I think what we'll see coming out of this is just that much more effort, open ecosystems. How you really bring together data across insights? How do you bring in increasing the amount of analytics AI to now do something turn that data into information that you can respond with and that in turn, close it, closing the loop with automation against or against your hybrid cloud environment? We're just going to see acceleration of that occurring. >> Awesome, great insights there. Open data insights, automation, all kind of coming together. AI. You don't have AI in your, your plans. Someone was Wall Street was joking. That's going to be the future stable stakes get listed on Wall Street. You got to have some sort of AI piece. They have great insight, Joe, your take on what's next? What, what what's going to what's going to happen as we come out of the pandemic? >> Yeah. We've definitely seen people, you know advance their digital transformation. And I don't think it's going to stop. Right? So the speed scale and complexity or just put more pressure on teams, right? To be able to support these environments that are evolving at light speed. So I think Red Hat is really well positioned and is a great partner for folks who are trying to get more digital, faster trying to leverage these technologies from the hybrid cloud to the edge. They're going to need lots of help. Red Hat is in a great position. >> Okay. >> You guys doing great work, Dave Linquist, Joe Fitzgerald. Great to have you back on again. Open, always wins. And as end users become much more participants in the open source ecosystem and user contributions and user interactions software at scale, it's now a new come next generation commercial environment, You guys are doing a great job. Thank you for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Red Hat Summit 21 CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier getting all the action from the experts who've been there, done that living through it, being more productive and have bringing benefits to you being open source. Thanks for watching.

(gentle music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our continuous coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not in person this year, as everybody knows, but we're back covering the event. We're excited to be here and really our next guest we've had him on a lot of times. He's super insightful coming right off the keynote, driving into some really interesting topics that we're excited to get into. It's Chris Wright, he's the Chief Technology Officer of Red Hat Chris, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me on. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. I mean, you covered so many topics in your keynote. The first one though, that just jumps off the page, right, is automation and really rethinking automation. You know, and I remember talking to a product manager at a hyperscaler many months ago, and he talked about the process of them mapping out their growth and trying to figure out how are they going to support it in their own data center. And he just basically figured out, we cannot do this at scale without automation. So I think the hyperscaler has been doing it, but really it's kind of a new approach for enterprises to incorporate new and more automation in what they do every day. >> It's a fundamental part of scaling. And I think we've learned over time that one we need programming interfaces on everything. So that's a critical part of beginning of the automation journey. So now you have a programmatic way to interact with all the things out there. But the other piece is just creating really confidence in knowing that when you're automating and you're taking tasks away from humans which are actually error prone and typing on the keyboard is not always the greatest way to get things done. The confidence that those automation scripts or playbooks are going to do the right things at the right time. And so, creating really a business and a mindset around infusing automation everything you do is a pretty big journey for the enterprise >> Right. And that's one of the topics you talked about as well. And you know it comes up all the time with digital transformation or software development. This kind of shift the focus from, you know, kind of it's a destination to it's a journey. And you talked very specifically that you need to think about automation as a journey and as a process and even a language, and really bake it into as many processes as you possibly can. I'm sure that shocks a lot of people and probably scares them but really that's the only way to achieve these types of scales that we're seeing out there. >> Well, I think so. And part of what I was trying to highlight is the notion that a business is filled with people with domain expertise. So everybody brings something to the table. You're a business analyst, you understand the business part of what you're providing. You're the technologist. You really understand the technology. There's a partner ecosystem coming in with a critical parts of the technology stack. And when you want to bring this all together, you need to have a common way to communicate. And the... What I was really trying to point out is a language for communication across all those different cross functional parts of your business is critical. Number one, and number two, that language can actually be an automation language. And so, choosing that language wisely obviously we're talking to AnsibleFest. So we're going to be talking a lot about Ansible in this context. Treating that language wisely is part of how you build the end to end sort of internalized view of what automation means to your business. >> Right. I wrote down a bunch of quotes that you talked about, you know, Ansible is the language of automation, and automation should be a primary communication language. Again, very different kind of language that we don't hear. Now, it's more than a tool but a process a constant process and should be an embedded component of any organization. So, I mean, you're really talking about automation as a first class citizen, not kind of this last thing for the most advanced or potentially last thing for the most simple things where we can apply this process, but really needs to be a fundamental core of the way you think about everything that you do. Really a very different way to think about things and probably really appropriate, you know, as we come out of 2020 in this kind of new world where, you know, everyone like distributed teams, well now you have distributed teams. And so, you know, the forcing function on better tooling, that's really wrapped in better culture has never been greater than we're seeing today. >> I completely agree with that. And that domain expertise, I think we understand well in certain areas. So for example, application developers, they rely on one another. So, you maybe as an application developer consuming a service from somebody else in your microservices architecture, and so you're dependent on that other engineering team's domain expertise. Maybe that's even the database service, and you're not a database DBA or an engineer that really builds schemas for databases. So we kind of get that notion of encapsulating domain expertise in the building and delivering about applications that notion the CICD pipeline, which itself is automating how you build and deliver applications, that notion of encapsulating domain expertise across a series of different functions in your business can go much broader than just building and delivering the application. It's running your business. And that's where it becomes fundamental. It becomes a process. That's the journey, you know, not the end state, but it's the... And it's not the destination, it's the journey that matters. And I've seen some really interesting ways that people actually work on this and try to approach it from the, "How do you change your mindset?" Here's one example that I thought was really unique. I was speaking with a customer who quite literally automated their existing process, and what they did was automate everything from generating the emails to the PDFs, which would then be shared as basically printed out documents for how they walked through business change when they're making a change in their product. And the reason they did that was not because that was the most efficient model at all. It was... That was the way they could get the teams comfortable with automation. If it produced the same artifacts that they were already used to, then it created confidence and then they could sort of evolve the model to streamline it because printing out a piece of paper to review it is not going to be the efficient way to (indistinct) change your business. >> Well, just to follow up on that, right? Cause I think what would probably scares a lot of people about automation, one is exception handling and can you get all the Edge cases in the use cases? So in the one you just talked about, how do they deal with that? And then I think the other one is just simply control. Do I feel confident enough that I can get the automation to a place that I'm comfortable to hand over control? And I'm just curious in that case you just outlined how do they deal with kind of those two factors? >> Well, they always enabled a human checkpoint, so especially in the beginning. So it was sort of trust but verify that model and over time you can look at the things that you really understand well and start with those and the things that have more kind of gray zones, where the exceptions may be the rule or maybe the critical part of the decision making process. Those can be sort of flagged as needs real kind of human intervention. And that's a way to sort of evolve and iterate and not start off with the notion that everything has to be automated. You can do it piecemeal and grow over time and you'll build confidence and you'll understand how to flag those exceptions, where you actually need to change your process itself because you may have bottlenecks that don't really make sense for the business anymore and where you can incorporate the exception handling into the automation essentially. >> Right, that's great. Thank you for sharing that example. I want to shift gears a little bit cause another big topic that you covered in your keynote that we talk about all the time on theCUBE is Edge. So everybody knows what a data center is, everybody knows what a public cloud is, you know lots of conversations around hybrid cloud and multicloud, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this new thing is Edge and I think people talk about Edge in kind of an esoteric way, but I think you just nailed it. I mean you just nailed it very simply, moving the compute to where the data is collected and or consumed. You know I thought that was super elegant, but what you didn't get into on all the complexity is what means. I mean data centers are our pristine environments that they're very, very controlled, the environment's controlled, the network is controlled, the security is controlled and you have the vision of an Edge device and the one everyone always likes to use let's say like a wind farm. Those things are out in crazy harsh conditions and then there's still this balancing act as to what information does get stored and processed and used and then what does have to go back to the data center because it's not a substitute for the data center it's really an extension of the data center or maybe the data center is actually an extension of the Edge. Maybe that's a better way to think of it but we've had all these devices out there, now suddenly we're connecting them and bringing them into a network and add a control. And I just thought the Edge represents such a big shift in the way we're going to see compute change probably as fundamental I would imagine as the cloud shift has been. >> I believe it is, I absolutely believe it's as big a change in the industry as the cloud has been. The cloud really created scale, it created automation, programmatic interfaces to infrastructure and higher level services. But it also was built around a premise of centralization. I mean clouds themselves are distributed and so you can create availability zones and resilient applications, but there's still a sense of centralization. Edge is really embracing the notion that data production is kind of only up into the right and the way to scale processing that data and turning that data into insights and information that's valuable for our business is to bring compute closer to data. Not really a new concept, but the scale at which it's happening is what's really changing how we think about building infrastructure and building the support behind all that processing and it's that scale that requires automation. Because you're just not going to be able to manage thousands or tens of thousands or in certain scenarios even millions of devices without putting automation at the forefront. It's critical. >> Right. And we can't talk about Edge without talking about 5G and I laugh every time I'm watching football on Sundays and they have the 5G commercials on talking about my handset that I can order my food to get delivered faster at my house like completely missing the point. 5G is about machine to machine communication and the scale and the speed and the volume of machine to machine is so fundamentally different than humans talking voice to voice. And that's really this big drivers to instrument as you said, all these machines, all these devices there's already been sensors on them forever but now the ability to actually connect them and pull them into this network and start to use the data and control the machines is a huge shift in the way things are going to happen going forward. >> A couple of things that are important in there. Number one, that data production and sensors and bringing computer closer to data, what that represents is bringing the digital world and the physical world closer together. We'll experience that at a personal level with how we communicate we're already distributed in today's environment and the ways we can augment our human connections through a digital medium are really going to be important to how we maintain our human connections. And then on the enterprise side, we're building this infrastructure in 5G that when you think about it from a consumer point of view and ordering your pizza faster it really isn't the right way to think about it. Couple of key characteristics of 5G. Greater bandwidth, so you can just push more package to the network. Lower latency, so you're closer to the data and higher connection density and more reliable connections. And that kind of combination of characteristics make it really valuable for enterprise businesses. You can bring your data and compute close together you have these highly reliable and dense connections that allow for device proliferation and that's the piece that's really changing where the world's going. I like to think of it in a really simple way which is, 4G and the cloud and the smartphone created a world that today we take for granted, 10 years ago we really couldn't imagine what it looked like. 5G, device proliferation and Edge computing today is building the footprint for what we can't really imagine what we will be taking for granted in 10 years from now. So we're at this great kind of change inflection point in the industry. >> I have to always take a moment to call out (indistinct). I think it's the most underappreciated law and it's been stolen by other people and repackage many ways, but it's basically we overestimate the impact of these things in the short term and we way, way, way, way, kind of underestimate the impact in the longterm and I think your story in they keynote about once we had digital phones and smartphones, we don't even think twice about looking at a map and where are we and where is a store close buy-in are they open and is there a review? I mean the infrastructure to put that together kind of an API based economy which is pulling together all these bits and pieces the stupid relay expectation of performance and how fast that information is going to be delivered to me. I think we still take it for granted, as you said I think it's like magic and we never thought of all the different applications of these interconnected apps enabled by and always on device that's always connected and knows where we are it's a huge change. And as you say that when we think about 5G, 10 years from now, oh my goodness, where are we going to be? >> It's hard to imagine? It really is hard to imagine and I think that's okay. And what we're doing today is introducing everything that we need to help businesses evolve, take advantage of that and that scale of the Edge is a fundamental characteristic of the Edge. And so automating to manage that scale is the only way you're going to be successful and extending what we've learned in the data center, how to the Edge using the same tools, the things we already understand really is a great way to evolve a business. And that's where that common language and the discussions that I was trying to generate around Ansible as a great tool, but it's not just the tool, it's the whole process, the mindset. The culture changed the way you change how you operate your business that's going to allow us to take advantage of the future where my clothes are full of sensors and you can look through a video camera and tell immediately that I'm happy with this conversation. That's a very different kind of augmented reality than we have today and maybe it's a bad example but it's hard to imagine really what it will be like. >> So, Chris, I just want to close on a slight shift. We've been talking a lot about technology, but you talk about culture all the time and really it's about the people and I think a number of times in the keynote you reinforced this is about people and culture. And I just had InaMarie Johnson on the Chief Diversity Officer from Zendesk and she said culture eats strategy for breakfast. Great line. So I wonder if you can talk about the culture because it's very different and you've seen it in opensource from Red Hat for a long time really a shifting culture around opensource the shifting culture around DevOps and continuous delivery and change is a good thing, not a bad thing and we want to be able to change our code frequently and push out new features. So again, as you think of automation and culture, what kind of comes to mind and what should people be thinking about when they think about the people and less about the technology? >> Well, there's a couple of things. Some I'll reinforce what we already touched on which is the notion of creating confidence in the automation. So there's an element of trust associated with that and that's more maybe trusting the technology. So when you're automating something you've already got a process, you already understand how something works, it's turning that something into an automated script or playbook in the Ansible context and trusting that it's going to do the right thing. There's another important part of trust which is getting more to the people part. And I've learned this a lot from open source communities collaboration and communities are fundamentally built around trust and human trust relationships. And the change in process, trusting not only that the tools are going to the right job but that people are really assuming good intent and working with or trying to build for the right outcomes for your business. I think that's a really important part of the overall picture. And then finally that trust is extended to knowing that that change for the business isn't going to compromise your job. So thinking differently about what is your job? Is your job to do the repetitive task or is your job to free up your time from that repetitive task to think more creatively about value you can bring to the business. And that's where I think it's really challenging for organizations to make changes because you build a personal identity around the jobs that you do and making changes to those personal identities really gets to the core of who you are as a person. And that's why I think it's so complicated. The tools almost start the easy part, it's the process changes and the cultural changes, the mindset changes behind that which is difficult but more powerful in the end. >> Well, I think people process tools the tech is always the easy part relative to culture and people in changing the way people do things and as you said, who their identity is, how they get kind of wrapped into what they do and what they think their value is and who they are. So to free them up from that that's a really important point. Well, Chris, I always love having you on, thank you for coming on again, sharing your insight, great keynote. And give your the last word about AnsibleFest 2020. What are you looking forward to take away from this little show? >> Well, number one, my personal hope is that the conversation that I was trying to sort of ignite through the keynote is an opportunity for the community to see where Ansible fits in the Edge and automation and helping really the industry at large scale. And that key part of bringing a common language to help change how we communicate internally is the message I was hoping to impart on the AnsibleFest Community. And so hopefully we can take that broader and appreciate the time here to really amplify some of those messages. >> All right, great. Well, thanks a lot Chris and have a great day. >> Thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right. He's Chris, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE and our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. (twinkly music) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. Welcome back to our continuous coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not in-person this year, as everybody knows, but we're back covering the event. We're excited to be here, and really our next guest... We've had him on a lot of times. He's super insightful. Coming right off the keynote, diving into some really interesting topics that we're excited to get into, and it's Chris Wright. He's the chief technology officer of Red Hat. Chris, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me on. