(gentle music) >> Okay. We're back at AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. Think it's the first time, at re:Invent, we've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re:Invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the senior vice president of alliances. And he's joined by Ankur Jain, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Tom, tell us about Merkel, for those who might not be familiar with you. >> Yeah. So, Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the dentsu umbrella. Dentsu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars, which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. >> So you're a tech company? >> Yes. >> Right? Okay. So there's some big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously, the pandemic, the forced march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing, that you're trying to ride? >> So what we're seeing is, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem, that we manage today, within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment. To be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realizing they need, to be in a digital environment. And so, that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. >> And you're relatively you new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you can talk about that, Ankur. >> Well, actually, as a partner, we may be new. But Merkle has been working with AWS for over five years. >> Dave Vellante: As a customer? >> As a customer. >> Yeah. >> So what we did was, last year, we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we are part of the re:Stack program, basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialization of marketing. So, as Tom said, you know, we are part of a dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us, to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. >> So, I mean, your on-prem databases, there's probably a lot of diversity on-prem. (laughs) A lot of tech... When the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical philosophy. >> Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described... So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are, essentially, Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem. Especially, MarTech ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints, customer data from disparate sources. And they, basically, integrate that data in one central place. And then bolt-on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on top of it. Helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases, currently, sit on-prem, on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them. Give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities, to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate that. >> Dave Vellante: And you do that as a service? >> We do that as a service. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Strategically, >> Yes. >> you're sort of transforming your business- >> Yes. >> to help your customers transform their business. >> Right. >> Right? Take away, it's classic. I mean, it's happening. This theme of, you know, AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Superclouds, we call 'em. >> Superclouds, yeah. (Dave laughs) It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And, for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them, and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for 'em. >> Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media. And all they keep talking about was direct-to-consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third-party anymore, if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that, kind of, the play here? >> Yes. Direct-to-consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick-and-mortar-based, or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors, are now, basically, transforming themselves to be direct-to-consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment. Because, now, those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems, that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS, to bring all those technologies, and build those next generation solutions for our customers. >> So what kind of initiatives are you working on with AWS? >> So, there are, like, three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. You know, and they have a transformation like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services. To give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one, we are doing in partnership with AWS. To reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations. You know, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environment, by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Merkury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to, actually, easily use that solution. And number four, I would say is, helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. You know, leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms. Which is, bring on your first-party data, join it with Amazon data, to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com. Which gives insight to these brands, to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are, like, four, five focus areas. >> No, it's good. So, I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy. Like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists, that... Your clients have first-party data. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources. >> Yes. >> And then you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >> Well, ultimately, client owns the data, because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third-party data, which is what we call as... So Merkle has a service called DataSource, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is, to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange. So that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first-party data, take this third-party data from Merkle, and then, segment their customers much more intelligently. >> And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? >> Yeah. CMO is our main customer profile. And we'll work with the chief data officer, or we'll work with the chief technology officer. We bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing, and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. >> And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too? >> Tom Miller: Yeah, he fits in there too. >> CGO, chief dig. officer, CMO. Sometimes, they're one in the same. Other times, they're mixed. >> Yep. Yep. >> I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. >> Yes. >> Sure. >> It's all data. >> It's all data. (Dave laughs) >> Yeah. Some of the roles that come into play, as Tom mentioned, and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers, from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talked about the business initiatives, like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkle comes in, to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years, on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >> So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise, that now, you're making that available as a service. Is that right? >> That's right. Yes. >> Yes. >> How far are you into that journey, of saasfying your business? >> Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkle. >> Yeah. Where you began leveraging the cloud? >> That's right. >> Dave Vellante: And then the light bulb went off and- >> So cloud, again, we use cloud in multiple aspects. From general computing perspective, leveraging, you know, fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece, on the cloud side, is SaaS offering, Software as a Service offerings, like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkle covers a huge spectrum, when it comes to cloud. >> And you got a combination, you have a consulting business, and also- >> So Merkle has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them. Where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives, and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have a data business, the data assets that I was talking about, that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. >> Dave Vellante: Quite a portfolio. >> Yes. >> You mentioned analytics a couple of times, how do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics, so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? >> Yeah. So that's a very important line. Because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, because that's the actionable part. So, few areas. I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now, who those set of customers are, you know, where they should target this, who their target customers are, what their demographics are, that's all done through analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell, and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. >> Used to be, really, pure art, right? It's really becoming- >> Not any more, it's all data driven companies. (Tom laughs) >> It's "Moneyball." >> Yes. Exactly. (Dave laughs) >> Tom Miller: Exactly. >> There's, maybe, still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair, still. >> Yes. >> But you got to go with the data. >> And that's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art, to present it to a end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. >> And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves. Where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkle. >> You got to teach 'em how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in two to three years? Where do you want to take? >> I think future is cloud, AWS being the market leader. I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS, I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sales in, majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to tell. >> Yeah, that's good news for AWS. If a little of your DNA could rub off on them, it'd be good. >> Tom Miller: Yeah. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> It was great to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re:Invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high-tech coverage. Be right back. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Very few physical events this year doing a lot of hybrid stuff. It's great to be back in hybrid event... Physical event land, 25,000 people here. Probably a little few more registered than that. And then on the periphery, got to be another at least 10,000 people that came in, flew in and out, see what's happening. A bunch of VCs, checking things out, a few parties last night and so forth. A lot of action here. It's like re:Invent is back. Matt Coulter is here. He's a technical architect at Liberty Mutual. Matt, thanks for flying in from Belfast. Good to see ya. >> Dave, and thanks for having me today. >> Pleasure. So what's your role as a technical architect? Maybe describe that, we'll get into a little bit. >> Yeah so I am here to empower and enable our developers across the globe to rapidly deliver business value and solve problems for our customers in a well-architected way that doesn't introduce problems or risks, you know, later down the line. So instead of thinking of me as someone who directly every day, build software, I try to create the environment where other people can rapidly build software. >> That's, you know, it's interesting. because you're a developer, right? You can use like, "Hey I code." That's what normally you would say but you're actually creating frameworks and business model so that others can learn, teach them how to fish, so we speak. >> Yeah because I can only scale, there's a certain amount. Whereas if I can teach, there's 5,000 people in Liberty Mutual's tech organization. So if I can teach the 5,000 to be 5% better, it's way more than me even if I 10Xed >> When did you first touch the Cloud? >> Personally, it would have been four/five years ago. That's when I started in the Cloud. >> What was that experience like for you? >> Oh, it was hard. It was very different to anything that we'd done in the past. So it's because you... Traditionally, you would have just written your small piece of code. You would have had a big application that was out there, it had been out there maybe 20 years, it was deployed, and you were just adding a couple of lines. Whereas when you start putting stuff into the Cloud, it's out there. It's on the internet for anyone there to try and hack or try to get into. It was a bit overwhelming the amount that you needed to learn. So it was- >> Was it worth it? >> Oh yeah. Completely. (laughing) So that's the thing, that I would never go back to the way we did things before. And that's why I'm so passionate, enthusiastic about the stuff I've been doing. Because to me, the amount of benefits you can get, like now we can deliver thing. We have teams going out there and doing discovery and framing with the business. And they're pushing well-architected products three days later into production. That was unheard of before, you know, this year. >> Yeah. So you were part of Werner's keynote this morning. Of course that's always one of the keynotes that's most anticipated at re:Invent. It's on the sort of last day. He's awesome. This is you know, 10th year of re:Invent. He sort of did a look back. He started out (chuckles) he's just a cool guy and very passionate. But talk about what your role was in the keynote. >> Yeah so I had a section towards the end of the keynote, and I was to talk about Liberty Mutual's serverless first journey. I actually went through from 2014 through to the current day of all the major Cloud milestones that we've hit. And I talked through some of the impact it's had on our business and the impact it's had on our developers. And yeah it's just been this incredible journey where as I said, it was hard at the start. So we had to spark this culture within our company that we were going to empower and enable our developers and we were going to get them excited about doing this. And that's why we needed to make it safe. So there was a lot of work went down at the start to make the Cloud safe for our developers to experiment. And then the past two years have been known that it's safe, okay? Let's see what it can do. Let's go. >> Yeah so Liberty Mutual has been around many many years, Boston-based, you know, East Coast-based, my home city. I don't live in Boston but I consider it my city. And so talk about your business a little bit because you're an established company. I don't know, probably a hundred years old, right? Any all other newbies nipping at your business, right? Coming in with low-cost products. Maybe not bringing as much protection as you dig into it. But regardless, you've got to compete with them technically. So what are some of the drivers in your business and how are you using the Cloud to sort of defend your turf and grow? >> Yeah so first of all, we're 109 years old. (laughing) Yeah. So absolutely, there's an entire insurtech market of people here gunning for the big Liberty Mutual because we've been here for so long. And our whole thing is we're focused on our customers. So we want to be there for people in their time of need. Because at a point in time whenever you need insurance, typically something is going wrong. And that's why we're building innovative solutions like a serverless call center we built, that after natural disaster, it can automatically process claims in less than four minutes. So instead of having to wait on hold for maybe an hour, you can just text or pick up the phone, and four minutes later your claims are through. And that's we're using technology always focused on the customer. >> That's unbelievable. Think about that experience, to me. I mean I've filed claims before and it's, it's kind of time consuming. And you're saying you've compressed that to minutes? Days, weeks, you know, and now you've compressed that to minutes? >> Yeah. >> Tell us more about how you did that. >> And that's because it's a fully serverless solution that was built. So it doesn't require like people to scale. It can scale to whatever number of our customers need to make a claim at that point because that would typically be the bottleneck if there's some kind of natural disaster. So that means that if something happens we can just switch it on. And customers can choose not to use it. You can always choose to say I want to speak to a person. But now with this technology, we can just make it easy and just go. Everything, all the information we know in the back end, we just use it and actually make things better for you. >> You're talking about the impact that it had on your business and developers. So how do you quantify that? Maybe start with the business. Maybe share some ways in which you look at that measure. >> Yeah, so I mean, in terms of how we measure the impact of the Cloud on our business, we're always looking at our profitability and we're always looking, as I say, at our customers. And ideally, I want our Cloud bill to go down as our number of customers goes up because that's why we're using the serverless fast mindset, we call it. We don't want to build anything we don't have to build. We want to take the best that's out there and just piece it together and produce these products for our customers. So yeah, that's having an impact on our business