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. I mean, you covered so many topics in your keynote. The first one though, that just jumps off the page, right, is automation, and really rethinking automation. And I remember talking to a product manager at a hyperscaler many moons ago, and he talked about the process of them mapping out their growth and trying to figure out how they were going to support it in their own data center. And he just basically figured out we cannot do this at scale without automation. So I think the hyperscalers have been doing it, but really it's kind of a new approach for enterprises to incorporate new, and more, automation into what they do every day. >> It's a fundamental part of scaling, and I think we've learned over time that, one, we need programming interfaces on everything. So that's a critical part of beginning of the automation journey, so now you have a programmatic way to interact with all the things out there. But the other piece is just creating, really, confidence in knowing that when you're automating and you're taking tasks away from humans, which are actually error-prone, and typing on a keyboard is not always the greatest way to get things done, the confidence that those automation scripts, or playbooks, are going to do the right things at the right time. And so creating, really, a business and a mindset around infusing automation into everything you do is a pretty big journey for the enterprise. >> Right. And that's one of the topics you talked about as well, and it comes up all the time with digital transformation or software development; this kind of shift the focus from kind of it's a destination to it's a journey. And you talked very specifically that you need to think about automation as a journey, and as a process, and even a language, and really bake it into as many processes as you possibly can. I'm sure that shocks a lot of people and probably scares them, but really that's the only way to achieve the types of scales that we're seeing out there. >> Well, I think so. And part of what I was trying to highlight is the notion that a business is filled with people with domain expertise. So everybody brings something to the table. You're a business analyst. You understand the business part of what you're providing. You're the technologist. You really understand the technology. There's a partner ecosystem coming in with a critical parts of the technology stack. When you want to bring this all together, you need to have a common way to communicate. What I was really trying to point out is a language for communication across all those different cross-functional parts of your business is critical, number one, and number two, that language can actually be an automation language. And so choosing that language wisely... Obviously, we're talking at AnsibleFest, so we're going to be talking a lot about Ansible in this context. Choosing that language wisely is part of how you build the end-to-end sort of internalized view of what automation means to your business. >> Right. I mean, I wrote down a bunch of quotes that you talked about. "Ansible is the language of automation, and automation should be a primary communication language." Again, very different kind of language that we don't hear. And that it's "more than a tool, but a process, a constant process, and should be an embedded component of any organization." So I mean, you're really talking about automation as a first class citizen, not kind of this last thing for the most advanced, or potentially last thing for the most simple things where we can apply this process, but really needs to be a fundamental core of the way you think about everything that you do. Really a very different way to think about things, and probably really appropriate as we come out of 2020 in this kind of new world where everyone liked distributed teams. Well, now you have distributed teams, and so the forcing function on better tooling that's really wrapped in better culture has never been greater than we're seeing today. >> I completely agree with that. That domain expertise I think we understand well in certain areas. So for example, application developers, they rely on one another. So you're, maybe as an application developer, consuming a service from somebody else in your microservices architecture, and so you're dependent on that other engineering team's domain expertise. Maybe that's even the database service, and you're not a database, a DBA, or an engineer that really builds schemas for databases. We kind of get that notion of encapsulating domain expertise in the building and delivering of applications. That notion, the CI/CD pipeline, which itself is automating how you build and deliver applications, that notion of encapsulating domain expertise across a series of different functions in your business can go much broader than just building and delivering the application. It's running your business. And that's where it becomes fundamental. It becomes a process that's the journey. Not the end state. And it's not the destination. It's the journey that matters. And I've seen some really interesting ways that people actually work on this and try to approach it from the "how do you change your mindset?" Here's one example that I thought was really unique. I was speaking with a customer who quite literally automated their existing process, and what they did was automate everything from generating the emails to the PDFs, which would then be shared as basically printed out documents for how they walked through business change when they're making a change in their product. And the reason they did that was not because that was the most efficient model at all. It was that was the way they could get the teams comfortable with automation. If it produced the same artifacts that they were already used to, then it created confidence, and then they could sort of evolve the model to streamline it, because printing out a piece of paper to review, it is not going to be the efficient way to make changes in your business. >> Well, just to follow up on that, right, cause I think what probably scares a lot of people about automation... One is exception handling, right? And can you get all the edge cases in the use case. So in the one you just talked about, how do they deal with that? And then I think the other one is just simply control. Do I feel confident enough that I can get the automation to a place that I'm comfortable to hand over control? And I'm just curious, in that case you just outlined, how do they deal with kind of those two factors? >> Well, they always enabled a human checkpoint. Especially in the beginning. So it was sort of "trust but verify" that model, and over time you can look at the things that you really understand well and start with those, and the things that have more kind of gray zones, where the exceptions may be the rule, or may be the critical part of the decision making process, those can be sort of flagged as "needs real kind of human intervention," and that's a way to sort of evolve, and iterate, and not start off with the notion that everything has to be automated. You can do it piecemeal and grow over time, and you'll build confidence, and you'll understand where... How to flag those exceptions, where you actually need to change your process itself, because you may have bottlenecks that don't really make sense for the business anymore, and where you can incorporate the exception handling into the automation, essentially. >> Right. That's great. Thank you for sharing that example. I want to shift gears a little bit, cause another big topic that you covered in your keynote that we talk about all the time on theCube is edge, right? So everybody knows what a data center is. Everybody knows what a public cloud is. Lots of conversations around hybrid cloud and multi cloud, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... But this new thing is edge, and I think people talk about edge in kind of an esoteric way, but I think you just nailed it. I mean, you just nailed it. It's very simply moving the compute to where the data is collected and/or consumed. I thought that was super elegant, but what you didn't get into on all the complexity is what that means, right? I mean, data centers are pristine environments that... They're very, very controlled. The environment's controlled. The network is controlled. The security is controlled, and you have the vision of an edge device. And the one everyone always likes to use is say like a wind farm, right? Those things are out in crazy harsh conditions, and then there's still this balancing act as to what information does get stored, and processed, and used, and then what does have to go back to the data center, because it's not a substitute for the data center. It's really an extension of the data center, or maybe the data center is actually an extension of the edge. Maybe that's a better way to think of it, but we've had all these devices out there. Now, suddenly we're connecting them and bringing them into a network and adding control. And I just thought the edge represents such a big shift in the way we're going to see compute change. Probably as fundamental, I would imagine, as the cloud shift has been. >> I believe it is. I absolutely believe it's as big a change in the industry as the cloud has been. The cloud really created scale. It created automation, programmatic interfaces to infrastructure and higher level services. But it also was built around a premise of centralization. I mean, clouds themselves are distributed, and so you can create availability zones and resilient applications, but there's still a sense of centralization. Edge is really embracing the notion that data production is kind of only up and to the right, and the way to scale, processing that data, and turning that data into insights and information that's valuable for a business, is to bring compute closer to data. It's not really a new concept, but the scale at which it's happening is what's really changing how we think about building infrastructure and building the support behind all that processing. And it's that scale that requires automation, because you're just not going to be able to manage thousands, or tens of thousands, or in certain scenarios even millions of devices, without putting automation at the forefront. It's critical. >> Right. And we can't talk about edge without talking about 5G, and I laugh every time I'm watching football on Sundays and they have the 5G commercials on talking about my handset, that I can order my food to get delivered faster at my house, completely missing the point, right? 5G's about machine-to-machine communication, and the scale, and the speed, and the volume of machine-to-machine is so fundamentally different than humans talking voice-to-voice. And that's really this big driver to instrument, as you said, all these machines, all these devices. There's been sensors on them forever, but now the ability to actually connect them, and pull them into this network, and start to use the data, and control the machines is a huge shift in the way things are going to happen going forward. >> Well, it's a couple of things that are important in there. Number one, that data production, and sensors, and bringing compute closer to data, what that represents is bringing the digital world and the physical world closer together. We'll experience that at a personal level with how we communicate. We're already distributed in today's environment, and the ways we can augment our human connections through a digital medium are really going to be important to how we maintain our human connections. And then on the enterprise side, we're building this infrastructure in 5G that when you think about it from a consumer point of view and ordering your pizza faster, it really isn't the right way to think about it. Couple of key characteristics of 5G: greater bandwidth, so you can just push more packets through the network; lower latency, so you're closer to the data; and higher connection density and more reliable connections, and that kind of combination of characteristics make it really valuable for enterprise businesses. You can bring your data and compute close together. You have these highly reliable and dense connections that allow for device proliferation, and that's the piece that's really changing where the world's going. I like to think of it in a really simple way, which is 4G, and the cloud, and the smartphone created a world that today we take for granted. 10 years ago, we really couldn't imagine what it looked like. >> 5G- >> Jeff: Like tomorrow... Excuse me. >> Device proliferation, and edge computing today is building the footprint for what we can't really imagine what we will be taking for granted in 10 years from now. So we're at this great kind of change in inflection point in the industry. >> Yeah. I have to always take a moment to call out a Amara's law. I think it's the most underappreciated law. It's been stolen by other people and repackaged many ways, but it's basically we overestimate the impact of these things in the short term, and we way, way, way, way kind of underestimate the impact in the longterm. And I think your story in they keynote about once you had digital phones and smartphones, we don't even think twice about looking at a map, and where are we, and where's a store close by, and are they open, and is there a review? I mean, the infrastructure to put that together, kind of an API-based economy, which is pulling together all these bits and pieces... (scoffs) The stupid rely... Expectation, right, of performance, and how fast that information's going to be delivered to me. I think we so take it for granted. As you say, I think it's like magic, and we never thought of all the different applications of these interconnected apps enabled by an always-on device that's always connected and knows where we are. It is a huge change, and as you say that when we think about 5G... (chuckling) 10 years from now. Oh, my goodness. Where are we going to be? >> It's hard to imagine? I mean, it really is hard to imagine, and I think that's okay. And what we're doing today is introducing everything that we need to help businesses evolve. Take advantage of that. And that scale of the edge is... It's a fundamental characteristic of the edge, and so automating to manage that scale is the only way you're going to be successful, and extending what we've learned in the data center out to the edge using the same tools, the things we already understand, really is a great way to evolve a business. And that's where that common language and the discussions that I was trying to generate around Ansible as a great tool. But it's not just the tool, it's the whole process, the mindset, the culture change, the way you change how you operate your business that's going to allow us to take advantage of the future where my clothes are full of sensors and you can look through a video camera and tell immediately that I'm happy with this conversation. That's a very different kind of augmented reality than we have today. Maybe it's a bad example, but it's hard to imagine really what it'll be like. >> So Chris, I just want to close on a slight shift, right? We've been talking a lot about technology, but you talk about culture all the time, and really, it's about the people. And I think a number of times in the keynote you reinforced this is about people and culture. And I just had I'm InaMarie Johnson on, the chief diversity officer from Zendesk. And she said culture eats strategy for breakfast. Great line. So I wondered if you can talk about the culture, because it's very different and you've seen it in opensource from Red Hat for a long time, really, a shift in culture around opensource, the shift in culture around devops, and continuous delivery, and "change is a good thing, not a bad thing," and we want to be able to change our code frequently and push out new features. So again, as you think of automation and culture, what kind of comes to mind, and what should people be thinking about when they think about the people and less about the technology? >> Well, there's a couple of things. I'll reinforce what we already touched on, which is the notion of creating confidence in the automation. There's an element of trust associated with that, and that's more maybe trusting the technology. So when you're automating something, you've already got a process. You already understand how something works. It's turning that something into an automated script, or playbook in the Ansible context, and trusting that it's going to do the right thing. There's another important part of trust, which is getting more to the people part, and I've learned this a lot from opensource communities. Collaboration and communities are fundamentally built around trust, and human trust relationships, and the change in process, trusting not only that the tools are going to do the right job, but the people are really... Assuming good intent, and working with they're trying to build for the right outcomes for your business, I think that's a really important part of the overall picture. And then finally, that trust is extended to knowing that that change for the business isn't going to compromise your job, right? So thinking differently about what is your job. Is your job to do the repetitive task, or is your job to free up your time from that repetitive task to think more creatively about value you can bring to the business? That's where I think it's really challenging for organizations to make changes because you build a personal identity around the jobs that you do, and making changes to those personal identities really gets to the core of who you are as a person. That's why I think it's so complicated. The tools almost are the easy part. It's the process changes and the cultural changes, the mindset changes behind that which is difficult, but more powerful in the end. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think people, process, tools... The tech is always the easy part relative to culture, and people, and changing the way people do things, and as you said, who their identity is, how they get kind of wrapped into what they do, and what they think their value is, and who they are. So to free them up from that, that's a really important point. Well, Chris, I always love having you on. Thank you for coming on again, sharing your insight. Great keynote, and give me the last word about AnsibleFest 2020. What are you looking forward to take away from this little show? >> Well, number one, my personal hope is that the conversation that I was trying to sort of ignite through the keynote is an opportunity for the community to see where Ansible fits in the edge and automation, and helping, really the industry at large, scale. And that key part of bringing a common language to help change how we communicate internally is the message I was hoping to impart on the AnsibleFest community, and so hopefully we can take that broader. Appreciate the time here to really amplify some of those messages. >> All right. Great. Well, thanks a lot, Chris, and have a great day. >> Thanks, Jeff. Thank you. >> All right. He's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, and our ongoing coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (twinkly music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studios, COVID is still going on, so all of the interviews continue to be remote, but we're excited to have a Cube alumni, he hasn't been on for a long time, and this guy has been in the weeds of the storage industry for a very very long time and we're happy to have him on and get an update because there continues to be a lot of exciting developments. He's Phil Bullinger, he is the SVP and general manager, data center business unit from Western Digital joining us, I think for Colorado, so Phil, great to see you, how's the weather in Colorado today? >> Hi Jeff, it's great to be here. Well, it's a hot, dry summer here, I'm sure like a lot of places. But yeah, enjoying the summer through these unusual times. >> It is unusual times, but fortunately there's great things like the internet and heavy duty compute and store out there so we can get together this way. So let's jump into it. You've been in the he business a long time, you've been at Western Digital, you were at EMC, you worked on Isilon, and you were at storage companies before that. And you've seen kind of this never-ending up and to the right slope that we see kind of ad nauseum in terms of the amount of storage demands. It's not going anywhere but up, and please increase complexity in terms of unstructure data, sources of data, speed of data, you know the kind of classic big V's of big data. So I wonder, before we jump into specifics, if you can kind of share your perspective 'cause you've been kind of sitting in the Catford seat, and Western Digital's a really unique company; you not only have solutions, but you also have media that feeds other people solutions. So you guys are really seeing and ultimately all this compute's got to put this data somewhere, and a whole lot of it's sitting on Western Digital. >> Yeah, it's a great intro there. Yeah, it's been interesting, through my career, I've seen a lot of advances in storage technology. Speeds and feeds like we often say, but the advancement through mechanical innovation, electrical innovation, chemistry, physics, just the relentless growth of data has been driven in many ways by the relentless acceleration and innovation of our ability to store that data, and that's been a very virtuous cycle through what, for me, has been 30 years in enterprise storage. There are some really interesting changes going on though I think. If you think about it, in a relatively short amount of time, data has gone from this artifact of our digital lives to the very engine that's driving the global economy. Our jobs, our relationships, our health, our security, they all kind of depend on data now, and for most companies, kind of irrespective of size, how you use data, how you store it, how you monetize it, how you use it to make better decisions to improve products and services, it becomes not just a matter of whether your company's going to thrive or not, but in many industries, it's almost an existential question; is your company going to be around in the future, and it depends on how well you're using data. So this drive to capitalize on the value of data is pretty significant. >> It's a really interesting topic, we've had a number of conversations around trying to get a book value of data, if you will, and I think there's a lot of conversations, whether it's accounting kind of way, or finance, or kind of good will of how do you value this data? But I think we see it intrinsically in a lot of the big companies that are really data based, like the Facebooks and the Amazons and the Netflixes and the Googles, and those types of companies where it's really easy to see, and if you see the valuation that they have, compared to their book value of assets, it's really baked into there. So it's fundamental to going forward, and then we have this thing called COVID hit, which I'm sure you've seen all the memes on social media. What drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, the board, or COVID-19? And it became this light switch moment where your opportunities to think about it are no more; you've got to jump in with both feet, and it's really interesting to your point that it's the ability to store this and think about it now differently as an asset driving business value versus a cost that IT has to accommodate to put this stuff somewhere, so it's a really different kind of a mind shift and really changes the investment equation for companies like Western Digital about how people should invest in higher performance and higher capacity and more unified and kind of democratizing the accessibility that data, to a much greater set of people with tools that can now start making much more business line and in-line decisions than just the data scientist kind of on Mahogany Row. >> Yeah, as you mentioned, Jeff, here at Western Digital, we have such a unique kind of perch in the industry to see all the dynamics in the OEM space and the hyperscale space and the channel, really across all the global economies about this growth of data. I have worked at several companies and have been familiar with what I would have called big data projects and fleets in the past. But at Western Digital, you have to move the decimal point quite a few digits to the right to get the perspective that we have on just the volume of data that the world has just relentless insatiably consuming. Just a couple examples, for our drive projects we're working on now, our capacity enterprise drive projects, you know, we used to do business case analysis and look at their lifecycle capacities and we measured them in exabytes, and not anymore, now we're talking about zettabyte, we're actually measuring capacity enterprise drive families in terms of how many zettabyte they're going to ship in their lifecycle. If we look at just the consumption of this data, the last 12 months of industry TAM for capacity enterprise compared to the 12 months prior to that, that annual growth rate was north of 60%. And so it's rare to see industries that are growing at that pace. And so the world is just consuming immense amounts of data, and as you mentioned, the COVID dynamics have been both an accelerant in some areas, as well as headwinds in others, but it's certainly accelerated digital transformation. I think a lot of companies we're talking about, digital transformation and hybrid models and COVID has really accelerated that, and it's certainly driving, continues to drive just this relentless need to store and access and take advantage of data. >> Yeah, well Phil, in advance of this interview, I pulled up the old chart with all the different bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes, and just per the Wikipedia page, what is a zettabyte? It's as much information as there are grains of sand in all the world's beaches. For one zettabyte. You're talking about thinking in terms of those units, I mean, that is just mind boggling to think that that is the scale in which we're operating. >> It's really hard to get your head wrapped around a zettabyte of storage, and I think a lot of the industry thinks when we say zettabyte scale era, that it's just a buzz word, but I'm here to say it's a real thing. We're measuring projects in terms of zettabytes now. >> That's amazing. Well, let's jump into some of the technology. So I've been fortunate enough here at theCUBE to be there at a couple of major announcements along the way. We talked before we turned the cameras on, the helium announcement and having the hard drive sit in the fish bowl to get all types of interesting benefits from this less dense air that is helium versus oxygen. I was down at the Mammer and Hammer announcement, which was pretty interesting; big heavy technology moves there, to again, increase the capacity of the hard drive's base systems. You guys are doing a lot of stuff on RISC-V I know is an Open source project, so you guys have a lot of things happening, but now there's this new thing, this new thing called zonedd storage. So first off, before we get into it, why do we need zoned storage, and really what does it now bring to the table in terms of a capability? >> Yeah, great question, Jeff. So why now, right? Because I mentioned storage, I've been in storage for quite some time. In the last, let's just say in the last decade, we've seen the advent of the hyperscale model and certainly a whole nother explosion level of data and just the veracity with which they hyperscalers can create and consume and process and monetize data. And of course with that, has also come a lot of innovation, frankly, in the compute space around how to process that data and moving from what was just a general purpose CPU model to GPU's and DPU's and so we've seen a lot of innovation on that side, but frankly, in the storage side, we haven't seen much change at all in terms of how operating systems, applications, file systems, how they actually use the storage or communicate with the storage. And sure, we've seen advances in storage capacities; hard drives have gone from two to four, to eight, to 10 to 14, 16, and now our leading 18 and 20 terabyte hard drives. And similarly, on the SSD side, now we're dealing with the capacities of seven, and 15, and 30 terabytes. So things have gotten larger, as you expect. And some interfaces have improved, I think NVME, which we'll talk about, has been a nice advance in the industry; it's really now brought a very modern scalable low latency multi-threaded interface to a NAM flash to take advantage of the inherent performance of transistor based persistent storage. But really when you think about it, it hasn't changed a lot. But what has changed is workloads. One thing that definitely has evolved in the space of the last decade or so is this, the thing that's driving a lot of this explosion of data in the industry is around workloads that I would characterize as sequential in nature, they're serial, you can capture it in written. They also have a very consistent life cycle, so you would write them in a big chunk, you would read them maybe in smaller pieces, but the lifecycle of that data, we can treat more as a chunk of data, but the problem is applications, operating systems, vial systems continue to interface with storage using paradigms that are many decades old. The old 512 byte or even Forte, Sector size constructs were developed in the hard drive industry just as convenient paradigms to structure what is an unstructured sea of magnetic grains into something structured that can be used to store and access data. But the reality is when we talk about SSDs, structure really matters, and so what has changed in the industry is the workloads are driving very very fresh looks at how more intelligence can be applied to that application OS storage device interface to drive much greater efficiency. >> Right, so there's two things going on here that I want to drill down on. On one hand, you talked about kind of the introduction of NAND and flash, and treating it like you did, generically you did a regular hard drive. But you could get away and you could do some things because the interface wasn't taking full advantage of the speed that was capable in the NAND. But NVME has changed that, and now forced kind of getting rid of some of those inefficient processes that you could live with, so it's just kind of classic next level step up and capabilities. One is you get the better media, you just kind of plug it into the old way. Now actually you're starting to put in processes that take full advantage of the speed that that flash has. And I think obviously prices have come down dramatically since the first introduction, where before it was always kind of a clustered off or super high end, super low latency, super high value apps, it just continues to spread and proliferate throughout the data center. So what did NVME force you to think about in terms of maximizing the return on the NAND and flash? >> Yeah, NVME, which we've been involved in the standardization, I think it's been a very successful effort, but we have to remember NVME is about a decade old, or even more when the original work started around defining this interface, but it's been very successful. The NVME standard's body is very productive cross company effort, it's really driven a significant change, and what we see now is the rapid adoption of NVME in all of data center architectures, whether it's very large hyperscale to classic on prem enterprise to even smaller applications, it's just a very efficient interface mechanism for connecting SSDs into a server. So we continue to see evolution at NVME, which is great, and we'll talk about ZNS today as one of those evolutions. We're also very keenly interested in NVME protocol over fabrics, and so one of the things that Western Digital has been talking about a lot lately is incorporating NVME over fabrics as a mechanism for now connecting shared storage into multiple post architectures. We think this is a very attractive way to build shared storage architectures of the future that are scalable, that are composable, that really have a lot more agility with respect to rack level infrastructure and applying that infrastructure to applications. >> Right, now one thing that might strike some people as kind of counterintuitive is within the zoned storage in zoning off parts of the media, to think of the data also kind of in these big chunks, is it feels contrary to kind of atomization that we're seeing in the rest of the data center, right? So smaller units of compute, smaller units of store, so that you can assemble and disassemble them in different quantities as needed. So what was the special attribute that you had to think about and actually come back and provide a benefit in actually kind of re-chunking, if you will, in these zones versus trying to get as atomic as possible? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff, and I think it's maybe not intuitive in terms of why zoned storage actually creates a more efficient storage paradigm when you're storing stuff essentially in larger blocks of data, but this is really where the intersection of structure and workload and sort of the nature of the data all come together. If you turn back the clock maybe four or five years when SMR hard drives host managers SMR hard drives first emerged on the scene. This was really taking advantage of the fact that the right head on a hard disk drive is larger than the read head, or the read head can be much smaller, and so the notion of overlapping or shingling the data on the drive, giving the read head a smaller target to read, but the writer a larger write pad to write the data could actually, what we found was it increases aerial density significantly. And so that was really the emergence of this notion of sequentially written larger blocks of data being actually much more efficiently stored when you think about physically how it's being stored. What's very new now and really gaining a lot of traction is the SSD corollary to SMR on the hard drive, on the SSD side, we had the ZNS specification, which is, very similarly where you'd divide up the name space of an SSD into fixed size zones, and those zones are written sequentially, but now those zones are intimately tied to the underlying physical architecture of the NAND itself; the dyes, the planes, the read pages, the erase pages. So that, in treating data as a block, you're actually eliminating a lot of the complexity and the work that an SSD has to do to emulate a legacy hard drive, and in doing so, you're increasing performance and endurance and the predictable performance of the device. >> I just love the way that you kind of twist the lens on the problem, and on one hand, by rule, just looking at my notes here, the zoned storage device is the ZSD's introduce a number of restrictions and limitations and rules that are outside the full capabilities of what you might do. But in doing so, an aggregate, the efficiency, and the performance of the system in the whole is much much better, even though when you first look at it, you think it's more of a limiter, but it's actually opens up. I wonder if there's any kind of performance stats you can share or any kind of empirical data just to give people kind of a feel for what that comes out as. >> So if you think about the potential of zoned storage in general and again, when I talk about zoned storage, there's two components; there's an HDD component of zoned storage that we refer to as SMR, and there's an SSD version of that that we call ZNS. So we think about SMR, the value proposition there is additional capacity. So effectively in the same drive architecture, with roughly the same bill of material used to build the drive, we can overlap or shingle the data on the drive. And generally for the customer, additional capacity. Today with our 18, 20 terabyte offerings that's on the order of just over 10%, but that delta is going to increase significantly going forward to 20% or more. And when you think about a hyperscale customer that has not hundreds or thousands of racks, but tens of thousands of racks. A 10 or 20% improvement in effective capacity is a tremendous TCO benefit, and the reason we do that is obvious. I mean, the economic paradigm that drives large at-scale data centers is total custom ownership, both acquisition costs and operating costs. And if you can put more storage in a square tile of data center space, you're going to generally use less power, you're going to run it more efficiently, you're actually, from an acquisition cost, you're getting a more efficient purchase of that capacity. And in doing that, our innovation, we benefit from it and our customers benefit from it. So the value proposition for zoned storage in capacity enterprise HDV is very clear, it's additional capacity. The exciting thing is, in the SSD side of things, or ZNS, it actually opens up even more value proposition for the customer. Because SSDs have had to emulate hard drives, there's been a lot of inefficiency and complexity inside an enterprise SSD dealing with things like garbage collection and right amplification reducing the endurance of the device. You have to over-provision, you have to insert as much as 20, 25, even 28% additional man bits inside the device just to allow for that extra space, that working space to deal with delete of data that are smaller than the block erase that the device supports. So you have to do a lot of reading and writing of data and cleaning up. It creates for a very complex environment. ZNS by mapping the zoned size with the physical structure of the SSD essentially eliminates garbage collection, it reduces over-provisioning by as much as 10x. And so if you were over provisioning by 20 or 25% on an enterprise SSD, and a ZNS SSD, that can be one or two percent. The other thing I have to keep in mind is enterprise SSD is typically incorporate D RAM and that D RAM is used to help manage all those dynamics that I just mentioned, but with a much simpler structure where the pointers to the data can be managed without all the D RAM. We can actually reduce the amount of D RAM in an enterprise SSD by as much as eight X. And if you think about the MILA material of an enterprise SSD, D RAM is number two on the list in terms of the most expensive bomb components. So ZNS and SSDs actually have a significant customer total cost of ownership impact. It's an exciting standard, and now that we have the standard ratified through the NVME working group, it can really accelerate the development of the software ecosystem around. >> Right, so let's shift gears and talk a little bit about less about the tech and more about the customers and the implementation of this. So you talked kind of generally, but are there certain types of workloads that you're seeing in the marketplace where this is a better fit or is it just really the big heavy lifts where they just need more and this is better? And then secondly, within these hyperscale companies, as well as just regular enterprises that are also seeing their data demands grow dramatically, are you seeing that this is a solution