because now developers aren't spending weeks, months, years doing all this configuration. And they can actually sit down with the business and understand how we write insurance. So now we can start being innovative with our products and talking about the real business instead of everything else. >> When you say you want your Cloud bill to go down, you know, it reminds me like in the old days of IT budgeting, right? It was always slash, do more with less cut, cut, cut, right? And it was kind of going in cycles. But with the Cloud a lot of customers that I talk to, they were like, might be going down as a percentage of revenues but actually it might be going up as you launch more projects because they're driving revenue. There's a tighter tie between revenue and Cloud bill. How do you look at that? >> Yeah. So I mean, with every project, you have to look at the worth-based development often and whether or not it's going to hold this away in the market. And the key thing is with the serverless products that are being released now, they cost pennies if they're low scale. So you can actually launch a new product into the market and it maybe only cost you $20 to see if that thing would fit in the market. So by the time you're getting into the big bills you know whether or not you've got a market fit and you can decide whether you want to pivot. >> Oh wow. So you you've compressed, that's another business metric. You've compressed the time to get certainty around product market fit, right? Which is huge because you really can't go to market until you have product market fit (laughing) >> Exactly. You have to be. Thoroughly understand if it's going to work. >> Right because if you go to the market and you've got 50% churn. (laughing) Well, you don't want to be worried about the go-to market. You got to get back to the product so you can test that and you can generate. >> So that's why, yeah, As I said, we have developers who can go out and do discovery and framing on a potential product and deliver it three days later which (chuckles) >> How has the Cloud effected developer satisfaction or passion? I guess it's... I mean we're in AWS Cloud. Our developers, we tell them "Okay, you got to go back on-prem." They would say, "I quit." (laughing) How has it affected their lives? >> Yeah it's completely there for them, it's way better. So now we have way more ownership over any, you know, of everything we ever did. So it feels like you're truly a part of Liberty Mutual and you're solving Liberty's problems now. Because it's not a case of like, "Okay, let's put in a request to stand up a server, it's going to take six months. And then let's do some big long acquisition." It's a case of like, "Let's actually get done into the nitty gritty of what we going to build." And that's- >> How do you use the Cloud developer kit? Maybe you could talk about that. I mean, explain what it is. It's a framework. But explain from your perspective. >> Yeah so the Cloud typically, it started off, and lot of it was done by Cloud infrastructure engineers who created these big YAML files. That's how they defined all the stuff that's going to be deployed. But that's not typically the development language that most developers use. The CDK is in like Java, TypeScript, .NET, Python. The language is developers ready known love. And it means that they can use everything they already know from all of their previous development experience and bring it to the Cloud. And you see some benefits like, you get, I talked about this morning, a 1500 line YAML file was reduced to 14 lines of TypeScript. And that's what we're talking about with the cognitive difference for a developer using CDK versus anything else. >> Cognitive abstraction, >> Right? >> Yeah. And so it just simplifies your living and you spend more time doing cool stuff. >> Yeah we can write an abstraction for our specific needs once. And then everybody can use that abstraction. And if we want to make a change and make it better, everyone benefits instead of everybody doing the same thing all the time. >> So for people who are unfamiliar, what do you need? You need an AWS account, obviously. You got to get a command-line interface, I would imagine. maybe some Node.js often running, or is it- >> Yeah. So that's it. You need an AWS account, and then you need to install CDK, which is from Node Package Manager. And then from there, it depends on which way you want to start. You could use my project CDK patterns, has a whole ray of working patterns that you can clone among commands. You just have to type, like one command you've got a pattern, and then CDK deploy. And you'll have something working. >> Okay so what do you do day-to-day? You sort of, you evangelize folks to come in and get trained? Is there just like a backlog of people that want your time? How do you manage that? >> So I try to be the place that I'm needed the most based on impact of the business. And that's why I try to go in. Liberty split up into different areas and I try to go into those areas, understand where they are versus where they need to be. And then if I can do that across everywhere, you can see the common thesis. And then I can see where I can have the most impact across the board instead of focusing on one micro place. So there's a variety of tools and techniques that I would do, you know, to go through that but that's the crux of it. >> So you look at your business across the portfolio, so you have portfolio view. And then you do a gap analysis essentially, say "Okay, where can I approach this framework and technology from a developer standpoint, add value? >> Yeah like I could go into every single team with every single project, draw it all out and like, what we call Wardley map, and then you can draw a line and then say "Everything blue in this line is undifferentiated, heavy-lifted. I want you to migrate that. And here's how you're going to do it I've already built the tools for that." And that's how we can drive those conversations. >> So, you know, it's funny, I spent a lot of time in the insurance business not in the business but consulting with heads of application development and looking at portfolios. And you know, they did their thing. But you know, a lot of people sort of question, "Can developers in an insurance company actually become cool Cloud native developers?" You're doing it, right? So that's going to be an amazing transformation for your colleagues and your industry. And it's happening as we look around here (indistinct) >> And that's the thing, in Liberty I'm not the only one. So there's Tommy Gloklin, he's an AWS hero, and there's Diali Mikan, who's an AWS hero. And Diali is in Workgrid but we're still all the same family. >> So what does it mean to be an AWS hero? >> Yeah so this is something that AWS has to offer you to join. So basically, it's about impacting the community. It's not... There's not like a checklist of items you can go through and you're hero. It's you have to be nominated internally through AWS, and then you have to have the right intentions. And yeah, just follow through. >> Dave: That's awesome. Yeah so our producer, Lynette, is looking for an Irish limerick. You know, every, say I'm half Irish is through my marriage. Dad, you didn't know that, did you? And every year we have a St Patrick's Day party and my daughter comes up with limericks. So I don't know, if you have one that you want to share. If you don't, that's fine. >> I have no limericks for now. I'm so sorry. (laughing) >> There once was a producer from, where are you from? (laughing) So where do you want to take this, Matt? What's your future look like with this program? >> So right now, today, I actually launched a book called the CDK book. >> Dave: Really? Awesome. >> Yeah So me and three other heroes got together and put everything we know about CDK and distilled it into one book. But the... I mean there's two sides, there's inside Liberty. The goal as I've mentioned is to get our developers to the point that they're talking about real insurance problems rather than tech. And then outside Liberty in the community the goal is things like CDK Day, which is a global conference that I created and run. And I want to just grow those farther and farther throughout the world so that eventually we can start learning you know, cross business, cross market, cross the main instead of just internally one company. >> It's impressive how tuned in you are to the business. Do you feel like the Cloud almost forces that alignment? >> It does. It definitely does. Because when you move quickly, you need to understand what you're doing. You can't bluff almost, you know. Like everything you're building you're demonstrating that every two weeks or faster. So you need to know the business to do it. >> Well, Matt, congratulations on all the great work that you've done and the keynote this morning. You know, true tech hero. We really appreciate your time coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, for having me. >> Our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE at AWS re:Invent. We are the leader global tech coverage. We'll be right back. (light upbeat music)

>> Welcome back everyone. CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services, reinvent 2021. In person event on the floor, back in business, theCUBE. Two live sets pumping out content left and right. Three and a half days of wall to wall overage, over 120 interviews, stream 28 hours literally on the main site as well as on the CUBE zone. Go to CUBEreinvent.com to get all the action, all the videos will be there. Of course theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Nicholson my cohost this week and Sarbjeet Johal cloud strategist, influencer, all around great guy, CUBE alumni, here to break down reinvent in context to the cloud industry. Sarbjeet, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you guys in person finally. >> I'm so excited. I did all these interviews the past two years in person and I've been remote, now were in person, great to do it, everyone's excited. 27,000 people here at reinvent. Stand in line for classes. By the way, they're not offering these classes online, only the leadership classes and the keynote. If you're not here, you're not getting the classes. >> I like the vibe actually. I thought it would be more subdued but it is better than what I thought and energy is here. It's not like 2019, it's not. >> That's 60,000 people, you couldn't even get through the hallway. Any company would love to have 27,000 people but I got to say, this year we were just talking earlier on the segment this morning, I wanted to get your thoughts on this, you go back 15 years ago when AWS rolled out, you have EC2, S3, SQS, you had to roll your own. Basically your alternative was better than building a data center or hosting on a colo. So great, check, you don't have to buy the technology tax. I think you had to fill in the glue layers, you had to kind of roll your own and build it up. Now everyone is scaling up and next gen cloud is a completely different architecture. You got serverless, you got all the glue layers pretty much there, and you can still add stuff on it, so a completely different mindset. Changing the startup speed game. Changing the enterprise. Looking pretty good. What's your reaction to the new architecture in cloud vis a vis where it came from? >> My reaction to the new architecture is that number one it's just new. We change stuff all the time in software stacks and what I was grasping within myself sitting in my hotel in the morning listening to Warner's keynote was that we have started to accumulate the technology debt even in cloud. We cooked up some some stuff with the scripts and we automated stuff with programing, language of your choice, or CLIs. Then became the cloud formation automation, orchestration of your cloud stack, if you will. Then Hashicorp are like, so Hashicorp are sitting on the side there. But now there's another abstraction layer on top of that which was announced during Warner's keynote today. I think the new abstraction layers leave the pervious architectures a little stale. It's always like, what should you do? Should you refactor your existing stacks or should you not touch that? Just go from now on on the new architecture? I think it's getting busy, complicated, a lot of number of services. >> What do you think other people are saying? I saw you did a little snippet with Dion Hinchcliffe online, nice Tweet there, you got a big video coming out. As you talk to other folks and influencers and people in the front lines, what are they saying about Amazon Reinvent this year? >> I think almost everybody's saying that number of services is expanding exponentially. I was thinking that 200 plus number of services or whatever that number is today, it's mind boggling. I totally understand that when you have two teams that they want to take the credit for creating a new service and they want to publish it. They want to do a press release and all that. But my request to all cloud providers, mainly three, is to not call everything a new service. Call that feature of a service. So number of services has to be reduced, collapsed if you will. We need umbrella services and then under that there should be features of services, that's one thing. Another feedback I got from some second tier partners is that they have the competency program for partners. They announced that. They had that earlier but new competencies. It leaves the second or third tier partners in the cold. Only the first tier partners can get those competencies because for that they have to send a lot of money, train people, then they get that check box, oh, you can do this. >> This whole services thing and what you call a service, if you called everything a service a new feature of DNS or a new thing here and there, serverless, there's be thousands of features, services. I think Amazon, I think they culled it down to like, 200, is the number we hear. >> But isn't that part of the role of the partner, the services provider, the consultancy, to act as a bridge between all of those services and features, whatever you want to call them and figuring out exactly what the end user customer actually needs? The idea that AWS is messaging here is targeted directly towards end user customers. There's a lot to be desired there because how do you translate that? I'm thinking, compare and contrast that with the Steve Jobs approach of there shall be three. There will be a large, a medium and a small. I know that this is more complex, but when you come out and you say, 475 different kinds of instances, you're leaving that to your partners to translate. To your point, if you're segregating those partners into categories where only a top tier has access to everything, interesting place to be. >> A couple of discussions I had with partners was that I actually suggested them to create a bank of reference architectures, we call that in Amazon terms. But it's not only technical side of things, but business as well. They need to create some principle based architectures and have a bank of that and then prescribe that to their customers base. I think that's the only way to simplify these things because as you said, if you have 200 different types of instances, for instance, (laughs), it is hard. It is really hard. >> I want to get your thoughts, we talk about this on Twitter all the time so the folks watching, if you want to follow our rants and raves on Twitter, follow us on Twitter you'll get all the action, all the influencers are there. Competition. I've been ranting all week and been saying it for a long time, Microsoft's not even close to Amazon. I'm a bit over the top but I'll just say that if Amazon goes unchecked, Microsoft's ecosystem's going to get decimated. Why would I want to run software, my software, on a suboptimal performance infrastructure? Microsoft had Windows back in the day and had the system software and the application suite but they encouraged developers to build on top of Windows. Their "dot net" or ecosystem. That game's over. I guess Window's runs on Amazon too, whatever. But now the cloud is the Windows. The cloud is the system software. So developers are running on top of the cloud. >> Yes. >> So who wins? >> I think Open wins. Not Open-source. Open-source and Open are different things, we always discuss that. I think Open wins, the close systems have this problem of protectionism which doesn't work, with our little kids at home or your economy as whole. When you protect your local industry, the economy goes down. I've seen that, I'm an economist by education as you guys know. >> Yes. >> I think it's the same, when you protect too much of whatever you have, I think it's has a worse effect. But there's one narrative, Satya sort of narrates if you will, he says that, hey, when you use Windows, you keep everything, 100%. We are not taking a cut. When you're sitting in a cloud marketplace, somebody's getting a cut. That's the argument. >> Terry Chen said, because he puked on what I said, he said better could win. >> Yes. >> That's one thing. Okay, I buy that. Azure could be better in some use cases. But I think over all Amazon wins hands down currently. Certainly with the custom processors. >> You haven't mentioned GCP. >> Actually GCP. >> What can you say about it? >> What you could say is that AWS right now has either constructed or is benefiting from the highest barrier to entry to