that they want to bring in for kind of the marginal kind of next data center, extension of their data center, or their next cloud region? Or are they doing lift and shift and ripping stuff out? Or do they enough data growth organically that there's plenty of new stuff that they can put in these new systems? >> Yeah, I love that. The large customers don't rip and shift; they ride their assets for a long lifecycle, 'cause with the relentless growth of data, you're primarily investing to handle what's coming in over the transom. But we're seeing solid adoption. And in SMRS you know we've been working on that for a number of years. We've got significant interest and investment, co-investment, our engineering, and our customer's engineering adapting the application environment's to take advantage of SMR. The great thing is now that we've got the NVME, the ZNS standard gratified now in the NVME working group, we've got a very similar, and all approved now, situation where we've got SMR standards that have been approved for some time, and the SATA and SCSI standards. Now we've got the same thing in the NVME standard, and the great thing is once a company goes through the lift, so to speak, to adapt an application, file system, operating system, ecosystem, to zoned storage, it pretty much works seamlessly between HDD and SSD, and so it's not an incremental investment when you're switching technologies. Obviously the early adopters of these technologies are going to be the large companies who design their own infrastructure, who have mega fleets of racks of infrastructure where these efficiencies really really make a difference in terms of how they can monetize that data, how they compete against the landscape of competitors they have. For companies that are totally reliant on kind of off the shelf standard applications, that adoption curve is going to be longer, of course, because there are some software changes that you need to adapt to enable zoned storage. One of the things Western Digital has done and taken the lead on is creating a landing page for the industry with zoned storage.io. It's a webpage that's actually an area where many companies can contribute Open source tools, code, validation environments, technical documentation. It's not a marketeering website, it's really a website built to land actual Open source content that companies can use and leverage and contribute to to accelerate the engineering work to adapt software stacks to zoned storage devices, and to share those things. >> Let me just follow up on that 'cause, again, you've been around for a while, and get your perspective on the power of Open source. And it used to be the best secrets, the best IP were closely guarded and held inside, and now really we're in an age where it's not necessarily. And the brilliant minds and use cases and people out there, just by definition, it's more groups of engineers, more engineers outside your building than inside your building, and how that's really changed kind of a strategy in terms of development when you can leverage Open source. >> Yeah, Open source clearly has accelerated innovation across the industry in so many ways, and it's the paradigm around which companies have built business models and innovated on top of it, I think it's always important as a company to understand what value ad you're bringing, and what value ad the customers want to pay for. What unmet needs in your customers are you trying to solve for, and what's the best mechanism to do that? And do you want to spend your RND recreating things, or leveraging what's available and innovating on top of it? It's all about ecosystem. I mean, the days where a single company could vertically integrate top to bottom a complete end solution, you know, those are fewer and far between. I think it's about collaboration and building ecosystems and operating within those. >> Yeah, it's such an interesting change, and one more thing, again, to get your perspective, you run the data center group, but there's this little thing happening out there that we see growing, IOT, in the industrial internet of things, and edge computing as we try to move more compute and store and power kind of outside the pristine world of the data center and out towards where this data is being collected and processed when you've got latency issues and all kinds of reasons to start to shift the balance of where the compute is and where the store and relies on the network. So when you look back from the storage perspective in your history in this industry and you start to see basically everything is now going to be connected, generating data, and a lot of it is even Opensource. I talked to somebody the other day doing kind of Opensource computer vision on surveillance video. So the amount of stuff coming off of these machines is growing in crazy ways. At the same time, it can't all be processed at the data center, it can't all be kind of shipped back and then have a decision and then ship that information back out to. So when you sit back and look at Edge from your kind of historical perspective, what goes through your mind, what gets you excited, what are some opportunities that you see that maybe the laymen is not paying close enough attention to? >> Yeah, it's really an exciting time in storage. I get asked that question from time to time, having been in storage for more than 30 years, you know, what was the most interesting time? And there's been a lot of them, but I wouldn't trade today's environment for any other in terms of just the velocity with which data is evolving and how it's being used and where it's being used. A TCO equation may describe what a data center looks like, but data locality will determine where it's located, and we're excited about the Edge opportunity. We see that as a pretty significant, meaningful part of the TAM as we look three to five years. Certainly 5G is driving much of that, I think just any time you speed up the speed of the connected fabric, you're going to increase storage and increase the processing the data. So the Edge opportunity is very interesting to us. We think a lot of it is driven by low latency work loads, so the concept of NVME is very appropriate for that, we think, in general SSDs deployed and Edge data centers defined as anywhere from a meter to a few kilometers from the source of the data. We think that's going to be a very strong paradigm. The workloads you mentioned, especially IOT, just machine-generated data in general, now I believe, has eclipsed human generated data, in terms of just the amount of data stored, and so we think that curve is just going to keep going in terms of machine generated data. Much of that data is so well suited for zoned storage because it's sequential, it's sequentially written, it's captured, and it has a very consistent and homogenous lifecycle associated with it. So we think what's going on with zoned storage in general and ZNS and SMR specifically are well suited for where a lot of the data growth is happening. And certainly we're going to see a lot of that at the Edge. >> Well, Phil, it's always great to talk to somebody who's been in the same industry for 30 years and is excited about today and the future. And as excited as they have been throughout their whole careers. So that really bodes well for you, bodes well for Western Digital, and we'll just keep hoping the smart people that you guys have over there, keep working on the software and the physics, and the mechanical engineering and keep moving this stuff along. It's really just amazing and just relentless. >> Yeah, it is relentless. What's exciting to me in particular, Jeff, is we've driven storage advancements largely through, as I said, a number of engineering disciplines, and those are still going to be important going forward, the chemistry, the physics, the electrical, the hardware capabilities. But I think as widely recognized in the industry, it's a diminishing curve. I mean, the amount of energy, the amount of engineering effort, investment, that cost and complexity of these products to get to that next capacity step is getting more difficult, not less. And so things like zoned storage, where we now bring intelligent data placement to this paradigm, is what I think makes this current juncture that we're at very exciting. >> Right, right, well, it's applied AI, right? Ultimately you're going to have more and more compute power driving the storage process and how that stuff is managed. As more cycles become available and they're cheaper, and ultimately compute gets cheaper and cheaper, as you said, you guys just keep finding new ways to move the curve in. And we didn't even get into the totally new material science, which is also coming down the pike at some point in time. >> Yeah, very exciting times. >> It's been great to catch up with you, I really enjoy the Western Digital story; I've been fortunate to sit in on a couple chapters, so again, congrats to you and we'll continue to watch and look forward to our next update. Hopefully it won't be another four years. >> Okay, thanks Jeff, I really appreciate the time. >> All right, thanks a lot. All right, he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special CUBE Conversation, we always love talking to startups around the industry, understanding how they're creating innovation, doing new things out there, and oftentimes one of the exits for those companies is they do get acquired, and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Sheng Liang, he is the cofounder and CEO of Rancher, today there was an announcement for a definitive acquisition of SUSE, who our audience will know well, we were at SUSECON, so Sheng, first of all, thank you for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on joining SUSE here in the near future. >> Thank you, Stu, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so Sheng, why don't you give our audience a little bit of context, so I've known Rancher since the very early days, I knew Rancher before most people had heard the word Kubernetes, it was about containerization, it was about helping customers, there was that cattles versus pets, so that Rancher analogy was, hey, we're going to be your rancher and help you deal with that sprawl and all of those pieces out there, where you don't want to know them by name and the like, so help us understand how what was announced today is meeting along the journey that you set out for with Rancher. >> Absolutely, so SUSE is the largest independent opensource software company in the world, and they're a leader in enterprise Linux. Today they announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher, so we started Rancher about six years ago, as Stu said, to really build the next generation enterprise compute platform. And in the beginning, we thought we're going to just base our technology based on Docker containers, but pretty soon Kubernetes was just clearly becoming an industry standard, so Rancher actually became the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, so really with the combination of Rancher and SUSE going forward, we're going to be able to supply the enterprise container platform of choice for lots and lots of customers out there. >> Yeah, just for our audience that might not be as familiar with Rancher, why don't you give us your position in where we are with the Kubernetes landscape, I've talked about many times on theCUBE, a few years ago it was all about "Hey, are we going to have some distribution war?" Rancher has an option in that space, but today it's multicloud, Rancher works with all of the cloud Kubernetes versions, so what is it that Rancher does uniquely, and of course as you mentioned, opensource is a key piece of what you're doing. >> Exactly, Stu, thanks for the question. So this is really a good lead-up into describing what Rancher does, and some of the industry dynamics, and the great opportunity we see with SUSE. So many of you, I'm sure, have heard about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is this container orchestration platform that basically works everywhere, and you can deploy all kinds of applications, and run these applications through Kubernetes, it doesn't really matter, fundamentally, what infrastructure you use anymore, so the great thing about Kubernetes is whether you deploy your apps on AWS or on Azure, or on on-premise bare metal, or vSphere clusters, or out there in IoT gateways and 5G base stations and surveillance cameras, literally everywhere, Kubernetes will run, so it's, in our world I like to think about Kubernetes as the standard for compute. If you kind of make the analogy, what's the standard of networking, that's TCPIP, so networking used to be very different, decades ago, there used to be different kinds of networking and at best you had a local area network for a small number of computers to talk to each other, but today with TCPIP as a standard, we have internet, we have Cisco, we have Google, we have Amazon, so I really think as successful as cloud computing has been, and how much impact it has had to actually push digital transformation and app modernization forward, a lot of organizations are kind of stuck between their desire to take advantage of a cloud provider, one specific cloud provider, all the bells and whistles, versus any cloud provider, not a single cloud provider can actually supply infrastructure for everything that a large enterprise would need. You may be in a country, you may be in some remote locations, you may be in your own private data center, so the market really really demands a standard form of compute infrastructure, and that turned out to be Kubernetes, that is the true, Kubernetes started as a way Google internally ran their containers, but what it really hit the stride was a couple years ago, people started realizing for once, compute could be standardized, and that's where Rancher came in, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform. We help organizations tie together all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless where they are, and you can see this is a very natural evolution of organizations who embark on this Kubernetes journey, and by definition Rancher has to be open, because who, this is such a strategic piece of software, who would want their single point of control for all compute to be actually closed and proprietary? Rancher is 100% opensource, and not only that, Rancher works with everyone, it really doesn't matter who implements Kubernetes for you, I mean Rancher could implement Kubernetes for you, we have a Kubernetes distro as well, we actually have, we're particularly well-known for Kubernetes distro design for resource constrained deployments on the edge, called K3S, some of you might have heard about it, but really, we don't care, I mean we work with upstream Kubernetes distro, any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distro, or one of many many other popular cloud hosted Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, AKS, and with Rancher, enterprise can start to treat all of these Kubernetes clusters as fungible resources, as catalysts, so that is basically our vision, and they can focus on modernizing their application, running their application reliably, and that's really what Rancher's about. >> Okay, so Sheng, being acquired by SUSE, I'd love to hear a little bit, what does this mean for the product, what does it mean for your customers, what does it mean for you personally? According to Crunchbase, you'd raised 95 million dollars, as you said, over the six years. It's reported by CNBC, that the acquisition's in the ballpark of 600 to 700 million, so that would be about a 6X increment over what was invested, not sure if you can comment on the finances, and would love to hear what this means going forward for Rancher and its ecosystem. >> Yeah, actually, I know there's tons of rumors going around, but the acquisition price, SUSE's decided not to disclose the acquisition price, so I'm not going to comment on that. Rancher's been a very cash-efficient business, there's been no shortage of funding, but even amounts to 95 million dollars that we raised, we really haven't spent majority of it, we probably spent just about a third of the money we raised, in fact our last run to fundraise was just three, four month ago, it was a 40 million dollar series D, and we didn't even need that, I mean we could've just continued with the series C money that we raised a couple years ago, which we barely started spending either. So the great thing about Rancher's business is because we're such a product-driven company, with opensource software, you develop a unique product that actually solves a real problem, and then there's just no barrier to adoption, so this stuff just spreads organically, people download and install, and then they put it in mission-critical production. Then they seek us out for commercial subscription, and the main value they're getting out of commercial subscription is really the confidence that they can actually rely on the software to power their mission-critical workload, so once they really start using Rancher, they recognize that Rancher as an organization provide, so this business model's worked out really well for us. Vast majority of our deals are based on inbound leads, and that's why we've been so efficient, and that's I think one of the things that really attracted SUSE as well. It's just, these days you don't just want a business that you have to do heavy weight, heavy duty, old fashioned enterprise (indistinct), because that's really expensive, and when so much of that value is building through some kind of a bundling or locking, sooner or later customers know better, right? They want to get away. So we really wanted to provide a opensource, and open, more important than opensource is actually open, lot of people don't realize there are actually lots of opensource software even in the market that are not really quite open, that might seem like a contradiction, but you can have opensource software which you eventually package it in a way, you don't even make the source code available easily, you don't make it easy to rebuild the stuff, so Rancher is truly open and opensource, people just download opensource software, run it in the day they need it, our Enterprise subscription we will support, the day they don't need it, they will actually continue to run the same piece of software, and we'd be happy to continue to provide them with patches and security fixes, so as an organization we really have to provide that continuous value, and it worked out really well, because, this is such a important piece of software. SUSE has this model that I saw on their website, and it really appeals to us, it's called the power of many, so SUSE, turns out they not only completely understand and buy into our commitment to open and opensource, but they're completely open in terms of supporting the whole ecosystem, the software stack, that not only they produce, but their partners produce, in many cases even their competitors produce, so that kind of mentality really resonated with us. >> Yeah, so Sheng, you wrote in the article announcing the acquisition that when the deal closes, you'll be running engineering and innovation inside of SUSE, if I remember right, Thomas Di Giacomo has a similar title to that right now in SUSE, course Melissa Di Donato is the CEO of SUSE. Of course the comparison that everyone will have is you are now the OpenShift to SUSE. You're no stranger to OpenShift, Rancher competes against RedHat OpenShift out on the market. I wonder if you could share a little bit, what do you see in your customer base for people out there that says "Hey, how should I think of Rancher "compared to what RedHat's been doing with OpenShift?" >> Yeah, I mean I think RedHat did a lot of good things for opensource, for Linux, for Kubernetes, and for the community, OpenShift being primarily a Kubernetes distro and on top of that, RedHat built a number of enhanced capabilities, but at the end of the day, we don't believe OpenShift by itself actually solves the kind of problem we're seeing with customers today, and that's why as much investment has gone into OpenShift, we just see no slowdown, in fact an acceleration of demand of Rancher, so we don't, Rancher always thrived by being different, and the nice thing about SUSE being a independent company, as opposed to a part of a much larger organization like RedHat, is where we're going to be as an organization 100% focused on bringing the best experience to customers, and solve customers' business problems, as they transform their legacy application suite into cloud-native infrastructure. So I think the opportunity is so large, and there's going to be enough market there for multiple players, but we measure our success by how many people, how much adoption we're actually getting out of our software, and I said in the beginning, Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, and out of that, what real value we're delivering to our customers, and I think we solve those problems, we'll be able to build a fantastic business with SUSE. >> Excellent. Sheng, I'm wondering if we could just look back a little bit, you're no stranger to acquisitions, remember back when Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix, back when we had the stack wars between CloudStack and OpenStack and the like, I'm curious what lessons you learned having gone through that, that you took away, and prepared you for what you're doing here, and how you might do things a little bit differently, with the SUSE acquisition. >> Yeah, my experience with Cloud.com acquired by Citrix was very good, in fact, and a lot of times, you really got to figure out a way to adapt to actually make sure that Rancher as a standalone business, or back then, Cloud.com was a standalone business, how are they actually fitting to the acquirer's business as a whole? So when Cloud.com was acquired, it was pretty clear, as attractive as the CloudStack business was, really the bigger prize for Citrix was to actually modernize and cloudify their desktop business, which absolutely was like a two billion dollar business, growing to three billion dollars back then, I think it's even bigger now, with now everyone working remote. So we at Citrix, we not only continued to grow the CloudStack business, but more importantly, one of the things I'm the most proud of is we really played up a crucial role in modernizing and cloudifying the Citrix mainline business. So this time around, I think the alignment between what Rancher does and what SUSE does is even more apparent, obviously, until the deal actually closes, we're not really allowed to actually plan or execute on some of the integration synergies, but at a higher level, I don't see any difficulty for SUSE to be able to effectively market, and service their global base of customers, using the Rancher technology, so it's just the synergy between Kubernetes and Linux is just so much stronger, and in some sense, I think I've used this term before, Kubernetes is almost like the new Linux, so it just seems like a very natural place for SUSE to evolve into anyway, so I'm very very bullish about the potential synergy with the acquisition, I just can't wait to roll up my hands and get going as soon as the deal closes. >> All right, well Sheng, thank you so much for joining us, absolutely from our standpoint, we look at it, it's a natural fit of what Rancher does into SUSE, as you stated. The opensource vision, the community, and customer-focused absolutely align, so best of luck with the integration, looking forward to seeing you when you have your new role and hearing more about Rancher's journey, now part of SUSE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's always great talking to you. >> All right, and be sure, we'll definitely catch up with Rancher's team at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon European show, which is of course virtual, as well as many other events down the road. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

(slow music) >> From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. The event happening digitally this year. We are bringing in Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around the globe. And happy to welcome back to the program. One of our cube alumni. Robin Bergeron is the senior principal community architect with Ansible part of Red Hat. Robin, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. So we've got the community coming together even while we're apart. >> Indeed. That's what we're good at. So, I'm glad to be back here again with you all. So, hello. >> All right. So, Robin, we caught up with you last at AnsibleFest of course Red Hat Summit. So much community activity that goes on. The Ansible, community is a big piece of summit even though they also have, the separate AnsibleFest. So just give us a little bit update what's happening in your world and in the community. >> Well. I hate to say it's a, "it's a big wide world" because it sounds very cliche, but the Ansible world is fairly big. I don't know if, let's see, we talked, lasted, AnsibleFest and that was in September in Atlanta, is that correct? >> Sounds right. Yep. >> I believe so. So right around that time was when GitHub released their annual list of, they have a report called the Octoverse they publish every year, in conjunction with their annual event. And one of their metrics they have on that list is, most active projects. So, we clocked in at the number ninth most active project on Github this past year. And that's out of, I've lost count of github, like number of projects. It's not quite the, United States national debt status, but it's a, like a hundred million repositories or something like that. So we're the number nine most active repository this year. And I believe we are one of two projects who's been on that list every year since 2016 I want to say. So, yeah, we're at 5900 contributors right now. So it's, all over the globe. A lot of people keeping us very busy. I guess that and fact it's so busy and we talked about collections a bit when we were at AnsibleFest this past year and it's been a thing that we've been talking about continuously in Ansible community and also, as part of Red Hats product line for a while and we've actually now gotten to the point of sort of splitting out the Ansible repository. Ansible is going to continue to be the, you a car and you look under the engine and there's like the things that make the car run. >> Ansible base, separate from the windshield wipers and all the ad-ons and all the cool stuff that you actually, want to get when you get a car. And that stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible collections that we'll have or repository that's actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done, more rapidly. Cause in the past it's always been a really a tug of war between, work and github have always been very respectful about, how the balances between community and product because obviously without a community you don't have a product. And this is a obviously a method that Red Hat has sort of nailed down. I guess IBM really liked the idea. So here we are. But we're really looking forward to, right now we've got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo. But, they're also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way. Once we opened for business, since we've got several thousand contributors, we don't say, open for business and then have everybody comes running into a glass wall like it and then all on the floor, right? We want the doors to be open. We want the, registers so to speak to be processing things. We want, all the box to be working, all of the, all of the magic to be happening just as it is, as it has in past. But, this time with a little bit more empowerment to the community, that's on a work progress for it was like forever, but, nine months, and here in the next few weeks that will be open for business and we're hoping that, by the time the AnsibleFest rolls around, that will be part of the two, part and parcel to the 2.10 release. And, we're hoping that, even though under the hood for contributors, that's changed. We believe we'll be very transparent brand eaters, which has been one of the most important things for us because, we don't like to break people. That's, >> yeah, >> {Robin] Glad yeah >> Absolutely Robin. So it was one of the key things a announced at a AnsibleFest last year. Anybody that knows the software world is the traditional release train. Get on that train. Got to make sure you get your feature in there. But for a solution like Ansible, which as you said, has a lot of partners and it's a very big ecosystem. If you have to worry about how much stuff do I get shoved into one release, it's a little bit limiting. So you break those pieces up more like the, containers, that go on the train and you can make sure that you're adding and, doing the various pieces as they go. So maybe >> Yeah >> not the perfect analogy. >> Yeah. >> But very important so, Robin, as you've been going through this, I'm wondering, what feedback are you getting from the contributors there? and how about as you said, very active community. We know if anybody you know, says something, you got, the crowd and the wisdom coming in and giving you ideas. But, how do you balance that? You're not going to have everybody be happy about every decision, but making sure that the ultimate release train, does the job and delivers the overall solution. >> Yes. What color are we going to paint? Paint our bike shed. Right? Like the yak for circling. So it's, I don't want to to say it's been mixed, it's, you know, we, I can, I compare and contrast this, one of my, previous roles was being the newer project leader, right. And, which is, as we know the upstream, for Red Hat enterprise Linux, and its some of the, Linux and, a lot of the Linux distributions have been around for forever. Back when there were like, I don't know. 10, 15 opensource projects that anybody at all, could contribute to. Now as we can see looking on, github and many other places get lab, open dev. There's a, you name it, there's a gazillion opensource projects out there. People aren't always as attached to, I don't want to say attached, coz that sounds, terrible, but open source has become such a norm people are just very used to, there's something wrong. I'm going to submit it, I'm going to hope it gets accepted, but I'm going to move on with my life because I also have all these other places that I can also contribute, right. That said, we do have, a significant number of compute of contributors who have been with us back since Ansible started. Some of those folks go back with us to Fidor days, on Linux days on and on and on. Some of them, some folks I have concerns, they do like that this is the opportunity to give them more empowerment to figure out better ways to run the, contributor process. I think the number one thing that everybody's been concerned about is what diseases your experience going to be. And I think that's a testament to, just the power of our community is that, people aren't just concerned about how am I going to get my stuff in and your stuff in and like the tug of war of like, is one person can get something else in before someone else. Everybody's very concerned about is this going to still work for the end users? Is this going to disrupt them? Because it's a change under hood. Are they going to have to change all their playbooks and all of their, rules and everything that they have. And right now the goal is, it should be transparent. Anything that you have written right now, you should continue work, you shouldn't notice. Once we get your 3.O our goal is to ramp people up into harnessing the power of collections. But first we need to get the collections, infrastructure in place, before we get in. Start giving them to artists the power of collections. You can't just flip the switch and be like, hi . So it used to be this way, now we have collections and now you've got to redo everything, right. Because that's-- you still have the opportunity because it's open source. We'll have this window where we can still find all the bugs and get that re rapid feedback, which means, once we roll out, Red Hat Ansible automation platform, the next version. I'm not going to say an AnsibleFest. That would be shocking, right? We never do announcements at events. But, whenever that product comes out, we want to make sure, that power of open source and, having that rapid feedback loop, ensures that, what we end up, we'll bring to customers, winds up being solid, but I believe it will be very, very solid for contributors because or, and, a community. There's, because, a significant number of our contributors are community users and they have that in their own interest in mind. And we've seen that not just from, I'm a community user at a university, but all of our partners are actually participating in the community as well. And there, just painting and chatting and we had a, we had planned to have a European as well contributor summit, which is a thing we normally run in combination or the day before AnsibleFest. and we had planned that for Sweden. I was so excited. I was going to go to Gothenburg. I hear it's a charming little town, except, when we are all stuck in, the a world that we are in currently. so we ran that virtually and a lot of our longterm contributors are actually from Europe. So that was really exciting except for me, cause I had to get up 8 Am but it was still nice to see them all. So we had, 50 some odd folks pop in over the course of, that day. And we talked through elections and debated and, got some demos from folks. Had some folks talk through some specific collections, folks talking about AWS and some of the networking things. So, yeah it was nice to see everyone. I was sad that it wasn't in Gothenburg. But it is what it is. I'm going to roll. >> So Robin, I think back to 2019 an automation, was right at the top of a hot topics. When I talk to practitioners out there, many conferences I went to, not just of course Ansible test, which focus on it, but many other shows and events. Well when you talk to people about key initiatives, its in a really leveraging automation, something that I've heard talked about my entire career, but really it feels like the last painful of years and people are much more serious about it. You know, you referenced the times that we live in right now, we're unprecedented global pandemics. So I'm not saying that, somebody, everybody all of a sudden woke up and say, Oh my gosh, I have to work from home and I need to be smarter. Let me finally use this automation that I've been hearing about all these years. But why don't you bring us into, what is happening today, what you are hearing customers, because automation obviously is a critical piece of what everybody is doing and probably just, shines a light on it even more. Now that we need to make sure that people are being efficient and still being able to deal with their lives while everything else is going on. >> Yeah. It's interesting because some of is, as well as used. Yeah, there's actually a, there's the dependency graph that you can look at on github and it will tell you how many other things in github are actually depending on the Ansible. It's, I can't even remember the number. It's a very large number, like tens of thousands of things as I recall. Disclaimer, my memory is terrible sometimes. I believe it was in the tens of thousands of things. Lots of people use Ansible and it's almost like probably not quite as popular as, the uses Docker container to get started, but, venture to guess it might be a number to that. Type this Ansible thing and this thing will magically come up. Right. For folks that are, in a traditional IT department, just trying to get along, day to day right now who are, they're like me. They're at home, they're with their spouse, they're sharing an office. They're also homeschooling their kids if they got out of bed. Hopefully we all have enough bandwidth. For those folks it's, I'm just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing, they're using Ansible tower, they're glad that they can still manage to figure out how to collaborate their coworkers in that type of environment. For all the folks out there who are doing, research or trying to set up any type of infrastructure anywhere to related to this, I don't care if it's a, grocery store or you're a research laboratory, whatever it is. Last thing you want to do is spend five hours, be like, oh God okay, let me get out my manual. Where did I, it's hey, there's an Ansible. Excellent, I can type this Ansible thing in. And if for some reason it gets hung up. We have folks on IRC, we have, there's folks on stack overflow . There folks literally everywhere. You can ask a question on Twitter and It's a Pretty large, friendly, global community of people who have plenty of answers. And that's, I can't say we're like, hey, we solved everything, but we got all the >> stuff out of the way so that people can actually solve all of their, they can get down to what's actually important for them. And so that, that's always been one of the most redeeming things about Ansible that it's, for me, it's, the thing that I work on is, it's easy and it helps people solve their problems and gets all there, stuff out of the way so that they can concentrate on what's actually important to them. So I like to think, it's most important to them. And I know it is, but it's interesting seeing how things change, as people are like, are you going to teach a bunch of people Ansible now? And it's like, well, if they're in need of a job, there are a lot of online resources for that. But if they're just trying to get through their job, like everybody's sort of in a don't rock the boat position. Like if I can get a little bit ahead, that's cool. If I've already got a bunch of stuff automated Yes. That's one less thing that I have to worry about right now and that's all we can really hope for at this moment. >> Yeah, great stuff Robin. One of the high point always is seeing, the value and support of the community and as you said, it's something that we definitely see highlighted up out there. All right, Robyn Bergeron, greatest as always to catch up with you. Thank you so much. I'm sure you know so many community activities that people will be able to participate in. This week at Red Hat Summit, even though we're, all doing it remotely, >> and the >> yeah >> challenges there. >> Glad I, great uni central area city. You can come on, come on by and see all of the, various Red Hat open source communities doing their thing. >> All right, watch lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit coming at you. I'm Stu Miniman and always, thank you for watching, the cube (slow music)