any business in the history of our planet. You can look at the investment that GCP is making to the tune of six billion dollars a year to go after market share. Are they going after current market share which is arguably the 20% of IT that's in cloud now? Or are they going for future market share which is a piece of the larger pie? When you talk about who wins, I think it's still possible for- >> Hold on, hold on. >> You left Oracle out. I think it's still possible. >> Hold on, hold on, hold on. >> I can tell you about Oracle. >> Hold on, hold on. This is a thought exercise, I'm going to ask you guys this question. It may be rhetorical, you don't need to answer it. If you went to all the people out there buying Azure and GCP, no offense guys, and you said, "Put aside all your credits you've been given, how much are you actually using?" If you take the incentives away, why are you on those clouds from a performance perspective? >> Sorry to cut you off. We know that Oracle uses incentives, X codes, leads for sale, and all that stuff, we know that. A lot of people know that. So cloud became shelfware there, we know the story. I'm leaving Oracle to the side. But I think Google has legs. Google's cloud has legs. They are a very enduring focus company. They are more open-source friendly and data science friendly as well. I think they are actually a number two, personally I believe. I'm a developer by heart, so they are number two developer cloud after Amazon. >> I think it's well know, I agree with you by the way. I think people may not know this but it's well known in the industry that Amazon has been mostly afraid of Google more than Microsoft. I think now because of this market share, the ecosystem war that's going to happen in a very short period of time, Microsoft's more of a threat on paper. But Google's got more threat to sling shot back and front technically because if you look at Graviton, the stack that they're building for ISVs and developers, Amazon's clearly winning. Google can pull that off. If they get it, they got to have their own way. >> Let me tell you, the one thing actually, if we want to know what was the fumble this time? I have some, actually I will talk about it in my radio, if you have enough time here. I think Google will do better because they're open and Amazon is complex. I was thinking during the keynotes, what are the clues to Amazon, AWS, leaving which is helping Google and Azure, mainly Google. Google is simple actually, a lot simpler to use, but again having said that, there's one thing actually, the new term I'm trying to define is the feature proximity. Amazon has feature proximity, like the best. When you are doing one thing and you want to do another thing, they have that all right there. They're ahead of the game. They have their 5G, private 5G on all their stuff, it's very futuristic. >> By the way, I got Amazon to agree to get me some private 5G for when we go back home. We're going to setup an outdoor area for some open CUBE action with some 5G. >> Actually we could put that on a nice van with the logos and all that. We could move around. >> We'll park it right there on El Camino, right next to Stanford University. Maybe we could live in one of those things too. >> Make it a taco truck and I'll join you guys. >> (laughs) Taco truck for free food. >> Yeah, let's do that. >> All seriousness guys, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up this segment on the analysis of the cloud industry. What do you guys think, your opinion, it's going to take, I'll start by saying I think Amazon, if not contested for their leadership in the performance of silicon and the stack for software developers and owners to run the fastest they can run away with this. I think Microsoft and Google better be cranking right now to make it easy and have silicon advantage as well. I think clearly if the ecosystem's going to be at play, because the shift is happening to modernize software development, low code, no code, every shift everyone will go to the best performance, independent of cost and incentives. Amazon's got lower cost too so they got the fly wheel going. >> I can make mine short. I think GCP can also be successful. But I think already the amount of momentum that AWS has, the wind behind it's sails, I was at EMC for many years and we used to joke about our arch nemesis Hitachi Data Systems and saying that they were quite discouraged every morning as they woke up learning that they were a year further behind. Every night they went to sleep. They woke up the next day and they were a year further behind. Watching the announcements coming out of this event this week, I think there are some people at GCP and Microsoft and others who have that sense. But having said that, we're at the dawn of at era of cloud. There's plenty of room for a lot of players. When you give us your thoughts, I'd like your answer to the question, how much are consumers in the driver's seat today? Will the customers be able to demand multi sourcing? >> I think customers, you work with your money. Customers can demand that but at the same time customers can get stuck in a platform and they can't get out. We usually talk about when to lock in. There's one thing that Amazon keeps saying that we are open, we are open and the other vendors are like, these brands. I think that kind of narrative can come bite back to them. It's not a good thing to say. You don't want to be cocky about your features or you are the best and all that stuff. I think you want to stay humble and respect the other guys as well because they are coming right behind you. I think the key is developers. I have the bias towards developers because I was a developers but I totally believe deep down, actually I have tried to put my developer hat off and still think that way about these constructs. Developers are the people who call the shots. If you are not developer friendly you can't do much. >> That's a good point. >> That's my warning to Amazon. Don't go away from developers. You are number one developer cloud, stay there. This refocus is good, but put that to the side, not make that front center. Google has made that front center, I think that's a mistake. >> Yeah, you have the features, the right features, but again, speed, performance. Developers, capture the opportunity. Developers want to move fast. That's the entrepreneurship. Sarbjeet, great to have you on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me here, I enjoyed it. Great set here. >> All right, Dave Nicholson's here. Dave Nicholson, CUBE host. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE, the world leader in technology coverage. We'll be back with more live coverage from Reinvent after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're wrapping up four days of coverage, two sets. Two remote sets, one in Boston, one in Palo Alto. And really, it's a pleasure to introduce Benoit Dageville. He's the Press Co-founder of Snowflake and President of Products. Benoit, thanks for taking some time out and coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you for having me, Dave. >> You know, it's really a pleasure. We've been watching Snowflake since, maybe not 2012, but mid last decade you hit our radar. We said, "Wow, this company is going to go places." And yeah, we made that call correctly. But it's been a pleasure to sort of follow you. We've talked a little bit remotely. I kind of want to go back to some of the fundamentals. First of all, I wanted mention your earnings last night. If you guys didn't see it, again, triple digit growth, $1.8 billion RPO, cashflow actually looking pretty good. So, pretty amazing. Oh, and 173% NRR, you know, wow. And Mike Scarpelli is kind of bummed that you did so well. And I know why, right? Because it's going to be at some point, and he dials it down for the expectations and Wall Street says, "Oh, he's sandbagging." And then at some point you're actually going to meet expectations and people are going to go, "Oh, they met expectations." But anyway, he's a smart guy, he know what he's doing. (Benoit laughing) I loved it, it was so funny listening to him last night. But anyway, I want to go back to, when I talked to practitioners about data warehousing pre-cloud, they would say sound bites like, it's like a snake swallowing a basketball, they would tell me. And the other thing they said, "We just chased the chips. Every time a new Intel chip comes out, we have to bring in new servers, and we're struggling." The cloud changed all that. Your vision and Terry's vision changed all that. Maybe go back to the fundamentals of what you saw. >> Yeah, we really wanted to address what we call the data challenges. And if you remember at that time, data challenge was first of the volume of data, machine-generated data. So it was way more than just structured data, right? Machine-generated data is weblogs, and it's at petabyte scale. And there was no good solution for that type of data. Big data was not a great solution, Hadoop was really bad. And there was no good solution for that. So we thought we should do something for big data. The other aspect was concurrency, right? Everyone wants to use these data analytic platform in an enterprise, right? And you have more and more workload running against the same data, and the systems that were built were not scaling for these workloads. So you had to silo data, right? That's the only way big enterprise could deal with that, is to create many different silos, Oracle, Teradata, data mass, you would hear data mass. All of it was to afloat, right, this data? And then there was the, what do we call, data sharing. How to get access to data which is not born inside the enterprise, right? So with Terry, we wanted to solve all these challenges and we thought the only way to solve it was the cloud. And the cloud has really two free aspects. One is the elasticity, for all of a sudden, you can run every workload that you want concurrently, in parallel, on different computer resources, and you can run them against the same data. So this is kind of the data lake model, if you want. At the same time, you can, in the cloud, create a service. So you can remove complexity from users and make it really easy for new workloads to be added to the system, because you can manage, you can create a managed service, where all the sudden our customers, they don't need to manage infrastructure, they don't need to patch, they don't need to tune. Everything is done by Snowflake, the service, and they can just load in and run their query. And the third aspect is really collaboration. Is how to connect data sets together. And that's almost a new product for Snowflake, this data sharing. So we really at Snowflake was all about combining big data and data warehouse in one system in the cloud, and have only one single system where you can put all your data and all your workload. >> So you weren't necessarily trying to solve the data warehouse problem, you were trying to solve a data problem. And then it just so happened data warehouse was a logical entry point for you. >> It's really not that. Yes, we wanted to solve the data problem. And for us big data was a really important problem to solve. So from day one, Snowflake was all about machine generated data, petabyte scale, but we wanted to do it right. And for us, right was not compromising on data warehouse principle, which is a CDT of transaction, which is really fast response time, and which is also simplicity. So as I said, we wanted to solve kind of all the problems at the time of volume of data, concurrency, and these sharing aspects. >> This was 2012. You knew at that time that Hadoop wasn't going to be the answer. >> No, I mean, we were really, I mean, everyone knew that. Everyone knew Hadoop was really bad. You know, complex to manage, really slow. It had good aspects, right? This was the only system that could manage petabyte scale data sets. That's the only thing- >> Cheaply. >> Yeah, and cheaply which was good. And we wanted really to do that, plus have all the good attributes of data warehouse system. And at the same time, we wanted to build a system where if you are data warehouse customer, if you are coming from Teradata, you can migrate to Snowflake and you will get to a system which is faster than what you had on-premise, right. That's why it's pretty cool. So we wanted to do big data without compromising on data warehouse. >> So several years ago we looked at the hyperscalers and said, "Wow, last year they spent $100 billion in CapEx." And so, we started to think about this abstraction layer. And then we saw what you guys announced with the data cloud. We call it super clouds. And we see that as exactly what you're building. So that's clearly not just a data warehouse or database, it's technology that really hides the underlying complexity of all those clouds, and it allows you to have federated governance and data sharing, all those things. Can you talk about sort of how you think about that architecture? >> So for me, what I say is that really Snowflake is the worldwide web of data. And we are indeed a super cloud, or we are super-posed to the infrastructure cloud, which is our friends at Amazon, and of course, Azure, I mean, Microsoft and Google. And as any cloud, we have regions, Snowflake regions all over the world, and located on different cloud providers. At the same time, our platform is global in the sense that every region interconnects with all the other regions, this is our snow grid and data mesh, if you want. So that as an organization you can have your presence on several Snowflake region. It doesn't matter which cloud provider, so you can mix AWS with Azure. You can use our cloud like that. And indeed you can, this is a cloud where you can store your data, that's the thing that really matters, and data is structured, but it's machine structure, as I say, machine generated, petabyte scale, but there's also unstructured, right? We have added support for images, text, videos, where you can process this data in our system, and that's the workload spout. And workload, what is very important is that you can run this workload, any number of workloads. So the number of workloads is effectively unlimited with Snowflake because each workload can have its dedicated set of compute resources all operating on the same data set. And the type of workloads is also very important. It's not only about dashboards and data warehouse, it's data engineering, it's data science, it's building application. We have many of our customers who are building full-scale cloud applications on top of Snowflake. >> Yeah so the other thing, if you're not familiar with Snowflake, I don't know, maybe your head has been in the sand for a while, but separating compute and storage, I don't know if you were the first, but you were certainly the first to popularize it. And that allowed you to solve that chasing the chips problem and the swallowing the basketball, right? Because you have virtually infinite resources now at your disposal. >> Yeah, this is really the concurrency challenge that I was mentioning. Everyone wants to access the data. And of course, if everyone runs on the same set of compute resources, you have a bottleneck. So Snowflake was really about this multi-workload. We call it Multi-Cluster Shared Data Architecture. But it's not difficult to run multiple cluster if you don't have consistency of data. So how to do that while maintaining transactional property of data as CDT, right? You cannot modify data from different clusters. And when you commit, every other cluster will immediately see the change, right, as if everyone was running on the same cluster. So that was the challenge that we solve when we started Snowflake. >> Used the term data mesh. What is data mesh to Snowflake? Is it a concept, is it fabric? >> No, it's a very interesting point. As much as we like to centralize data, this becomes a bottleneck, right? When you are a large organization with different independent units, everyone wants to manage their own data and they have domain-specific expertise about that data. So having it centralized in IT is not practical. At the same time, you really want to be able to connect these different data sets together and join different data together, right? So that's the data mesh architecture. Each data set is managed independently by business owners, and then there is a contract which is exposed to others, and you can combine. And Snowflake architectures with data sharing, right. Data sharing that can happen within an organization, or across organization, allows you to connect any data with any other data on our platform. >> Yeah, so when I first heard that term, you guys using the term data mesh, I got very excited because it was kind of the data mesh is, my view, anyway, is going to be the fundamental architecture of this decade and beyond. And the principles, if I understand it correctly, you're applying the principles of Jim Octagon's data mesh within Snowflake. So decentralized data doesn't have to be physically in one place. Logically it's in the data cloud. >> It's logically decentralized, right? It's independently managed, and the reason, right, is the data that you need to use is not produced by your, even if in your company you want to centralize the data and having only one organization, let's say IT managing that, let's say, pretend. Yet you need to connect with other datasets, which is managed by other