>>From Las Vegas. It's the cube covering Qualis security conference 2019 you buy quality. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in Las Vegas at the Bellagio, at the quality security conference. It's the 19th year they've been doing this. It's our first year here and we're excited to be here and it's great to have a veteran who's been in this space for so long, to give a little bit more of a historical perspective as to what happened in the past and where we are now and what can we look forward to in the future. So coming right off his keynote is Felipe korto, the chairman and CEO of Qualys. Phillip, great to see you. Thank you. Same, same, same for me. Absolutely. So you touched on so many great, um, topics in your conversation about kind of the shifts of, of, of modern computing from the mainframe to the mini. We've heard it over and over and over, but the key message was really about architecture. If you don't have the right architecture, you can't have the right solution. So how has the evolution of architects of architectures impacted your ability to deliver security solutions for your clients? >>So now that's a very good question. And in fact, you know, what happened is that we started in 1999 with a vision that we could use exactly like a salesforce.com this nascent internet technologies and apply that to security. And uh, so, and mod when you have applied that to essentially changing the way CRM was essentially used and deployed in enterprises and with a fantastic success as we know. So for us, the, I can say today that 19 years later the vision was right. It took a significant longer because the security people are not really, uh, warm at the idea of silently, uh, having the data in their view, which was in place that they could not control. And the it people, they didn't really like at all the fact that suddenly they were not in control anymore of the infrastructure. So we had a lot of resistance. >>I, wherever we always, I always believe, absolutely believe that the, the cloud will be the cloud architecture to go back. A lot of people make the confusion. That was part of the confusion that for people it was a cloud, that kind of magical things someplace would you don't know where. And when I were trying to explain, and I've been saying that so many times that well you need to look at the cloud like compute that can architecture which distribute the competing power far more efficiently than the previous one, which was client server, which was distributing the convening power far better than of course the mainframes and the mini computers. And so if you look at their architectures, so the mainframe were essentially big data centers in uh, in Fort Knox, like settings, uh, private lines of communication to a dump terminal. And of course security was not really issue then because it's security was built in by the IBM's and company. >>Same thing with the mini computer, which then was instead of just providing the computing power to the large, very large company, you could afford it. Nelson and the minicomputer through the advanced in semiconductor technology could reduce a foot Frank. And then they'll bring that computing power to the labs and to the departments. And was then the new era of the digital equipment, the prime, the data general, et cetera. Uh, and then kind of server came in. So what client server did, again, if you look at the architecture, different architecture now silently servers, the land or the internal network and the PC, and that was now allowing to distribute the computing power to the people in the company. And so, but then you needed to, so everybody, nobody paid attention to security because then you were inside of the enterprise. So it started inside the walls of the castle if you prefer. >>So nobody paid attention to that. It was more complex because now you have multiple actors. Instead of having one IBM or one digital equipment, et cetera, suddenly you have the people in manufacturing and the servers, the software, the database, the PCs, and on announcer, suddenly there was the complexity, increasing efficiency, but nobody paid attention to security because it wasn't a needed until suddenly we realized that viruses could come in through the front door being installed innocently. You were absolutely, absolutely compromised. And of course that's the era of the antivirus which came in. And then because of the need to communicate more and more now, Senator, you could not stay only in your castle. You needed to go and communicate to your customers, to your suppliers, et cetera, et cetera. And now he was starting to open up your, your castle to the world and hello so now so that the, the bad guy could come in and start to steal your information. >>And that was the new era of the forward. Now you make sure that those who come in, but of course that was a little bit naive because there were so many other doors and windows, uh, that people could come in, you know, create tunnels and create these and all of that trying to ensure your customers because the data was becoming more and more rich and more, more important or more value. So whenever there is a value, of course the bad guys are coming in to try to sell it. And that was that new era of a willing to pay attention to security. The problem has been is because you have so many different actors, there was nothing really central there that was just selling more and more solutions and no, absolutely like 800 vendors bolting on security, right? And boating on anything is short-lived at the end of the day because you put more and more weight and then you also increase the complexity and all these different solutions you need. >>They need to talk together so you have a better context. Uh, but they want the design to talk together. So now you need to put other system where they could communicate that information. So you complicated and complicated and complicated the solution. And that's the problem of today. So now cloud computing comes in and again, if you look at the architecture of cloud computing, it's again data centers, which is not today I've become thanks to the technology having infinite, almost competing power and storage capabilities. And like the previous that I sent her, the are much more fractured because you just one scale and they become essentially a little bit easier to secure. And by the way, it's your fewer vendors now doing that. And then of course the access can be controlled better. Uh, and then of course the second component is not the land and the one, it's now the internet. >>And the internet of course is the web communications extremely cheap and it brings you an every place on the planet and soon in Morris, why not? So and so. Now the issue today is that still the internet needs to be secure. And today, how are we going to secure the internet? Which is very important thing today because you see today that you can spoof your email, you can spoof your website, uh, you can attack the DNS who, yes, there's a lot of things that the bad guys still do. And in fact, they've said that leverage the internet of course, to access everywhere so they take advantage of it. So now this is obviously, you know, I created the, the trustworthy movement many years ago to try to really address that. Unfortunately, the quality's was too small and it was not really our place today. There's all the Google, the Facebook, the big guys, which in fact their business depend on the internet. >>Now need to do that. And I upload or be diabetic, criticized very much so. Google was the first one to essentially have a big initiative, was trying to push SSL, which everybody understand is secret encryption if you prefer. And to everybody. So they did a fantastic job. They really push it. So now today's society is becoming like, okay, as I said, you want to have, as I said it all in your communication, but that's not enough. And now they are pushing and some people criticize them and I absolutely applaud them to say we need to change the internet protocols which were created at a time when security, you were transferring information from universities and so forth. This was the hay days, you know, of everything was fine. There was no bad guys, you know, the, he'd be days, if you like, of the internet. Everybody was free, everybody was up and fantastic. >>Okay. And now of course, today this protocol needs to be upgraded, which is a lot of work. But today I really believe that if you put Google, Amazon, Facebook altogether, and they can fix these internet protocols. So we could forget about the spoofing and who forgot about all these phishing and all these things. But this is their responsibility. So, and then you have now on the other side, you have now very intelligent devices from in a very simple sensors and you know, to sophisticated devices, the phone, that cetera and not more and more and more devices interconnected and for people to understand what is going. So this is the new environment and whether we always believe is that if you adopt an architecture, which is exactly which fits, which is similar, then we could instead of bolting security in, we can now say that the build security in a voting security on, we could build security in. >>And we have been very proud of the work that we've done with Microsoft, which we announced in fact relatively recently, very recently, that in fact our agent technologies now is bundled in Microsoft. So we have built security with Microsoft in. So from a security perspective today, if you go to the Microsoft as your secretly center, you click on the link and now you have the view of your entire Azure environment. Crazier for quality Sagent. You click on a second link and now you have the view of your significant loss posture, crazy of that same quality. Say Sagent and then you click on the third name with us. Nothing to do with quality. It's all Microsoft. You create your playbook and you remediate. So security in this environment has become click, click, click, nothing to install, nothing to update. And the only thing you bring are your policies saying, I don't want to have this kind of measured machine expose on the internet. >>I want, this is what I want. And you can continuously audit in essentially in real time, right? So as you can see, totally different than putting boxes and boxes and so many things and then having to for you. So very big game changer. So the analogy that I want you that I give to people, it's so people don't understand that paradigm shift is already happening in the way we secure our homes. You put sensors everywhere, you have cameras, you have detection for proximity detection. Essentially when somebody tried to enter your home, all that data is continuously pumped up into an incidence restaurant system. And then from your phone, again across the internet, you can change the temperature of your rooms. You can do what you can see the person who knocks on the door. You can see its face, you can open the door, close the door, the garage door, you can do all of that remotely, another medically. >>And then if there's a burglar then in your house to try to raking immediately the incidents or some system called the cops or the far Marsha difficult fire. And that's the new paradigm. So security has to follow that paradigm. And then you have interesting of the problem today that we see with all the current secretly uh, systems, uh, incidents, response system. They have a lot of false positive, false positive and false negative are the enemy really of security. Because if you are forced visited, you cannot automate the response because then you are going to try to respond to something that is not true. So you are, you could create a lot of damage. And the example I give you that today in the, if you leave your dog in your house and if you don't have the ability, the dog will bark, would move. And then the sensors would say intruder alert. >>So that's becomes a false positive. So how do you eliminate that? By having more context, you can eliminate automatically again, this false positives. Like now you take a fingerprint of your dog and of these voice and now the camera and this and the sensors and the voice can pick up and say, Oh, this is my dog. So then of course you eliminate that for solar, right? Right. Now even if another dog managed to enter your home through a window which was open or whatever for soul, you will know her window was up and but you know you cannot necessarily fix it and the dog opens. Then you will know it's a, it's a, it's not sure about, right? So that's what security is evolving such a huge sea of change, which is happening because of all that internet and today companies today, after leveraging new cloud technology, which are coming, there's so much new technology. >>What people understand is where's that technology coming from? How come silently we have, you know, Dockers netics all these solutions today, which are available at almost no cost because it's all open source. So what happened is that, which is unlike the enterprise software, which were more the Oracle et cetera, the manufacturer of that software today is in fact the cloud public cloud vendors, the Amazon, the Google, the Facebook, the Microsoft. We suddenly needed to have to develop new technology so they could scale at the size of the planet. And then very shrewdly realized that effective that technology for me, I'm essentially going to imprison that technology is not going to evolve. And then I need other technologies that are not developing. So they realized that they totally changed that open source movement, which in the early days of opensource was more controlled by people who had more purity. >>If you prefer no commercial interests, it was all for the good of the civilization and humankind. And they say their licensing model was very complex. So they simplified all of that. And then nothing until you had all this technology coming at you extremely fast. And we have leverage that technology, which was not existing in the early days when when socials.com started with the Linux lamp pour called what's called Linux Apache. My SQL and PHP, a little bit limiting, but now suddenly all this technology, that classic search was coming, we today in our backend, 3 trillion data points on elastic search clusters and we return inflammation in a hundred milliseconds. And then onto the calf cabin, which is again something at open source. We, we, we, and now today 5 million messages a day and on and on and on. So the world is changing and of course, if that's what it's called now, the digital transformation. >>So now enterprises to be essentially agile, to reach out to the customers better and more, they need to embrace the cloud as the way they do, retool their entire it infrastructure. And essentially it's a huge sea of change. And that's what we see even the market of security just to finish, uh, now evolving in a totally different ways than the way it has been, which in the past, the market of security was essentially the market for the enterprise. And I'm bringing you my, my board, my board town solutions that you have to go and install and make work, right? And then you had the, the antivirus essentially, uh, for all the consumers and so forth. So today when we see the marketplace, which is fragmenting in four different segments, which is one is the large enterprise which are going to essentially consolidate those stock, move into the digital transformation, leveraging absolutely dev ops, which isn't becoming the new buyer and of course a soak or they could improve, uh, their it for, to reach out to more customers and more effectively than the cloud providers as I mentioned earlier, which are building security in the, no few use them. >>You don't have to worry about infrastructure, about our mini servers. You need, I mean it is, it's all done for you. And same thing about security, right? The third market is going to be an emergence of a new generation of managed security service providers, which are going to take to all these companies. We don't have enough resources. Okay, don't worry, I'm going to help you, you know, do all that digital transformation. And that if you build a security and then there's a totally new market of all these devices, including the phone, et cetera, which connects and that you essentially want to all these like OT and IOT devices that are all now connected, which of course presents security risk. So you need to also secure them, but you also need to be able to also not only check their edits to make sure that, okay, because you cannot send people anymore. >>So you need to automate the same thing on security. If you find that that phone is compromised, you need to make, to be able to make immediate decisions about should I kill that phone, right? Destroyed everything in it. Should I know don't let that phone connect anymore to my networks. What should I do? Should I, by the way detected that they've downloaded the application, which are not allowed? Because what we see is more and more companies now are giving tablets, do the users. And in doing so now today's the company property. So they could say, okay, you use these tablets and uh, you're not allowed to do this app. So you could check all of that and then automatically remote. But that again requires a full visibility on what you are. And that's why just to finish, we make a big decision about a few, three months ago that we have, we build the ability for any company on the planet to automatically build their entire global HSE inventory, which nobody knows what they have in that old networking environment. >>You don't know what connects to have the view of the known and the unknown, totally free of charge, uh, across on premise and pawn cloud containers, uh, uh, uh, whether vacations, uh, OT and IOT devices to come. So now there's the cornerstone of security. So with that totally free. So, and then of course we have all these additional solutions and we're build a very scalable, uh, up in platform where we can take data in, pass out data as well. So we really need to be and want to be good citizen here because security at the end of the day, it's almost like we used to say like the doctors, you have to have that kind of apricot oath that you cannot do no arm. So if you keep, if you try to take the data that you have, keep it with you, that's absolutely not right because it's the data of your customers, right? >>So, and you have to make sure that it's there. So you have to be a good warning of the data, but you have to make sure that the customer can absolutely take that data to whatever he wants with it, whatever he needs to do. So that's the kind of totally new field as a fee. And finally today there is a new Ash culture change, which is, which is happening now in the companies, is that security has become fronted centers, is becoming now because of GDPR, which has a huge of financial could over you challenge an impact on a company. A data breach can have a huge financial impact. Security has become a board level. More and more social security is changing and now it's almost like companies, if they want to be successful in the future, they need to embrace a culture of security. And now what I used to say, and that was the, the conclusion of my talk is that now, today it DevOps, uh, security compliance, people need to unite. Not anymore. The silos. I do that. This is my, my turf, my servers. You do that, you do this. Everybody in the company can work. I have to work together towards that goal. And the vendors need to also start to inter operate as well and working with our customers. So it's a tall, new mindset, which is happening, but the safes are big. That's what I'm very confident that we're now into that. Finally, we thought, I thought it would have happened 10 years ago, quite frankly. And uh, but now today's already happening. >>She touched on a lot, a lot there. And I'll speak for another two hours if we could. We could go for Tara, but I want to, I want to unpack a couple of things. We've had James Hamilton on you to at AWS. Um, CTO, super smart guy and it was, it was at one of his talks where it really was kind of a splash, a wet water in the face when he talked about the amount of resources Amazon could deploy to just networking or the amount of PhD power he could put on, you know, any little tiny sub segment of their infrastructure platform where you just realize that you just can't, you can't compete, you cannot put those kinds of resources as an individual company in any bucket. So the inevitability of the cloud model is just, it's, it's the only way to leverage those resources. But because of that, how has, how has that helped you guys change your market? How nice is it for you to be able to leverage infrastructure partners? Like is your bill for go to market as well as feature sets? And also, you know, because the other piece they didn't talk about is the integration of all these things. Now they all work together. Most apps are collection of API APIs. That's also changed. So when you look at the cloud provider GCP as well, how does that help you deliver value to your customers? >>Yeah, but the, the, the, the club, they, they don't do everything. You know, today what is interesting is that the clubs would start to specialize themselves more and more. So for example, if you look at Amazon, the, the core value of Amazon since the beginning has been elastic computing. Uh, now today we should look at Microsoft. They leverage their position and they really have come up with a more enterprise friendly solution. And now Google is trying to find also their way today. And so then you have Addy Baba, et cetera. So these are the public cloud, but life is not uniform like is by nature. Divers life wants to leave lunch to find better ways. We see that that's what we have so many different species and it just ended up. So I've also the other phenomena of companies also building their own cloud as well. >>So the word is entering into a more hybrid cloud. And the technology is evolving very fast as well. And again, I was selling you all these open source software. There's a bigger phenomenon at play, which I used to say that people don't really understand that much wood, but it's so obvious is if you look at the printing price, that's another example that gives the printing price essentially allowed, as we all know, to distribute the gospel, which has some advantage of, you know, creating more morality, et cetera. But then what people don't know for the most part, it distributed the treaties of the Arabs on technology, the scientif treaties, because the archives, which were very thriving civilization at the time, I'd collected all the, all the, all the information from India, from many other places and from China and from etc. And essentially at the time all of Europe