organizations. So by nature, the data that you use cannot be centralized, right? So now that you have this principle, if you have a platform where you can store all the data, wherever it is, and you can connect these data very seamlessly, then we can use that platform for your enterprise, right? To have different business units independently manage their data sets, connects these together so that as a company you have a 360 view of your customers, for example. But you can expand that outside of your enterprise and connect with data sets, which are from your vertical, for example, financial data set that you don't have in your company, or any public data set. >> And the other key principles, I think, that you've touched on really is the line of business now. Increasingly they're building data products that are creating value, and then also there's a self-service component. Assuming there's the fourth principle, governance. You got to have federated governance. And it seems like you've kind of ticked the boxes, more than tick the boxes, but engineered a solution to solve for those. >> No, it's very true. So Snowflake was really built to be really simple to use. And you're right. Our vision was, it would be more than IT, right? Who is going to use Snowflake is going now to be business unit, because you do not have to manage infrastructure. You do not have to patch. You do not have to do these things that business cannot do. You just have to load your data and run your queries, and run your applications. So now business can directly use Snowflake and create value from that. And yes, you're right, then connect that data with other data sets and to get maximum insights. >> Can you please talk about some of the things you do with AWS here at the event. I'm interested in what you're doing with your machine learning initiatives that you've recently announced, the AI piece. >> Yes, so one key aspects is data is not only about SQL, right? We started with SQL, but we expanded our platform to what we call data programmability, which is really about running program at scale across a large volume of data. And this was made popular with a programming model which was introduced by Pendal, DataFrames. Later taken by Spark, and now we have DataFrames in Snowflake, Where we are different than other systems, is that these DataFrame programs, which are in Python, or Java, or Scala, you program with data. These DataFrames are compiled to our single execution platforms. So we have one single execution platform, which is a data flow execution platform, which can run both SQL very efficiently, as I said, data warehouse speed, and also these very complex programs running Python and Java against this data. And this is a single platform. You don't need to use two different systems. >> Now so, you kind of really attack the traditional analytics base. People said, "Wow, Snowflake's really easy." Now you're injecting AI and machine intelligence. I see Databricks coming at it from the other angle. They started with machine learning, now they're sort of going after the analytics. Does there need to be a semantic layer to connect, 'cause it's the same raw data. Does there need to be a semantic layer to connect those two worlds? >> Yes, and that's what we are doing in our platform. And that's very novel to Snowflake. As I said, you interact with data in different program. You pick your program. You are a SQL programmer, use SQL. You are a Python programmer, use DataFrames with Python. It doesn't really matter. And then the semantic layer is our compiler and our processing engine, is going to translate both your program and my program in Python, your program in SQL, to the same execution platform and to the same programming language that Snowflake internally, we don't expose our programming language, but it's a data flow programming language that our execution platform executes. So at the end, we might execute exactly the same program, potentially. And that's very important because we spent all our IP and all our time, engineering time to optimize this platform, to make it the fastest platform. And we want to use that platform for any type of workloads, whether it's data programs or SQL. >> Now, you and Terry were at Oracle, so you know a lot about bench marketing. As Larry would stand up and say, "We killed the competition." You guys are probably behind it, right. So you know all about that. >> We are very behind it. >> So you know a lot about that. I've had some experience, I'm not a technologist, but I'm an observer and analyst. You have to take benchmarking with a very big grain of salt. So you guys have generally stayed away from that. Databricks came out and they came up with all these benchmarks. So you had to respond, because otherwise it's out there. Now you reran the benchmarks, you took out the materialized views and all the expensive stuff that they included in your cost, your price performance, but then you wrote, I thought, a very cogent blog. Maybe you could talk about sort of why you did that and your general philosophy around bench marketing. >> Yeah, from day one, with Terry we say never again we will participate in this really stupid benchmark war, because it's really not in the interest of customers. And we have been really at the frontline of that war with Terry, both of us, really doing special tricks, right? And optimizing this query to death, this query that no one runs apart from the synthetic benchmark. We optimize them to death to have the best number when we were at Oracle. And we decided that this is really not helping customers in the end. So we said, with Snowflake, we'll not do that. And actually, we are not the only one not to do that. If you look at who has published TPC-DS, you will see no one, none of the big vendors. It's not because they cannot run TPC-DS, Oracle can run it, I know that. And all the other big data warehouse vendor can, but it's something of a little bit of past. And TPC was really important at some point, and is not really relevant now. So we are not going to compete. And that's what we said is basically now our blog. We are not interesting in participating in this war. We want to invest our engineering effort and our IP in solving real world issues and performance issues that we have. And we want to improve our engine for these real world customers. And the nice thing with Snowflake, because it's a service, we see exactly all the queries that our customers are executing. So we know where we are struggling as a system, and that's where we want to invest and we want to improve. And if you look at many announcements that we made, it's all about under-the-cover improving Snowflake and getting the benefit of this improvement to our customer. So that was the message of that blog. And yes, the message was okay. Mr. Databricks, it's nice, and it's perfect that, I mean, everyone makes a decision, right? We made the decision not to participate. Databricks made another decision, which is very fine, and that's fine that they publish their number on their system. Where it is not fine is that they published number using Snowflake and misrepresenting our performance. And that's what we wanted also to correct. >> Yeah, well, thank you for going into that. I know it's, look, leaders don't necessarily have to get involved in that mudslide. (crosstalk) Enough said about that, so that's cool. I want to ask you, I interviewed Frank last spring, right after the lockdown, he was kind enough to come on virtually, and I asked him about on-prem. And he was, you know Frank, he doesn't mix words, He said, "We're not getting into a halfway house. That's not going to happen." And of course, you really can't do what you do on-prem. You can't separate compute, some have tried, but it's not the same. But at the same time that you see like Andreessen comes out with this blog that says a huge portion of your cost of goods sold is going to be the cloud, so you're going to have to repatriate. Help me square that circle. Is it cloud forever? Is it will you never say never? What can you share of that? >> I will never say never, it's not my style. I always say you can always change your mind, and maybe different factors can change your mind. What was true at some point might not be true at a later point. But as of now, I don't see any reason for us to go on-premise. As you mentioned at the beginning, right, Snowflake is growing like crazy. The world is moving to the cloud. I think maybe it goes both ways, but I would say 90% or 99% of the world is moving to the cloud. Maybe 1% is coming back for some very specific reasons. I don't think that the world is going to move back on-premise. So in the end we might miss a small percentage of the workload that will stay on-premise and that's okay. >> And as well, if you dig into some of the financial statements you'll see, read the notes where you've renegotiated, right? We're talking big numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of cost reduction, actually more, over a 10 year period. Billions of your cloud bills. So the cloud suppliers, they don't want to lose you as a customer, right? You're one of their biggest customer. So it's awesome. Last question is kind of, your work now is to really drive the data cloud, get adoption up, build that supercloud, we call it. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see the future. >> The future is really broadened, the scope of Snowflake, and really, I would say the marketplace, and data sharing, and services, which are directly built natively on Snowflake and are shared through our platform, and can operate, it can mix data on provider-side with data on consumer-side, and creating this collaboration within the Snowflake data cloud, I think is really the future. And we are really only scratching the surface of that. And you can see the enthusiasm of Snowflake data cloud and vertical industry We have nuanced the final show data cloud. Industry, complete vertical industry, latching on that concept and collaborating via Snowflake, which was not possible before. And I think you talked about machine learning, for example. Machine learning, collaboration through machine learning, the ones who are building this advanced model might not be the same as the one who are consuming this model, right? It might be this collaboration between expertise and consumer of that expertise. So we are really at the beginning of this interconnected world. And to me the world wide web of data that we are creating is really going to be amazing. And it's all about connecting. >> And I'm glad you mentioned the ecosystem. I didn't give enough attention to that. Because as a cloud provider, which essentially you are, you've got to have a strong ecosystem. That's a hallmark of cloud. And then the other, vertical, that we didn't touch on, is media and entertainment. A lot of direct-to-consumer. I think healthcare is going to be a huge vertical for you guys. All right we got to go, Terry. Thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." I really appreciate you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> And thank you for watching. This a wrap from AWS re:Invent 2021. "theCUBE," the leader in global tech coverage. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah. Okay. Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Coverage of reinvent 20 twenty-one Jon, your host of the Cube. We're here. Live in person for a real event. It's a hybrid event is a live stream of action to cube sets here, wall to wall coverage dot com. And, of course, you don't need to check the coverage out. And Amazon has got their own live event site. Go check out all the action. Stewart, See two of Micro Focus, the company That was part of the big announcement involving the mainframe modernization that Adam announced on stage and his first keynote CEO. And under the covers Micro Focus powering a lot of that functionality. Stuart, thanks for coming on. The break it down with >>Thanks. >>So what does the announcement? I mean that that Adam gave the i b. M. I mean the mainframe announcement that I've known for the main frame, but he had the mainframe modernization program. What's that all about? >>I think I'd like to think of this is the next evolution of the main frame for those customers that have been running on the main thing for 40 years. They had their business on it. Where do they go next? What does the future? What does the future hold? And this is all part of the announcement yesterday is this is the journey that many, many customers are going to decide to go on. >>So it's all about the relationship between A. W S and micro Focus. Obviously, Um, yeah. I was talking about migration for the Oracle, and a lot of our customers have these main friends that are in the classic data centers. And he told me personally when I interviewed him that the main part of that data center mindset that people are chipping away at now they want to move them out and keep some functionality, but for the most part, migrated out eventually. Yeah, This is where you guys are involved. Take us through why that's important. >>I think it's the next level of agility that it is actually delivered for many customers. They need to move a hell of a lot faster than they currently are. Let's face it, the world is changing at pace. The applications support these customers need to also a change of pace. What a W s does give this market and momentum which is, Where do we go next? Where do we take customers where workloads have been running the business? Where? How are they going to run the business in five years time? How they're gonna run their business in 10. >>Well, congratulations on microphone. Big part of the announcement. Specifically explained to me, Micro focuses role in the announcement with a W S. What's the relationship? >>I think they're too old to call it out. Actually, we've been working with A W S for many, many years. This isn't something that radically new. We've been engaging with them for literally 10 years, at least. But the key elements Microphone provides technology That's an enabler to facilitate delivering the service as well as the competency partner to help customers actually accelerate their journey to take advantage of it. >>So we're bundling micro focus into that capability. Is it software that you guys have? What's going on the covers? >>I think it's software. It's capability. It's expertise. It's everything that a customer might need to help and be successful. Our job is to a W S H A W s job to make sure the customer is absolutely satisfied. >>Give me an example of a customer mainframe. I'm a bank. I've been using the main frame and just squeaked Time to get my back up before I turned the light in the morning. It's just working. It's coming. It's pumping it all cylinders, my cobalt program or just quit. What do I do? How do you help me? >>Well, I think there are two reasons why you can give us a call Is number one? Yeah, You need to move your business of pace. So what's going to run your business going forward? So you need to understand your applications. Number two, the cost profile of your existing infrastructure is going to be incredibly expensive. So what you wanna do is essentially make the change accelerate the change delivered at a much lower cost. >>So it looks like the application. So the software Okay, what's the app? And then create a replica of digital twin? I'm just trying to visualized. Now I see what you mean. What happens because, I mean, you know what? That is A big deal with that animal for a long time. What happens next is a container eyes. That application, >>the customer determines how far they want to go if they would like the application to run in the cloud exactly as is so it supports their customers exactly as they expect today. We can do that. On the other hand, if they need to enhance the experience for their customers if they need to take it into a completely different environment. If they do want to contain, arise if they want to take it into new levels of service. If they do want to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, then again they can determine the journey. Micro focus is that essentially support them. Do that first step, which is get the applications ready to be delivered into cloud as fast as possible. >>Congratulations. Relationship. I guess I've got to ask you a question. Which on my mind is that Okay? It's the death of the mainframe. Long live the mainframe. You know the expression, uh, mainframe dying. I'm gonna hang around for a while. The dinosaurs are out there. >>I think it is. We like to position there is an evolution. We don't think the main friends gonna die. There will be customers who want to stay there, and we respect their choices. But on the other hand, this is a way to truly accelerate the future of mainstream applications. >>You know, student, I talked to a lot of success and C E O. S. And they tell me the same thing when they moved into the cloud. White hardcore is pretty much the main or critical laps to get the edges first moved into the cloud. And then they come and they start chipping away at the main, the main core and then slowly move it out because they don't want to get in there and disrupt so disruptions. A huge concerns. How does this new, um, modernization Tranz, uh, migration program for the mainframe ensure that disruption doesn't happen? What? I'm sure that's on their mind >>as well. I think what you're describing is what's the cut over when you're running on the main street today? You wanna run on the main from tomorrow, You know, if that's the case, or do you want to run the main from today and you want to run the cloud tomorrow? Essentially, the cut over is the same. The process is fairly separate from the mainframe itself. You obviously bringing applications off. We're getting them ready to go tested, you know, regulated. So it's been approved securities all in place, and then essentially, it's literally a switch cut. We literally have customers that turn off the main frame and, you know, they're already running in the cloud, and then we don't even have some that photographs of them shipping mainframe out the door. >>So I've got to ask, Is there a party at that point? You know, some people do >>that. It's certainly true. Remember that people are also going along for this journey, and they're not, You know, it's a big moment for them. >>You know, I hate the sound of today's my birthday. So I have to say this, Um, I remember when I was breaking into the business in my twenties. I never I never program punch cards, But remember pointing at the mainstream guys are seeing those old relics. I guess that's what I would be today. But the young guns coming into the industry, they want containers. They want micro services. They want cloud and see what's going on here. I mean, some really cool stuff happening. >>Uh, they want to take advantage of all the stuff that is there and every single announcement has been made today and yesterday on the days ahead. All of those great capabilities if you can get them into the core of your business. And so the key is to actually take us running your business today, enhance it and improve it and take it forward. I >>think I think the key points great insight on your part about this cut over because people know what that means. It's a project plan. Cut it over, get set up. And I think that's the hard part. How hard is that? On the cloud side, In terms of staging, can you share some timetables with me? Just kind of Give me a feel for order of magnitude Mainframe. Assuming, pumping it snap I'm using. I really can't shut it down, but I want to put it on. How much time to prepare to get into the cloud? Um, roughly just order of magnitude. Most >>customers, they tend to face these things they're not trying to. If you're a really big bank, you are not gonna do that overnight. That isn't gonna come as a surprise. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna take it in chunks and typically 12 to 15 months, which is the biggest step of the journey, which is going from mainframe to cloud. The next generation is going to be modernizing those applications, and it's going to be much short timeframes. Then you're getting into months, weeks, days >>after that. Is there any category that you see that are more susceptible to migration? You mentioned banks. I know some banks that they will never going to touch the mainstream because it's just so critical that the migration longer is there. Other areas of your insurance is a big market mainframe. Is the verticals that kind of like a more converting than others? >>Well, yes. But actually, I take it back. One of the reasons are these applications absolutely critical to these businesses. If they are, that's the reason why they're still running where they are, because they're really truly valuable. They are the business, so you're you're taking the business into new framework. So in that context actually tends to be financial services insurance, as you say, but also government, For example, the federal government, state and local as well as you move into retail. And it's surprising how often as you go into some of the other verticals where some of these mainframe applications are still existing. >>I hate to ask a question, because I don't know. So I want to ask, Um, and you can see it's a dumb question. If you think it is. Just tell me, Are there still cobalt programmers out there? >>There are to be clear. Actually, it's not a problem. You can train a new guy and literally weeks. If the issue is, yeah, actually use the mainstream itself, the mainstream experience about how it works as getting rarer. And so the key element is, how can how can you take the new young guns, give them, give them the application and see what they can do? This is a mechanism to do that. >>Great, Great announcement. Congratulations. I was really impressed at the moment. I'm actually surprised to see Adam kind of focus on that. But again, in the spirit of the traditional, uh, reinvent jazzy before Adam and he did the same thing with Oracle and all the other kind of big the legacy old guard they call them Technologies maintains one. You guys are part of that. So congratulations. Final word. Your take on the event so far. What's been the feedback on the announcement? Share some color commentary on what the feedback for you guys >>were. Actually, since the announcement, we've had some great customer conversations. I mean, there are a lot of businesses that really do want to make this change. We're kind of there to help them. And that's really the next step, which is what needs to happen to make that a reality. >>Amazon may not like me saying it, but I think there's some cases where you keep them in there and you don't touch. It works there. You keep it unless you wanna move. But if you want to move it, people, sometimes we want to move faster. And just there >>even a W s respects customer choice. The purpose is to meet the demand for the customer. And if the customer to sounds great, if they want to move off, we're there to help >>with the mainframe. Long live the main friends. The Cube coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John. I love the mainframe Thirty-seven terminal. When I worked at the back in the eighties getting myself, um, thanks for coming in. And I appreciate it. Okay. Coverage here in Las Vegas. The Cube. You're watching the leader in global tech event coverage? I'm your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, mhm, yeah.

>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we're running an incredible event this year. One of the most important technology events. It's a hybrid event with two live stages. Two sets here in Las Vegas. Two studios we've interviewed more than a hundred guests and two distinguished guests that I have here from emphasis today have joined us. Thank you very much. Uh, Mr., who's the executive vice president of Infosys cobalt. And we'll talk about what that is exactly in a moment along with David Wilson, Wilson, I'm sorry, senior vice president and head of global alliances in the partner ecosystem for Infosys gentlemen. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. So let's cut right to the chase cobalt. And when you tell your family that you're executive vice-president of cobalt, do they just smile and immediately nod? Like they know what it is? Absolutely. >>In fact, uh, in fact it is so exciting for us, uh, what we did at Infosys, just to define cobalt in one sentence, it is a set of services, solutions, and products that we are bringing together to solve, you know, accelerate our customer's journey or what we call as the customer's digital journey. So in slough, everybody talking about Kala cloud in a different way, with different narratives, different value proposition we had in forces. And by the way, we were the first ones in the world to combine all of this and the one brand called cobalt. So that's essentially what cobalt is. So anything and everything that we do in cloud, it's all under this brand called cobalt and that's Infosys cobalt. >>So does, does Infosys cobalt include a combination of bespoke solutions, cheering for people as well as packaged standardized things? How do you, how do you strike a balance because you can't have a one size fits all? Uh, what does that look like? How do you segregate those? >>Yes. Great question. So, so essentially what you are done with a cobalt is a delicate cobalt. In two ways. One is there are customers who want a solutions to solve technology problems. It could be getting out of data centers, it could be migrating workloads to cloud. It could be analytics on cloud ERP on cloud daddy's mainframe modernization, and, you know, getting off mainframes. And at the same time, there are industry verticals like financial services, retail manufacturing, and of course, life sciences, and many more who want to understand what are the business solutions and what are the solutions that we have for solving their business problems. So essentially cobalt is a bespoke solutions. It has products, it has platforms, and we have brought all of this together and we take it to our customers. So essentially these are industry blueprints. These are reference architectures. So we have 250 industry blueprints and around 25,000, that's it that we can actually take to our customers to help their digital journey. >>So, David, I imagine that key to the success of cobalt is, uh, uh, the idea of partnerships, talk about the alliances, uh, uh, that, uh, that you're involved with specifically the way that cobalt interacts with the AWS yes. >>Universe. Absolutely. So the, you know, as we designed our cobalt strategy, the partners are a major component of this. They contribute to it. They're part of the design. And ultimately when we go to the clients with these solutions, these assets, uh, our partners, components are baked right into the solution. In the case of AWS, we've been so successful with it that we recognize this week, uh, as their industry solutions partner of the year. Congratulations. Yeah. So I was joking. We should bring our trophy and put it in between, but we emphasis is invested heavily in developing the, the partner ecosystem, you know, gone are the days where our clients are, uh, putting out an RFP and purchasing individual piece parts, and then, you know, searching at NSI. They're looking for a business outcomes and, uh, uh, emphasis along with our cobalt strategy is able to work with partners like AWS and go there and sell an outcome and accelerate the whole. >>Well, you mentioned RFPs. Uh, what is your, uh, what is your go-to market strategy look like in terms of engaging with those end user clients? Um, is it in partnership with AWS? Is it led by Infosys bringing in AWS where appropriate some mix of the two? What does that look like in this world of cooperation and petition that we're in, >>It's actually a mix of two. So essentially the way we go to market is that there are solutions that Infosys has built on AWS that we will take to our customers. There are solutions that you have built, which are cloud neutral, and those are some things that we take to the customers. And the third one, which is very important is co-creating solutions for our customers along with AWS. So our go to market is a combination of all of them, and that's what makes it exciting. >>So a non-test running cobalt, you're, you're responsible for alliances. You guys are probably in contact a lot with one another. All of these crazy new things are announced at AWS. I'm sure you get a little bit of a preview of it. It's not a complete, it's not a complete surprise when you arrive, but you've gotta be screaming for teams and solutions to leverage some of the coolest stuff within cobalt. How does that, how does that conversation go? >>Yeah, so David David and I work very closely, right? In fact, uh, uh, the way, the way we do things is our go to market cannot be complete without partners. So similarly my strategy and our strategy and global cannot be complete without David. So we actually worked together to identify, in fact, we have been visiting a lot of boots. We got to create, we've gone to a lot of great ideas. We want to see how we can bring them into the cobalt framework and bundle some of that as part of our solutions. So we keep looking at those, we'll look at the announcements that were made and we'll solve, you know, identify many more sales motions that we can take to the, >>So David talk about some of the things you've seen here at re-invent this week that are specifically relevant for cobalt and emphasis customer. >>Well, what's some of the most exciting discussions we've been having is with, uh, not only, uh, AWS themselves about the, the announcements and the way in which we can leverage them, leverage them and go to market. But, uh, AWS has built out their own partner ecosystem, uh, that we then interact with. So we've had some exciting conversations with AWS's ISV partners, their, uh, their other solution providers about how we can bring this together and go to market together. You know, when, when an example, we had a lot of discussions this week was about, uh, how we're doing it, right? The mainframe services, uh, that were announced and how we can support them in building out our industry specific assets. So, you know, taking a kernel of what AWS provides and then wrapping our secret sauce around it, in partnership with other companies and then take into our clients, you know, that's what we're, I, it, the good part is we can quickly go from a discussion to a, go to market, a dialogue with our direct clients who are also here, which have been in real-time having those discussions. >>So emphasis a non has been a trusted advisor for clients predating the Dawn of cloud, if you will. Uh, and I'm sure that certain slices of your revenue don't wanna make this too uncomfortable. A question certain slices of your revenue are still dependent upon all of that. 80% of it. That's still on prem. How do you manage that? You're, you're laser focused on cobalt and you've got alliances. Um, everybody's looking towards the cloud. How do you balance that with the very real needs of Infosys as a business? Aren't you in the same boat as your customers, in terms of transformation? >>Well, you know, I, I would, I'm sorry, >>My eyes go back and forth. See, I told you it was gonna be easy for us to have a conversation. Yeah. Jump into >>W when you, when you look at the different partners out there, we have a discussion about being asset heavy asset light emphasis. Um, we, we grew up through application management, uh, and now as we're seeing these transformations go forward, the last thing we wanted to be is a server huggers. Uh, we're ready to accelerate these transformations as fast as possible. And, uh, you know, partners like AWS are recognizing that, uh, a non steam can go in there and be the disruptor to actually accelerate those transformation. >>Absolutely. In fact, involved when we spoke to some of the AWS executives, uh, we want to be the challenger, right? Because we don't carry any baggage. Uh, we clearly believe, as Gartner says that a cloud is going to be the, for business innovation, and we want to drive innovation and transformation for our customers. So essentially we want to make this relationship with AWS much bigger and better. We want to be the partners with our clients to drive business innovation with industry segments, industry clouds, solutions that drive opening, new markets, building better products and solutions, helping get better customer intimacy and those kinds of things. And so that's essentially what our thought processes with, uh, what we want to do. >>It's been mentioned a few times here that, uh, somewhere around 80 to 85% of it spend is still on premises. It's not in the cloud yet. So despite how large, we all think the AWS AWS universe has become so far, we're really just at the beginning stages. But what are you seeing in terms of clients hesitancy towards cloud at this point, has that changed over the last couple of years? Uh, what are the inhibiting factors that you see? What are the accelerants that you see at this stage of the game? >>Well, in fact, in fact, COVID unfortunately Colbert, uh, while it was all a very bad thing, but it actually helped accelerate customer's journey to cloud. Uh, in fact, uh, the, we have several customers who used to say that, you know, everybody has to come to office to work. Nobody can work remotely because there are security constraints that is, there will be impacted the security posture, but to when we hit March, 2020, and everybody had to work remote, it's the same set of customers who decided to go to cloud and started limited him to part of cloud. So I would say COVID in short has accelerated customers knowledge about cloud. They are no longer worried about security. They're no longer worried about, uh, latency and bandwidth. I think I don't see any major hesitancy at this point of time. Uh, but the trend that we're seeing towards cloud is cloud is going to be used more for innovation. And it's not just going to be about, take my data center and moving to cloud, right? So it's not going to be just those tactical reasons. Uh, and that's exactly what we did. We actually came out with a report, which says, moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity, and it talks about all these facets of what are those strengths that customer should look for. So that's essentially what we use. >>So I imagine cobalt one of the kind of main ideas behind it is to remove friction associated with that move to cloud, to the extent that you can not be reinventing the wheel every single time you're engaging a customer. Is that, is that a fair statement? >>In fact, you know, many customers of ours, in fact, almost all of them are saying, we do not want to reinvent the wheel. So how can you help us? So what we have