was pretty in the age they really came up and it now certainty that scientific knowledge was distributed and that was in fact the seeds of the industrial revolution, which then you're up cat coats and use that and creating all these different technologies. >>So that confidence of this dimension of electricity and all of that created the industrial revolution seeded by now, today what is happening is that the internet is the new printing press, which now is distributing the knowledge that not to a few millions of people to billions of people. So the rate today of advancing technology is accelerating and it's very difficult. I was mentioning today, we know today that work and working against some quantum computing which are going to totally change things. Of course we don't know exactly how and you have also it's clear that today we could use genetic, uh, the, the, the, if you look at DNA, which stores so much information, so little place that we could have significant more, you know, uh, memory capabilities that lower costs. So we have embarked into absolutely a new world where things are changing. I've got a little girl, which is 12 years old and fundamentally that new generation, especially of girls, not boys, because the boys are still on, you know, at that age. >>Uh, they are very studious. They absorb so much information via YouTube. They are things like a security stream. They are so knowledgeable. And when you look back at history 2000 years plus ago in Greece, you at 95 plus percent of the population slaves. So a few percent could start to think now, today it's totally changed. And the amount of information they can, they learn. And this absolutely amazing. And you know, she, she's, I would tell you the story which has nothing to do with computing, but as a button, the knowledge of, she came to me the few, few weeks ago and she said, Oh daddy, I would like to make my mother more productive. Okay. So I said, Oh, that's her name is Avia, which is the, which is the, the, the either Greece or Zeus weathered here. And so I say, Evie, I, so that's a good idea. >>So how are you going to do it? I mean, our answer, I was flawed, but that is very simple. Just like with, for me, I'm going to ask her to go to YouTube to learn what she needs to learn. Exactly. And she learns, she draws very well. She learns how to draw in YouTube and it's not a gifted, she's a nice, very nice little girl and very small, but all her friends are like that. Right? So we're entering in a word, which thing are changing very, very fast. So the key is adaptation, education and democracy and democratization. Getting more people access to more. Absolutely. It's very, very important. And then kind of this whole dev ops continuous improve that. Not big. That's a very good point that you make because that's exactly today the new buyer today in security and in it is becoming the DevOps shipper. >>Because what? What are these people? There are engineers which suddenly create good code and then they want to of course ship their code and then all these old silos or you need to do these, Oh no, we need to put the new server, we don't have the capacity, et cetera. How is that going to take three months or a month? And then finally they find a way through, again, you know, all the need for scale, which was coming from the Google, from the Facebook and so forth. And by the way, we can shortcut all of that and we can create and we can run out to auto-ship, our code. Guess what are they doing today? They are learning how to secure all of that, right? So again, it's that ability to really learn and move. And today, uh, one of the problem that you alluded to is that, which the Amazon was saying is that their pick there, they have taken a lot of the talent resources in the U S today because of course they pay them extra to me, what? >>Of course they'll attract that talent. And of course there's now people send security. There's not enough people that even in, but guess what? We realized that few years ago in 2007, we'll make a big decision who say, well, never going to be able to attract the right people in the Silicon Valley. And we've started to go to India and we have now 750 people. And Jack Welch used to say, we went to India for the cost and discover the talent. We went to India for the talent and we discover the cost. And there is a huge pool of tenants. So it's like a life wants to continue to leave and now to, there are all these tools to learn, are there, look at the can Academy, which today if you want to go in nuclear physics, you can do that through your phone. So that ability to learn is there. So I think we need just more and more people are coming. So I'm a very optimistic in a way because I think the more we improve our technologies that we look at the progress we're making genetics and so everywhere and that confidence of technology is really creating a new way. >>You know, there's a lot of conversations about a dystopian future and a utopian future with all these technologies and the machines. And you know what? Hollywood has shown us with AI, you're very utopian side, very optimistic on that equation. What gives you, what gives you, you know, kind of that positive feeling insecurity, which traditionally a lot of people would say is just whack a mole. And we're always trying to chase the bad guys. Generally >>speaking, if I'm a topian in in a way. But on the other end, you'd need to realize that unfortunately when you have to technological changes and so forth, it's also create factors. And when you look at this story in Manatee, the same technological advancement that some countries to take to try to take advantage of fathers is not that the word is everything fine and everything peaceful. In fact, Richard Clark was really their kid always saying that, Hey, you know that there is a sinister side to all the internet and so forth. But that's the human evolution. So I believe that we are getting longterm. It's going to. So in the meantime there's a lot of changes and humans don't adapt well to change. And so that's in a way, uh, the big challenge we have. But I think over time we can create a culture of change and that will really help. And I also believe that probably at some point in time we will re-engineer the human race. >>All right, cool. We'll leave it there. That's going to launch a whole nother couple hours. They leave. Congratulations on the event and a great job on your keynote. Thanks for taking a few minutes with us. Alrighty. It's relief. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube where the Qualice security conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon, Europe, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, we're at the end of two days, wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days has been Corey Quinn. Corey, we've gone two days, it's five years of Kubernetes, and everybody's been wondering when are you going to sing happy birthday to Fippy and the Kubernetes team? >> Generally, no one wants to hear me sing more than once, because first, I don't have a great singing voice, but more importantly, I insist on calling it Corey-oki, and it just doesn't resonate with people. The puns don't land as well as you'd hope they would. >> Maybe not singing, but you are a master of limericks, I'm told. >> So they tell me, most are unprintable, but that's a separate argument for another time. >> Alright, so, Corey this is your first time at KubeCon. >> It is. >> In CloudNativeCon, we've done some analysis segments, I thought we've had some phenomenal guests, some great end-users, some thought leaders, >> We had some great times. >> You need to pick your favorite right now. >> Oh, everyone's going to pick their own favorite on this one, but I've got to say it was, it would have to be, hands down, Abby Fuller, from AWS. Not that I didn't enjoy all of our guests -- >> Is it because you have AWS on your Lapel pin, and that secretly you do work for Amazon? >> Hardly, just the opposite, in fact. It's that, given that my newsletter makes fun of AWS on a near constant basis, whenever someone says Oh, there's going to be a public thing with Corey and someone from AWS, half the people there are like, Oh, this is going to be good, and the other half turn ghost white and Oh, no, no, this is going to go awfully. And, I'll be honest, it's been a day now, I still don't know which it was, but we had fun. >> Yeah, so, Abby was phenomenal, loved having her on the program, I'm a sucker for the real transformational stories, I tell you Jeff Brewer from Intuit, there's been many times I do a show and I do like, the first interview, and I'm like, I can go home. Here we hear a company that we know, both of us have used this technology, and really walks us through how that transformation happens, some of the organizational things. They've brought some software in and they're contributing to it, so just many aspects of what I look at in a company that's modernizing and going through those pieces. And those kinds of stories always get me excited. >> That story was incredible, and in fact it's almost starting to turn into a truth and labeling issue, for lack of a better term, because this is the Cloudnative Foundation, the software is designed for things that were more or less born in the cloud, and now we're hearing this entire series of stories on transitioning in. And it almost feels like that's not native anymore, that's effectively something that is migrating in. And that's fantastic, it's a sign of maturity, it's great to see. And it's strange to think of that, that in the terms of the software itself is absolutely Cloudnative, it's not at all clear that the companies that are working with this are themselves. And that's okay, that's not a terrible thing. There was some snark from the keynote today about, here's a way to run web logic in Kubernetes, and half the audience was looking at this with a, Eeee, why would I ever want to do that? Because you're running web logic and you need to continue to run web logic, and you can either sit there and make fun of people, you can help them get to a different place than they are now that helps their business become more agile and improves velocity, but I don't think you can effectively do both. >> Yeah, Corey, anything that's over than 5 years old why would you ever want to do that? Because you must always do things the brand new way. Oh wait, let's consider this for a second, lift and shift is something that I cringe a little bit when I hear it because there's too many times that I would hear a customer say I did this, and I hadn't fully planned out how I was doing it, and then I clawed it back because it was neither cheap nor easy, I swiped that credit card and it wasn't what I expected. >> Yeah, I went ahead and decided to run on a cloud provider now my infrastructure runs on someone else's infrastructure, and then a few months go by, and the transition doesn't happen right, I was wrong, it's not running on someone else's infrastructure, it's running on money. What do I do? And that became something that was interesting for a lot of companies, and painful as well. You can do that, but you need to plan the second shift phase to take longer than you think it will, you will not recoup savings in the time frame you probably expect to, but that's okay because it's usually not about that. It's a capability story. >> I had hoped that we learned as an industry. You might remember the old phrase, my mess for less? By outsourcing, and then we'll, Oh wait, I put it in an environment, they don't really understand my business, I can't make changes in the way I want, I need to insource now my knowledge to be able to work close with the business, and therefore no matter where I put my valuable code, my valuable information and I run stuff, I'm responsible for it and even if I move it there as a first step, I need to make sure how do I actually optimize it for that environment from a cost savings, there's lots of things that I can to change those kind of things. >> The one cautionary tale I'm picking up from a lot of these stories has been that you need to make sure the people you're talking to, and the trusted advisors that you have are aligned with your incentives, not their own. No matter where you go, there's an entire sea of companies that are thrilled and lined up to sell you something. And that's not inherently a bad thing, but you need to understand that whenever you're having those conversations, there's a potential conflict of interest. Not necessarily an actual one, but pay attention. You can partner with someone, but at some point your interests do diverge. >> Okay, Corey, what other key learnings or sound bites did you get from some of our speakers this week? >> There were an awful lot of them. I think that's the first time I've ever seen, for example, a project having pieces removed from it, Tiller, in this case, and a bunch of people clapped and cheered. They've been ripped out of Helm, it's oh awesome, normally the only time you see something get ripped out and people cheer is when they finally fire that person you work with. Usually, that person is me, then everyone claps and cheers, which, frankly, if you've met me, that makes sense. For software, it's less common. But we saw that, we saw two open-source projects merging. >> Yeah. >> We had, it was-- >> Open telemetry is the new piece. >> With open senses and open tracing combining, you don't often see that done in anything approaching a responsible way, but we've seen it now. And there's been a lot of people a little miffed that there weren't a whole bunch of new features and services and what not launched today. That's a sign of maturity. It means that there's a stability story that is now being told. And I think that that's something that's very easy to overlook if you're interested in a pure development perspective. >> Just to give a little bit of a cautionary piece there, we had Mark Shuttleworth on the program, he said Look, there are certain emperors walking around the show floor that have no clothes on. Had Tim talking, Joe Beta, and Gabe Monroy on, some of the earliest people working on Kubernetes and they said Look, five years in, we've reached a certain level of maturity, but Tim Hoggin was like, we have so much to do, our sigs are overrunning with what I need to do now, so don't think we can declare success, cut the cake, eat the donuts, grab the t-shirt, and say great let's go on to the next great thing because there is so much more yet to do. >> There's absolutely a consulting opportunity for someone to set up shop and call it imperial tailoring. Where they're going around and helping these people realize that yes, you've come an incredibly long way, but there is so much more work to be done, there is such a bright future. Now I would not call myself a screaming advocate for virtually any technology, I hope. I think that Kubernetes absolutely has it's place. I don't think it's a Penesea, and I don't think that it is going to necessarily be the right fit for every work load. I think that most people, once you get them calmed down, and the adrenaline has worn off, would largely agree with that sentiment. But that nuance often gets lost in a world of tweets, it's a nuanced discussion that doesn't lend itself well to rapid fire, quick sound bites. >> Corey, another thing I know that is near and dear to your heart they brought in diversity scholarships. >> Yes. >> So 56 people got their pass and travel paid for to come here. There's really good, People in the community are very welcoming, yet in the same breath, when they talked about the numbers, and Cheryl was up on stage saying only three percent of the people contributing and making changes were women. And so, therefore, we still have work to do to make sure that, you've mentioned a couple of times on the program. >> Absolutely, and it is incredibly important, but one of the things that gives me some of the most hope for that is how many companies or organizations would run numbers like that and realize that three percent of their contributors are women, and then mention it during a keynote. That's almost unheard of for an awful lot of companies, instead they wind up going and holding that back. One company we don't need to name, wound up trying to keep that from coming out in a court case as a trade secret, of all things. And that's generally, depressingly, what you would often expect. The fact that they called it out, and the fact that they are having a diversity scholarship program, they are looking at actively at ways to solve this problem is I think the right answer. I certainly don't know what the fix is going to be for any of this, but something has to happen, and the fact that they are not sitting around waiting for the problem to fix itself, they're not casting blame around a bunch of different directions is inspirational. I'm probably not the best person to talk on this, but the issue is, you're right, it is very important to me and it is something that absolutely needs to be addressed. I'm very encouraged by the conversations we had with Cheryl Hung and several other people these last couple of days, and I'm very eager to see where it goes next. >> Okay, Corey, what about any things you've been hearing in the back channel, hallway conversations, any concerns out there? The one from my standpoint where I say, well, security is something that for most of my career was top of mine, and bottom of budget, and from day one, when you talk about containers and everything, security is there. There are a number of companies in this space that are starting to target it, but there's not a lot of VC money coming into this space, and there are concerns about how much real focus there will be to make sure security in this ecosystem is there. Every single platform that this is going to live in, whether you talk the public clouds, talk about companies like Red Hat, and everybody else here, security is a big piece of their message and their focus, but from a CNCF if there was one area that I didn't hear enough about at this show, I thought it might be storage, but feels like we are making progress there, so security's the one I come out with and say I want to know more, I want to see more. >> One thing that I thought was interesting is we spoke to Reduxio earlier, and they were talking about one of their advantages was that they are quote enterprise grade, and normally to me that means we have slides with war and peace written on every one. And instead what they talked about was they have not just security built into this, but they have audit ability, they have an entire, they have data lifecycle policies, they have a level of maturity that is necessary if we're going to start winning some of these serious enterprise and regulated workloads. So, there are companies active in this space. But I agree with you, I think that it is not been a primary area of focus. But if you look at how quickly this entire, I will call it a Kubernetes revolution, because anything else takes on religious overtones, it's been such a fast Twitch type of environment that security does get left behind, because it's never a concern or a priority until it's too late. And then it becomes a giant horses left, barn door's been closed story, and I hope we don't have to learn that. >> So, MultiCloud, Corey, have you changed your mind? >> I don't think so, I still maintain that MultiCloud within the absence of a business reason is not a best practice. I think that if you need to open that door for business reasons then Kubernetes is not a terrible way to go about achieving it. But I do question whether it's something everyone needs to put into their system design principles on day one. >> Okay, must companies be born CloudNative, or can they mature into a CloudNative, or we should be talking a different term maybe? >> I don't know if it's a terminology issue, we've certainly seen companies that were born in on-prem environments where the classic example of this is Capital One. They are absolutely going all in on public cloud, they have been very public about how they're doing it. Transformation is possible, it runs on money and it takes a lot more time and effort than anyone thinks it's going to, but as long as you have the right incentives and the right reason to do things it absolutely becomes possible. That said, it is potentially easier, if you're born in the cloud, to a point. If you get ossified into existing patterns and don't pay attention to what's happening, you look at these companies that are 20 years old, and oh they're so