done as part of cobalt is to bring these reference architectures, right? So for example, if a financial services customer wants to fight fraud, fraud analytics is a reference architecture that we have. Uh, if the telco customer wants to implement 5g, we have a framework and a reference architecture for OSS BSS on cloud. Uh, if there is licenses customer who wants to basically look at drug discovery, we have an architecture for that. So we want to make it more and more in a inference architecture based without reinventing the wheel and bring the best practices from other customers to drive those scenarios. So that's essentially what we do. >>So cobalt underway, you've been recognized for a performance to this point. It's a lot of pressure for 2022. So what are you going to, what do you, what, what, what are you going to slap on the desk in 2022? When we get back together, >>We do plan to up bookends by this time next year, to, to able to pre >>It is perfectly acceptable by the way, to share both the 20, 21 and 2022 award on stage, because we have to make up for 2019 when we weren't here physically. >>But to build off of, with a, knotless saying about the, uh, you know, what's going on in the last 18 to 24 months, you know, we're seeing clients now that we have one that, uh, came to us with a 114 list of products that they bought from various partners, either directly through distributors and such and saying, listen, we no longer want to be in the procurement function. You know, we want to take these hundred and 14 products. We recognize we're going to get it down to 30 or 40 of the key ones, obviously a shifting a lot of that to cloud. And we were able to leverage emphasis cobalt to actually accelerate that and incorporate our partner components to help that shift. So I think next year, I think that will be a major theme that you're seeing clients recognize that the, the way in which they procure and they develop their it platform will be much different. And emphasis with the design we put in place will be in a key position to, to support them at that. Well, >>We recorded this. I'm not sure if you realized we were actually recording this, so we're going to go, we can go back and review this tape next year and we'll see. And I hope to see you then, David, thank you so much for joining us here at the cube and for the cube here in our continuous coverage at AWS reinvent 2021 live in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Nicholson saying stay tuned because there's always more on the cube. And I'd like to remind you that we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here, live at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets today, two, not one, two, two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event, it's a lot, talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners and we are pleased to welcome Walton Smith to the program, the public sector, director of strategic partnerships for Worldwide Technology, Walton welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? >> It's so nice to be in person, I mean I'm glad everybody's being safe and, and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and, and, and work with people cause we can really drive innovation when, when we get together. >> Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that, you getting grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging XYZ to do something? To me that's what makes this conference great. >> Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the, the things that you guys have been working on? >> It's a really exciting time at Worldwide, we're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering, we actually have one in our data center, Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to, to allow our customers to try to work out use cases, to, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works as well as our partners to get their ISV products certified on the outpost platform. >> So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis, is that what you're referring to? >> That's correct. >> Give us a little, give us a little insight into what goes on there, I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. because you are agnostic. >> Walton: Correct. >> You're there to serve the customer, but tell me, tell me what happens in the ATC. >> We say we're agnostic, but we have our, our, our preferences because we know- >> sure, sure, okay. what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel, it's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our, our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller of just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, I can stand up a, a, a Dell, Dell compute next to NetApp storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outpost can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workload, so the training that our FSI, Federal System Integrators have put into their staff or our government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center, so it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. >> In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow say 5% to 10% of their workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to a 100% workforce. So, a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information, because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic, we had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to, to move the country forward. >> Talk about security if you will for a second, we have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service, it's, you know, the cyber criminals, lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? >> It's, it's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment, because if, if you look at target, it's a great case studies around that, they had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation state actors And so as more and more nation state actors try to attack our government, or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in, in this, in the presentation, Sandy's today, they talked about, if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world, I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think, going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the, the, the protection and the ability to get back up, because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked, they're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world, how do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward. >> Yeah, cause these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we are only hearing about the large attacks. >> Walton: Correct. We don't hear about- all of the ones that go on day in and day out, I think, I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. >> Correct, I mean, just walking through here, how many text messages you've gotten? You want a free iPad click here, I mean, they're, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people, really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack, than it is to, to set up a real business and so, unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. >> You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. >> Walton: Right. So you've been in the business of AT for a long time So you've been in the business of AT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. >> I, I appreciate that, I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're 14, $15 billion privately held firm, the same two guys that founded it, still run it today and all they want to do is do cool things, they want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful and then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions, so we have over 6,000 engineers, they get up every day, how do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the, the best is yet to come. >> Talk to me about your customer focus, you know, when we talk, here we are at reinvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talked about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer, do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? >> 100%?, if you go to WWT.com we've published everything that we have so you can get full access to our lab to learn about x ISV and go deep to learn about x ISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life, and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that what's, is what's exciting and what enables us to, to really continue to grow. >> And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with, with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing, and now we have a, now we have, and it was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. >> 100%, it, it's we want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems, because that's when we, the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in, in virus control and be able to, in, in virus control and be able to, what are the tools that she need to be able to get ahead of the next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do, the scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science, we can bring the understanding of the storage, the security, and the network and then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa, to bring in someone from the European Union to, to work together to solve those problems, that's what's, what's exciting and then coming back to the outpost, to be able to put that in the data center, we know the data center is better than just about anybody out there, so it would be the ability to add innovation to them, to bring those part ISV partners together. It's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if, if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. >> One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests, and the other has been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company, whether it's public sector, private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rear view mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace an execute a data full course strategy? >> So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time and so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers, because the data is the new oil of, of the environment and sorry for my Southern twang on the oil, but it, but it truly is the most valuable asset they have and so, how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it? Because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there, so you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and, and automate based on, on what you learned from that data. >> You know I, I think with hindsight, it's easy to, it's easy to say, well, of course WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago, though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. >> Walton: Sure. >> And, and of course it makes sense because you're focused on customers, sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, But I'm a fan- >> I'll gladly apreciate that- because I, I, I've worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time, seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC and now you've got outposts in cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more of the same, I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. >> Walton: Correct. It's all the same. >> It's AT, it's where, where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it and the cloud has given the ability to, to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and pushing that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is, is what, what drives our innovation and that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to, that ability to innovate to, to tackle that next problem. >> So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's, what's, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to racket, stack and cable up? >> Lot's of stuff that I can't tell you about because there, there's things that Amazon is, is always working on that we work with before it, it's, it's made public, so there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline, because the, as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving to truly to the edge, where you can help that war fighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family, and custom built tools that really allow for quick response and custom built tools that really allow for quick response to whatever that problem is, is that next front and that's where we've been for a long time, helping our, our war fighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS Outpost sees that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud, to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real time decisions, is what we have to do to stay relevant and that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. >> It's what you have to do to stay relevant, it's also what your customers need, cause one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer, longer a nice to have, this is business critical for everything. >> Correct and even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real time decisions and if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when, when they need it to, to save our lives or to save the other people's lives so it's, it's, it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. >> It is mission critical, Walton, thank you so much, we're out of time, but thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- >> Really enjoyed it. all the stuff going on with, with worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much, have a great conference. >> Thanks, you too. >> Okay, thanks. >> All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Jay Theodore who's the CTO of Enterprise and AI at Esri and he's joined by Dave Cardella, who's the Principal Product Manager for Developer Technologies also at Esri. Guys, thanks for coming on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Jay, maybe you could give us a little background on Esri. What do you guys do? What are you all about? >> Sure. Esri is an old timer, we are a 50-year old software company. We are the pioneers in GIS and the world leader in GIS - geographic information system. We build geospatial infrastructure that's built for the cloud, built for the edge, built for the field also, you can say. So, we do mapping and analytics. We help our customers solve very complex challenges by bringing location intelligence into the mix. Our customers sort of like run the world, transform the world and we sort of like empower them with the technology we have. So, that's what we do. >> The original edge, and now of course, AWS is coming to you. >> Yeah. (both interviewees chuckling) >> Who are your customers, your main customers? Maybe share that. >> Yeah. We've got over 350,000 customers in... (Dave Cardella chuckling) Yeah. We're all- >> Dave Vellante: Scale. >> Yeah. (Dave Vellante laughing) In the public sector, especially, commercial businesses, non-profit organizations, and that really represents tens of millions of users globally. >> So, let's talk a little bit more about how things are changing. As they say, the edge is coming to you. Maybe AI, you know, 50 years ago... Actually, 50 years ago is probably a lot of talk about AI. When I came into the business, you know, it was a lot of chatter about it. But now, it's real. All this data that we have and the compute power, the cost is coming down. So, AI is in your title? >> Jay: Yes. >> Tell us more about that. >> I think that AI's come to age. When I went to grad school, AI was still in theory because we didn't have the compute and of course we didn't have all the data that was collected, right? Now, there's a lot of observation data coming in through IOT and many senses and so on. So, what do you do with that? Like, human interpretation is pretty challenged, I would say. So, that's where AI comes in, to augment the intelligence that we have in terms of extracting information. So, geospatial AI, specifically which we focus on, is to try to take location that's embedded with this kind of information and sort of like extract knowledge and information out of them, right? Intelligence out of them. So, that's what we focus on: to compliment location intelligence with AI, which we call geospatial AI. >> So, you can observe how things are changing, maybe report on that and that's got to be a huge thing that we can talk about. So, maybe talk about some of the big trends that are driving your business. What are those? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I was listening to Sandy Carter's 'Keynote' yesterday and she really emphasized the importance of data. And, data is crucial to what we do as a technology company, and we curate data globally and we get our data from best of breed sources, and that includes commercial data providers, it includes natural mapping agencies, and also a community maps program where we get data from our customers, from our global network of distributors and partners, and we take that data, we curate it, we host it and we deliver it back. And so, just recently for example, we're really excited 'cause we released the 2020 Global Land Cover. And so, Esri is the first company to release this data at 10 meter resolution for the entire planet, and it's made up of well over 400,000 earth observations from various satellites. So, you know data is a... It's not only a nice-to-have anymore, it's actually a must-have. And so, so is location when we talk about data. They go hand in hand. >> 10 meters so I can look at the hole in the roof of my barn... >> Well... (Dave Cardella chuckling) >> Dave Vellante: Pretty much. >> It depends on what you're trying to do, right? So, I think you know, to talk about it, it's within context. GIS is all about context, right? It's bringing location into context in your decision-making process. It's sort of like the where along with the when, what, how and why. That's what GIS brings in. So, a lot of problems are challenging because we need to bring these things together. It's sort of like you're tearing various layers of data that you have and then bringing them within context. Very often, the context that human minds understand and reflected in the physical world is geographic location, right? So, that's what you bring in. And I would say that there's various kinds of data, also. Various types of data, formats of data: structured data, unstructured data, data captured from extraterrestrial, you know, like, you can say, satellite imagery from drones, from IOT. So, it's like on the ground, above the ground, under the ground. All these sensors are bringing in data, right? So, what GIS does is try of map that data to a place on the earth at very high precision, if you're looking at it locally, or at a certain position if it's regionally, trying to find patterns, trying to understand what's emerging, and then, as you take this and infuse geospatial layer into this, you can even predict what is going to happen based on the past. So, that's sort of like... You could say GIS being used for real world problems, like if you take some examples, COVID... The pandemic is one example. Being able to first discover where it happened, where it's spreading, you know, that's the tracking aspect and then how you respond to that and then how you recover, you know, recovering as humans, as businesses and so on. So, we have widespread use of that. The most popular would be the John Hopkins' Dashboard, >> Dave Vellante: Board, yeah. >> that everyone's seen. >> Vellante: We all use it... >> It's gotten trillions of hits and so on, right? That's one example. Another example is addressing racial equity by using location information. Similarly, social justice. Now, these are all problems that we face today, right? So, GIS is extensively used by our customers to solve such problems. And then of course, you have the climate change challenge itself, right? Where you're hovering all kinds of complex data that we can't comprehend because you have to go back decades and try to bring all that together to compute. So, all of this together comes in the form of a geospatial cloud that we have as an offering. >> So, okay. That's amazing. I mean, you're building a super cloud, we call it. You know, and... So, how do you deal with... How do you work with AWS? What's the relationship there? Where do developers fit in? Maybe you can talk about a little bit. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So, we've got two main integration points with AWS. A lot of our location services that we expose data and capabilities through are built on AWS. So, we use storage, we use cloud caching and AWS's various data sets across the world quite heavily. So, that's one integration point. The other is a relatively new product that Amazon has released called Amazon Location Service. And so, what it does is it brings location and spatial intelligence directly into a developer's AWS dashboard. So, the experience that they're already used to, they now get the power of Esri services and location intelligence right at their fingertips. >> So, you're .. We started talking about the edge, your data architecture is very distributed, right? But, of course, you're bringing it back. So, how does that all work? You process it locally and then sending some data back? Are you sending all data back? What does that flow look like? >> I think the key thing is that our customers work with data of all kinds, all formats, all sizes and some are in real-time, some are big data and archive, right? So, most recently, just to illustrate that point, this year, we released RGS Enterprise on Kubernetes. It's the entire geospatial cloud made available for enterprise customers, and that's made available on AWS, on EKS. Now, when it's available on EKS, that means all these capabilities are microservices, so, they can be massively scaled. They're DevOps friendly and you've got the full mapping and analytics system that's made available for this. >> Dave Vellante: Oh. >> And we sort of like built it, you know, cloud native from the ground up and the more important thing that we have now is connectivity with Redshift. Why is that important? Because a lot of our customers have geospatial data in these cloud data warehouses. Redshift is very important for them. And so, you can connect to that, you can discover these massive petabytes of data sets and then you can set up what we call the query layer. It's basically pushing analytics into Redshift and being able to bring out that data for mapping, visualization, for AI workflows and so on. It's pretty amazing and it's pretty exciting at this time. >> And, I mean... So much data. And then... What, do you tear it down into glacier of just to save some cost, or is it going to all stay in S3 or is it... >> So, we already work with S3, we've worked with RDS, we support Amazon Aurora, our customers are very happy with that. So, Redshift is a new offering for us to connect to Redshift. >> Dave Vellante: AOK. >> So, the way the query layer works is all of your observation data is in Redshift, your other kinds of data... Your authoritative data sets could come from various other sources including in Amazon Aurora, for example, okay? And then, you overlay them and use them. Now, the data in Redshift is usually massive, so, when you run the analytic query, we let you cache that as a materialized view or as a snapshot that you can refresh and you can work against that. This is really good because it compliments our ability to actually take that data, to put it on a map image which we render service side, it's got very complex cartographic ready symbology and rendering and everything in there. And you get these beautiful rendering of maps that comes out of Redshift data. >> And you're pushing AI throughout your stack, is that, you know? >> Yeah. AI is just like infused, right? I mean, it's... I would say, human intelligence augmented for data scientists, for everyone, you know. Whether you're using it through notebooks or whether you're using it through applications that we have or the developer APIs themselves. >> So, what are some of the big initiatives you're working on near-term, mid-term? >> Yeah. So, you mentioned what's really driving innovation and it's related to the question that you just asked right now and I really believe developers drive innovation. They're force multipliers in the solutions that they build. And so, that's really the integration point that Esri has with AWS, it's developers. And earlier this year, we released the RGS platform which is our platform as a service offering that exposes these powerful location services that Jay just explained. There's a set of on-demand services that developers can bring in their applications as they want and they can bring in one, they can bring in two or three, whatever they need, but they're there when they need them. And also, developers have their client API of choice. So, we have our own client APIs that we offer but you're not pigeonholed into that when you're working with RGS platform. A developer can bring their own API. >> Okay, so he called the platform as a service. Are you making your data available as well? Your data, your tooling and then selling that as a service? >> Our data has always been available as a service, I would say. >> Okay, yeah. >> Everything that we do, our GIS tools, are accessible as a web service. >> Vellante: Is that new, or... that's always been the way? >> No, that's always been there. That's always been that way. The difference now is everything is built from the ground up to be cloud native. >> Dave Vellante: Okay. >> From the ground up to be connected to every data set that's available on AWS, every compute that can be exploited from small to massive in terms of compute, and also reaching out to bring all the apps and the developer experiences, pushing out to customers. >> So, 50 years ago, you weren't obviously using the cloud, but so, you were running everything on-prem now you're all in the cloud, or you're kind of got a mix? What is the clearer picture of that? >> So, we have two major offerings. There's RGS Online, where obviously it's offered as a service and it's GIS as a service provider for everyone. And that's available everywhere. The other offering we have is actually RGS Enterprise where some customers run them on premises, some run it in the cloud, especially AWS. Many run it on the edge, some in the field and there's connectivity between this. A lot of our customers are hybrid. So, they make the best of both. Depending on the kinds of data- >> Dave Vellante: You give them a choice. >> the kinds of workflows... Giving them the choice, exactly. And I would say, you know, taking Werner's 'Keynote' this morning, he talked about what's the next frontier, right? The next frontier could very well be when AWS gets to space and makes compute available there. It's sitting alongside the data that's captured and we've always, like I said, for 50 years, worked with satellite imagery, >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> or worked with IOT, or worked with drone data. It's just getting GIS closer to where the data is. >> So, the ultimate edge space. >> Yes. >> All right, I'll give you guys... Give us a quick wrap if you would. Final thoughts. >> I think its... Go ahead. >> Go, ahead Dave. >> Yeah. I really resonate with data and content. We're a technology company- there's no doubt about that- but without good data, not only supplied by ourselves, but our customers, Jay mentioned it earlier, our customers bring their own data to our platform and that's really what drives the analytics and the accuracy in the answers to the problems that people are trying to solve. >> Bring their first-party data with your data and then one plus one is... >> Yes. Yeah, and the key thing about that (Cardella chuckling) is not some of the data, it's all of the data that you have. You don't more need to be constrained. >> Yeah, you're not sampling. >> Yes, exactly. >> Yeah. >> All right, guys. Thanks so much. Really interesting story. Congratulations. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, thank you. >> Nice meeting you. >> Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, I'm Lisa Martin. This is day four for theCUBE. We have two live sets, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Dave two live sets, 100 guests on theCUBE for AWS Re:Invent 2021. >> Not all at the same time. >> Not all-- That's a good, he brings up a good point, not all at the same time, we are pleased to welcome Gretchen Peri who's going to be sitting down and chatting with Dave with me next. She is from Slalom, at the US State Local and Education, SLED leader. We're going to be talking about Slalom and AWS digital innovation in the public sector. Gretchen, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> For the audience that might not be familiar with Slalom before we dig into AWS and SLED in particular, talk to us about Slalom and what it is that you guys do. >> I'd love to. So Slalom's a modern business and technology consulting firm. We're headquartered in Seattle Washington, we have about 11,000 employees across 40 markets globally. And what's different about Slalom is we're local model firm, so our consultants live and work in the same locale, which means we're personally invested in our client's outcomes because they impact us directly in the communities in which we live. >> And you've been in a leader in SLED for a long time, talk to us about what's going on on SLED these days. Obviously the last 18, 22 months have been quite dynamic, but what's going on in the market? >> Absolutely. What we're seeing is an extra emphasis on data data data, obviously, data is king and data is queen right now, right? So when the pandemic hit, we saw a ton of digital innovation, as our SLED clients needed to get their services online. That had been going on for a long time but it absolutely accelerated when then pandemic it and then it was a public health hazard, to ask people to come into the location. So what we saw was for constituents, we saw just absolute blast of omni-channel service delivery, so we saw the advent of SMS and chat bots and the more tech services, right? Leveraging AWS Lex and Transcribe and other services of AWS really helped our SLED clients react to the pandemic and respond to make sure that their constituents were receiving the digital services they needed, and their employees were able to be productive at home. >> Well, that was one of the keys the employee productivity, the student productivity, when everything's went remote overnight, one of the most challenging things was the demand for collaboration tools. Then of course, there's security challenges, there was concerns there, but talk to us about, and we've seen so much innovation out of AWS in the last, I mean always, but even what they announced the last couple of days, the innovation flywheel of AWS is probably stronger than ever enabling organizations like SLED, FED, private sector, public sector to be data-driven. >> Absolutely. One thing that's really exciting right now is to see the evolution of how our SLED customers are thinking about data. So we've been working on like integrated visions in SLED for a long time, integrated justice, integrated health care, integrated eligibility, how do we bring all this information together so that we can supply the right information to the right people at the right time to deliver the right outcomes? And AWS has been a huge part of that. It's not the journey to get to the cloud, it's the destination once you get there, right? Because then you can leverage all their AIML tools, IOT, edge, container, blockchain. And so our customers, who have already made that switch to AWS, they're able to take advantage of that. It's not what you can do in the cloud anymore is what you can't do without it really, right? So we're seeing tons of advances, intelligent document processing is one area I'm really excited about for our SLED clients, and working very closely with AWS to make sure that we see our clients adopt that and achieve the value out of it. >> AWS is dominating the IT space, although what five to 15% of IT is in the cloud, which means the vast majority is still on premises. So there's a huge potential for growth. In this sort of wild, wild west that we're in, there are all sorts of different kinds of services and consultancy partners, that are seeking to bridge the gap between the technology that AWS delivers and the outcomes that customers desire. >> Right. >> Now I've had a couple of experiences actually with Slalom folks, that were very, very positive. And what I saw was that the Slalom people were embedded in a way that you don't see some other consultancies embedded. You mentioned that something that piqued my interest, you talked about the local nature, is that your superpower? Because it sure seemed to be powerful to see this person where some of these very, very large global companies had no idea who Slalom was, until they realized that Sally was the one who had the best relationship with the customer. So Sally's a fictitious name that I just came up with, but I want to hear a little more about Slalom and your superpower and your differentiation. 