backwards they'll never catch up. If you live that long, that will be you someday. So it's very important to not stop paying attention to what the larger ecosystem is doing, because you don't want to be the only person responsible for levels of your stack that you don't want to have to be responsible for. >> Alright, want to give you the final word. Corey, any final things, any final questions for me? >> Fundamentally I think that this has been an incredible event. Where we've had great conversations with people who are focused on an awful lot of different things. There are still a bunch of open questions. I still, for example, think that Serverless is being viewed entirely too much through a lens of functions as a service, but I'm curious as far as what you took away from this. What did you learn this trip that you didn't expect to learn? >> So, it's interesting when we talk about the changing world of OpenSource. There's been some concern lately that what's happening in the public cloud, well, maybe OpenSource will be imploding. Well, it really doesn't feel that way to me when you talk at this show, we've actually used the line a couple of times, Kubernetes is people. It is not the vendors jested, >> Internet of flesh. >> There are people here. We've all seen people that we know that have passions for what they are doing, and that goes above and beyond where they live. And in this community it is project first, and the company you work for is second or third consideration in there. So, there's this groundswell of activity, we're big believers of the world can be changed if, I don't need everybody's full time commitment, if you could just take two percent of the US's watching of TV in a single year, you could build Wikipedia. Clay Sharky, one of my greats that I love from those environments, we believe that the network and communities really can make huge efforts and it's great to see tech for good and for progress and many of the outcomes of that we see here is refreshingly uplifting to kind of pull us out of some of the day-to-day things that we think about sometimes. >> Absolutely, I think that you're right, it has to come from people, it has to come from community, and so far I'm seeing a lot of encouraging signs. One thing that I do find slightly troubling that may or may not resolve itself is that we're still seeing CloudNative defined in terms of what it's not. That said, this is theCUBE, I am not Stu Miniman. >> Well, I am Stu Miniman, you are Corey Quinn. Corey, how's it been two days on theCUBE wall-to-wall through all these things, ready for a nap or fly home? >> I'm ready to call it a week, absolutely. I'm somewhat surprised that at no point have you hit me. And one of these days I am sure we will cross that border. >> Well, definitely, I try not to have any video or photo evidence of that, but thank you Corey, so much. We do have to make a big shout out, first and foremost to the CloudNative Computing Foundation without their partnership, we would not be able to come here. And we do have sponsorship if you look on the lower thirds of the videos you will see our headline sponsor for this show has been Red Hat. Obviously strong commitment in this community, and will be with us here and also in San Diego for KubeCon. Additional shout out to Cisco, Canonical, and Reduxio for their sponsorship here. And all the people that put on this show here, it's a big community, our team. So I want to make a big shout out to my boys here, coming in I've got Pat, Seth, flying in from the West Coast as well as the Tony Day crew Tony, Steve, and John. Thank you guys, beautiful set here, love the gimble with the logo. Branding here, lot's of spectacle, and we always say check out thecube.com to see all the replays as well, see where we will be, reach out with any questions, and thank you as always, for watching theCUBE. (upbeat jingle)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick in Las Vegas at The Wynn, for Magento Imagine 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE T.J. Gamble. Not only the CEO of Jamersan, but a Magento Master. >> That's the big one right there. >> Right? >> CEO's important, but don't forget that one. >> Well, one of the things I wish our audience could see, is that awesome orange cape that you and the other Masters were wearing this morning. >> If I had had known, I'd have brought the cape, but the cape's going to get framed and put up somewhere, so we tucked that away in the bag. (laughs) >> So you have been a Magento advocate, part of this massive community of over 300 000 that they have accumulated in the years. For a long time now, this is the first Imagine post-Adobe acquisition. What is your take on this year's event? How is this community, in the year since the acquisition was announced? >> You know, the community is a little apprehensive, a little concerned. Change is always a concern for people. You know things are going so well, Magento's growing. Everything is positive forward, and then you have Adobe come in and acquire it. Some people, they're on edge a little bit, but I think you come to conferences like this, and you see the announcement of them rolling Sensei into it, and channels, you know the Amazon channels they rolling in, and you start to see the acceleration of features and innovation that Adobe brings when they bring those level of resources. And so, I think people are starting to really, kinda, get over that nervousness and start to feel the excitement of where the platform is going, and it's just about to explode, and get even bigger. >> It's a whole bunch of resources, right? The new investment, and as you've seen it kinda change hands a couple times: isn't it a pitted company, then going to eBay, then out of eBay, private equity, and now to Adobe, and yet the community has been very , very grounded and stuck with the platform all the way around. Opensource is a huge part of this story, small, medium-sized business is a huge part of this story. There's some really big announcements today, kind of integrating into the Amazon ecommerce system, integrating into the Google shopping systems, and I still can't believe that Adobe didn't have an ecommerce platform, before they brought a Magento. It fits perfectly into this kind of funnel process. >> It could not fit any better if they had built it up from the ground themselves. You know, if you've didn't see at least the promise of it right away, then maybe you weren't paying attention. It fits into what Adobe's doing just incredibly, because Adobe's all about experience, and so Magento being the most flexible e-commerce platform in the world, it does not have the limits that some of the other platforms have. So if you can envision it, if your customers desire it, you can deliver it on the Magento platform, which is what made it just-- I mean, it's like you say, it's just the perfect fit into the Adobe ecosystem. And I don't know why they didn't have an ecommerce platform. I don't know if they've tried and failed. I didn't keep up with the history of Adobe like I have Magento, but I'm glad we're here. I'm glad it worked out that way, because it's gonna be good for everybody. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from those small and medium businesses, as Jeff was mentioning this morning, the announcement of the Amazon sales channel integration with the free extensions in the marketplace, Google shopping, aimed at squashing the fears of some of those small and medium-sized businesses may have had in the last year of being acquired by a company, Adobe, that has a very strong and oquias presence? >> Yeah, it's not so much those features are-- it's you're starting to see the investments, so that's good, but those features are more about ecommerce is getting more complicated. You're going to have to start selling in multiple channels, you're going to have to start selling on all of the social platforms. Facebook's gonna eventually roll something out. They're already doing it with WhatsApp. Instagram just announced the check-out within their site. So there's a lot of things you've got to manage, and data is difficult, so anytime a platform can out-of-the-box handle a lot of those integrations, you can now manage Amazon, you can now manage your Google products, widen your ecommerce platform, and it becomes the hub for small merchants to run their business, because most small merchants don't have a complex ERP as their hub for their data, so they can-- >> A lot of resources, right? >> Exactly, so if the ecom platform can help you manage that data, so you can focus on properly merchandising, that's great for everybody, because small merchants, the have and the have nots: the gap is widening, and so small merchants are going to have to have tools that they can leverage to keep up, because they're never going to be able to throw the money at it like somebody else can. I mean Amazon is spending eight hundred million dollars next quarter Three months, they're spending eight million hundred dollars to go from two day prime to one day prime. How is anybody supposed to keep up with that? You can't, so you compete on your own turf, but you still need tools so that you can leverage all of the available things out there, all of the available channels and stuff, that you can go out and bring ecommerce to your customers, instead of forwarding customers to your ecommerce. >> It's a great example, bringing it to the customers. I'm curious to get, kind of your take, on the small, medium ecommerce players out there, that's kind of experienced message, right? It's a big piece of the Adobe story. We were at Adobe's summit a couple weeks back, and clearly they've got a ton of resources. When they talk about this ongoing engagement with the client, be with them wherever they are, let them shop wherever they are. Like you say, that's easy if you've got a lot of resources, but I'm curious: are smaller merchants seeing that? Are they changing their way? Do they go to market where it is more of an experience, and the products come along, or a lot of them, that's just too big for them to bite? >> Both. You see both. It depends on the maturity of the merchant, what kind of resources they actually have to dedicate to it. The great thing about experience is, is once you have a platform with limitations, like an Instagram check out, that is an experience. Instagram handles the experience for you, so somebody finds a product, they one-click, and they've ordered that product, and all of the canceling that order, all of the notifications go through that platform, so they've made that very easy for a merchant to have that top-level experience. You know, if you're a small Mom-and pop, and you gain access to Instagram checkout, it's gonna be the exact same experience as the big brands that have access to it. As long as you understand your audience, and you're creating posts to engage with them, and you know how to merchandise your products, you don't have to worry about the technology stack. So I think this is going to be the great equalizer with where merchants are actually interacting with their customers. It's going to be a huge opportunity. >> What about, kind of, the competition with somebody, like an Amazon, where on one hand it's a great distribution channel for me as a small merchant. I got some specialty items-- I used to always joke, "Good news, just got an order from Walmart. Bad news is you just got an order from Walmart", right? So, you've got the scale issues, as you mentioned in Instagram. Suddenly I turn on Instagram, and my cup goes viral. How are small merchants kinda playing both sides of that coin: I wanna play with Amazon. I want to use their distribution technology, I wanna use Instagram with to pay. At the same time, I've got limited resources. Oh my God. One of these things hit and I get 100 000 orders pop up on my system tomorrow, I'm in trouble. How are people managing that? How are you helping them, kind of, strategise? >> You want to find the right tools. You need to understand your customers. You need to understand where to best engage them, and if you have limited resources, you have to be selective. You have to figure out which one is the best, like if I have all my customers on Instagram, then that makes sense, but if all my customers are on Twitter, then why am I putting resources into Instagram? So you figure out which platform is best. When it comes to Amazon, not to quote-- we don't want to quote 90s rap on here, but in the words of the Immortal Too $hort, "You should be getting it while the gettin's good". Take advantage of it while it's there, but sooner or later they're going to own your market. You understand that, you go in with eyes wide open, that sooner or later if you're successful, Amazon is going to take over your market share that you're getting from their platform. But until that happens, you have no choice but to play by their rules. These other platforms, it's a little different, because Amazon's dangerous because they own the channel, the actual medium and the platform by which transactions are happening, but they're also a competitor on that platform, which is what makes them dangerous. When you get in that situation, there just so many gray areas. We've never been in that situation before. The good thing about these other social channels, is that they're the medium but they're not also competing. Like Instagram is not selling on their platform, so it's-- somethings going to happen with Amazon. Every Juggernaut dies at some point. We maybe a 100 years from now before we see that happen, but, you know, something's gonna have to happen to stop Amazon. We can't have one platform, that is also a competitor in the space be 75, 80, 90% of all ecoomerce. We just can't have it, so something's going to happen between now and when we get there. I'm not the guide, I'm not Nostradarmus, I'm not going to prognosticate what that is, but changes are gonna happen over the next five years, because that's just not a market conducive to competition. >> Speaking of changes, there's a lot of change going on with the expectation of consumers, which we are every day, for many products and services, and we wanna have a personalized experience. We also want to be able to do everything from our smartphone, so this rise of, at least it's starting a transactional buying process on mobile is really critical. One of the things also announced today was progressive web apps. Want to get your perspective on that as a game changer in the next gen for shopping, and how might that enable a small to medium business to compete better with its competitors on Amazon itself? >> Yeah, PWA is if you don't know what a progressive web app is, you need to go do research right now. It was-- they definitely mentioned it today. It wasn't necessarily announced. It was announced, I wanna say, a year and a half, two years ago now. They've been working on PWA Studio in Magento for a while. Progressive web apps are a Google initiative, and Google usually gets what it wants. We won't talk too much about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or anything like that, but usually if Google's pushing it, it's a good thing. PWAs are interesting, because they're not a technology. They're a methodology. It's like responsive web design. It is just best practices for how you should deliver a mobile experience. It's a single page application, which means you load your app once, and then elements-- when you're moving through your site, elements that are the same don't refresh. Like if the navigation, the headers the same, when you click, it's still there. It doesn't flicker, it doesn't jump, it lazy loads things in, so it brings things in as it needs it, to save time, so that it loads faster, and to save data, because mobile usually you're on a cell network when you're doing that. It touches on all of the important aspects of ecommerce, which is why it's coming fast. Number one, you're gonna have increased conversions, because if you can browse around the website, and it's snappy, and it's fast, you're much more likely to order something. So you've got increased conversions there, that's number one. Number two, you're gonna get more traffic, because it's a Google initiative, Google rewards fast websites. So if you do it properly, and you've got the SEO right, Google's going to send you more traffic, and so it also leads to more loyalty, because you can have a more pleasant user experience, and your customers like you. Really in ecommerce there's really only three stats that really matter when it comes to how much money you're taking in: how many new customers can you get-- right, that goes back to the conversion rates, and Google sending you stuff-- how much did they order, were they more likely to order more when it's fast, and they go right through and they can browse through 1000 products really quickly, and then how frequently do they order from you? That's it. Every other stat in ecommerce trickles down to those, and PWA touches on all three of those, which is what's going to make it happen and happen really fast. Right now, if you move into PWA, it's a little bit of a risk, a little bit. That risk lowers every day, so if you watching this, two months from now the risk is a lot lower, but the technology is new, the tooling is a little new. It still needs to mature a little bit to be readliy available for the masses and affordable, especially for smaller merchants, but if you do move now, you can have a serious competitive advantage for years. If you're building a website right now, you 100% need to at least look into PWAs. If you're gonna launch it, later this year, you're gonna launch it early next year, you absolutely have to look at it, and if you're going to start the website next year some time, I really-- it's going to be an odd case that launches a website by summer of next year, or after, that is not a progressive web app. It's gonna be that fast. >> T.J. I wanna get your perspective on something else that we're talking about here at the show, and that's AI. You know, talk about AI, and machine learning for a long time, and as we kinda suspected, really the easy application flows are inside somebody else's application. We're seeing Adobe use AI on the back-end or on the marketing side, 'cause the whole idea is to get you what you want, and as somebody once said "If it's done poorly, it's creepy. If it's done well, it's magic". So I wonder if you can kind of reflect on how AI is changing what you can build, amd what you can deliver to the customer, even if you're an SMB, 'cause you're leveraging AI back in systems, way back supporting it. >> Yeah, the AI is a buzz term right now, and buzz terms are always really popular about five years before they're useful, and we're probably a couple of years into AI really being a huge buzz term, so it's starting to creep down market. With something like SenSei being added to Magento, you're going to see it creep even further down market. I'm excited about it. What AI in ecommerce-- where it's really going to play is understanding your customers in real time. Those who understand their customers, can provide a better experience. And how do you understand your customer, the differences between them, what they're looking for in real-time, while they're interacting with your website, that's really difficult to do, and it's impossible to do without something like artificial intelligence, so leveraging it for your product recommendations, for your search, for what content you're going to show to them. It's still going to be a lot of work, unless we figure out how to AI create all that content. Still going to be a lot of work, but just having the ability to understand the subtle nuances and differences between your customers and their desires, and then to be able to actually react to those in real time, is going to be incredible. >> Especially as there is not only so much noise out there, but there's so much competition, pretty much every product and service. T.J. we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE this afternoon. Next time you gotta come back with your orange-- >> I'll bring the cape. >> Magento Imagine cape. >> If they would have just told me, I'd have brought it, but-- >> Now you have to come back. >> Now I've got an excuse. I'll forget it next time so I have to come back again. >> There you go! (laughs) Allright T.J. thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. We appreciate your insights. For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas, Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)