'Cause it's a crowded space, you've got global systems integrators, you got all kinds of people. What makes you special? >> It's really the breadth of professional services that we provide, combined with AWS's cloud technologies and services. What we do I think a little bit differently is whereas AWS works back from the customer, we work back from our customer's vision. And so what we do with our, especially with our SLED clients, but with all of our commercial clients, is we say, what is your business strategy and your business vision, and how do we design the technology solutions, working back from that. So you're able to answer the business questions through data-driven tech technology, that's really important to you. And when we look at that, it's not just generating data to create information to then garner insights, but let's go one step further. And how do we create knowledge and how do we create wisdom this space, right? Where we understand situational awareness, common operating pictures, that's really what we want to do. When we talk about criminal justice and public safety, I love how we're thinking about joining data in new and different ways. It's not necessarily applications anymore, right? How do we create data as a service? How do we create documents as a service? Where we're pulling out the exact information that we need from semi-structured, structured and unstructured data and providing it to the right people to make the right decisions. >> Talk to us about intelligent document processing, a lot of buzz going on with that. What is it? Where are public sector agencies in terms of embracing it, adopting it and having it be part of that vision? >> Yeah, the promise is huge for IDP. What IDP is basically is leveraging AWS AI services to create intelligent automation solutions that help extract information from printed documents, digital documents, paper documents, right? So leveraging AWS services like Amazon Textract, Comprehend, Augmented AI, things like, and Kendra. What that does in combination, is it helps our clients unlock the data from, you can imagine government, it's heavy, heavy documents, and in criminal justice and public safety in particular, these documents represent key milestones and processes, right? So we're never going to get rid of documents in SLED, they're going to be used in perpetuity, it's important for accessibility and practicality and everything else. But what this does is it lets us unlock the data from those kind of stale documents and create it into usable formats for so that people can make decisions. >> That's critical because there's, I mean, we talk about in Amazon, AWS been this week have been talking about it and Dave, we have too. Every company, public sector, private sector, it needs to be a data-driven company, but they need to be able to extract that value from the data and the data isn't just digital. And that's something that, to your point, that's going to be persistent within SLED, they have to be able to extract the value from it quickly. >> Yes. >> To be able to see what new products and services can we deliver? What directions should we be going? And what outcomes should we be driving based on that visibility? And that visibility is critical. >> Exactly. And right now we absolutely have to support our communities. And we have a lot of our slide clients who are talking about this is a time where we don't just respond in a way that helps people kind of navigate this pandemic, we have to build resiliency as well in our communities and we do that through helping people through these hard times and making sure that we're moving our services to places where people can access them, in any language from wherever they are, right? We're having to actually go into people's homes on their couches, to deliver government services. Where we used to bring them into a single location. >> Right. >> Typically public sector has often been seen as lagging behind the private sector in some ways, the pandemic, as I'm sure ignited a fire with, especially with federal acknowledgement of things that need to happen, budgets flowing, are you seeing even more of an awakening from a cloud perspective within public sector? >> We are, we are and we're seeing really interesting initiatives pop up like, behavioral health initiatives, that are meant to address some really serious concerns in our country like nationwide 988 suicide prevention projects, right? And the federal government is providing a lot of funding to states and local governments so that they can help take care of our communities and also make sure that we're moving our services online so everyone can access them. >> I'm curious about that point, the funding. >> Yeah. >> Do you find yourself almost in the position of prize patrol? Where were some of the state local governments aren't necessarily as aware as Slalom might be of programs that are coming down immediately. Is that part of the conversation? >> It is part of the conv-- That's a great point because what we do is we look at what's coming down from the federal government, how is it going to flow to the states? How is it going to land ultimately, and then helping governments come up with a strategy for how to spend that money in the right way is really important, right? And we saw with some of the funding that come out, that there were delays on getting like eviction prevention funding out to folks. And so making sure that we have the technology to support those outcomes. >> It's all about outcomes. >> Yes. >> Speaking of outcomes, something I want to congratulate Slalom on is winning the first ever National Essay Partner of the Year for the US. >> Yes. >> Nice. >> That's awesome, congratulations. >> What does that mean for Slalom and what direction can we expect the Slalom and AWS partnership to go? >> Up and up. >> To the right? >> Yes. For us it's about validating the relationship that we have, right? It's really, when we walk into a client conversation, what we want to do is develop trust that our clients know we're looking for their best interest and their best outcomes. We're not trying to sell them something we're trying to solve their problems together. And it validates that for us, our partnership with AWS obviously is so important. And what we're doing in terms of making sure that we have a strong bench full of certifications and we can go to market together in the right way for our clients. This is a huge award and the recognition is very powerful for us. >> Well, congratulations. And so last question, you mentioned AWS and we always talk about when we talk with them at their event, we talk about their customer obsession, right? They work backwards, as you said, from the customer. And you guys from customer vision. Talk to me about when you go in jointly together, work with the customer, what does that alignment look like? >> Absolutely. So what we typically do is, Slalom will focus on what is the business outcome that we want to generate? And we will help design, how are we going to go about solving that problem? And how is AWS going to help support us with enabling technology? And so we will go into client conversations together, say, what is the outcome we want from this initiative together? And how are both partners going to get aligned to support the client in that conversation, in that product. >> That alignment is (indistinct). Gretchen, thank you for joining Dave and me today, talking about Slalom, what you guys are doing, how you're really helping organizations in SLED transform and not just survive challenging time but really thrive and be data-driven. We appreciate your insights and congratulations again on the National Essay Partner of The Year. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (lively music)

(soft instrumental music) >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person at a live physical event with real people. Of course, it's a hybrid event. Great stuff online. Check it out on the Amazon site, as well as theCUBE zone. We've got great guests, talking about the cloud vision for getting talent in to the marketplace, in being productive and for society Accenture always great content. Denise Reese, Managing Director of the South Market Unit Lead at Accenture, AABG, which stands for "Accenture Area Business Group" and Gina Gina Fratarcangeli who is also the managing director of Midwest sales leader. Ladies, thanks for coming, I appreciate you coming on and talking about the vision of talent. >> I guess >> Thanks for having us. >> Yes, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, Amazon's got this dangerous goal, to train 29 million people. Maureen Lonergan came on yesterday, who I've known for a long time, doing a great job. It's hard to get the talent in. First of all, it sounds harder than it really is, that's my opinion. You know, you get some training certifications and you're up and running. So, talent's a big thing. What do you guys do? Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, we're having a lot of activity at Accenture trying to get talent in. Across the entire country we're spending a tremendous amount of effort to do that. A couple of critical things we're doing in the Midwest is bringing in and searching for different talent streams that we haven't typically done in the past. For instance, one thing that we're doing is, we set up an apprentice program where we're reaching out into the market to find diverse talent, who aren't coming through the critical normal college path and bringing folks in like that. And we've got 1200 people that we've brought in that way, just in the Midwest. Which has been a phenomenal new talent stream for us. And supporting our inclusion and diversity. One of the other exciting things is what we call "The Mom Project", where we're intentionally working with an organization called the Mom Project, to bring women back into the workplace who may have left while they were taking care of their families and helping them get certified in all the new cloud technology and getting back to work. >> I love how you guys are going after this whole places that not everyone's looking at, because what I love about Cloud is that, it's a level up kind of opportunity where you don't really have to have that pedigree, or that big-big school. Of course, I went to a different school. So, I have a little chip on my shoulder. I didn't go to MIT, wasn't North-east but still good school. But, I mean, you could really level up from anywhere. >> Gina: That's right. >> And the opportunities with Cloud are so great. This is like a huge thing. No I'm surprised no one knows about it. >> Absolutely. I would add to that. So, we've in the South, in Georgia in particular. We've just launched an initiative with the technical college system of Georgia and AWS. So, it's a public-private partnership, where we're actually helping to set the curriculum for those students that are going through programs, through the technical colleges. It's one of the largest parts of the university system of Georgia. And, we're actually helping to frame the curriculum. And, giving folks what they need, to your point. It is an opportunity to level up. It's a great way to get talent in non-traditional spaces. It helps us to achieve our inclusion and diversity roles or goals, rather. But, then it also allows us to really continue to fill that pipeline with folks that we may not have had access to otherwise. >> Is there a best practice that you see developing in the acquisition of talent? Or enticing people to come in? Because that's just economics you know, Maureen was telling me that it was this person she was unemployed, and she got certified and she's making six figures. >> Both: Yeah. >> She's like oh my God, this is great. So, that's the Cloud growth. Is there a way to entice people? Is there a pattern? Is it more economic? Is it more, hey, be part of something. What's the data showing? >> There's definitely a war for talent out there. And so in this space we continuously hear from our clients that they can't hire enough people. So in the past, in the technology space, a lot of clients were hiring their own teams and here they just can't get the skills fast enough. So we're spending a tremendous amount of time being proactive. We started a women in Cloud organization where we're proactively reaching out to the community to bring women in, let them know that we will help them get those certifications and partnering with organizations like Women in Cloud, which is a global organization to create new funnels of talent. >> I think the women angle is great. The mom network coming out of the work for back into the workforce, because things change. Like we were talking about how Amazon just changed over the past five years now that this architectural approach is changing. So that's cool. Also we were involved in the women in data science, out of Stanford University, they have that great symposium. This is power technical women. >> Yes >> And it's got a global following. So the women networks that are developing are phenomenal. So that's not just an Accenture thing, right? That's outside of Accenture. >> I think it's a combination because I think we do a really good job inside of Accenture to create opportunities for women of various ethnicities lived experiences to be able to come together to network internally, but then also to pour some of that talent that they have into the communities where we live and we all do business as well. So I think I'm seeing definitely a two-pronged approach there. >> Let me ask you a question, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of will, Accenture's known as a pretty great firm. So working at Accenture is kind of a big deal. Does that scare people? Because if you could work at a Accenture I mean, that's good pedigree right there. So like, when you're trying to get people coming into the cloud, do they get the Accenture mojo or does it work for them? And can you share your experiences on that? >> I've been here five years and it's been a phenomenal ride for me. I've really enjoyed the fact having a female CEO, I think, and having a CEO who is so committed to diversity on all aspects, right? Her commitment is 50% diversity parody by 2025 at every level of our organization. And that doesn't happen without really intentional efforts at the entry-level and everywhere through the process to ensure that women are not only promoted, but really given the support network among all of our leaders and mentorship to be successful. And it's not just words, it's something that we're really spending a lot of time doing with intention. And that word is out in the space now, as women come in, they're loving it and they're recruiting their other women into the organization and diverse groups as well as what I'm seeing. >> And so I actually just started at Accenture in March. So I've been around eight months. I actually joined from AWS, interestingly enough. And I can tell you from my own experience, the intentionality that Gina spoke to you is it's evident at all levels. I feel like the way that I was courted to the firm was nothing short of amazing. That's another story for another day, but I feel like my being where I am, being hired in as a managing director, as an experienced hire, I think my presence is a testament to the focus that Accenture has on inclusion diversity and the equity component as well. And then also in Atlanta, we are exceptionally fortunate. We have close to 30 black and Latin X managing directors and senior managing directors out of the Atlanta office. So what we're doing there is pretty magical and it's something that I've never experienced in my 25 years. >> It's contagious I hope, the magic is contagious. >> Yeah. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And it's exciting because we're known as a management consulting business, right? So our product is the people >> That's right. >> And so there is intention from day one as to what you want from your career and setting your career plan. So everyone is given those career counselors and the expectation that someone is thinking about your business and your personal business, and what is your role today and what should your role be in two years, and what skills do you need to get there? Which is awesome, it's a lot of fun. >> It's also walking the talk too, right? I mean, Amazon here, they had a 50% women on stage. I don't know if you noticed on the keynote, they was two men and two women, 50%. Of course the United Airlines, it's got to be three. We got to get a 51%,, 'cause technically 51% So it should be three to one, but yeah, like, okay, that was cute notice but that's good. But this is real, I've been a big proponent of software development. Customers are women too that's 51%. So I think this whole representation thing has to be more real and more intentional. And so I want to ask you, how would you share the best practice of making that real from the essential playbook? What could people learn and what mistakes should they avoid? I think people who do want to try with it, but they don't know what to do. >> You know, I think get started, right. Do the work. I feel like since I started in technology, we've been having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and bringing more people into the space. And now it's time for us to just do that. And I feel like Accenture is doing that in spades. I think also again, I've been using this word. I was on a breakout panel yesterday talking about our partnership with AWS and intentionality keeps coming up. But I think also it helps to have a CEO who's creating diversity as an imperative at the most senior levels of the firm and folks are being incentivized as a result. So you've got to put the mechanisms in place to ensure that folks understand that this is not just lip service. >> That's a great point. It's not only just the people, but the mechanisms. And one of the things that I've been saying early on in the top of the interview was Cloud is an instant leveler there, because if you can be so capable so fast. So like when you start thinking about getting people in the market, producing talent, this notion of meritocracy isn't lip service, because if you have the capabilities and the people side lineup, then it truly can be like that. 'Cause your game does the talking, right. >> And we're doing it with intention at every level in the organization so much though, that every people leader, one of their metrics is the diversity. And as we look at the promotions, making sure that that parody is there, but every person who's managing people has diversity as a metric that they're being measured on. And so I think that's really critical as well as having the people who are being the advocates and being the allies and really asking the questions as the teams are getting put together. You know, my job is to review all the deals in the Midwest. And when the teams come forward, I say, "Great where are the women on the team? Who are we putting it?" We're all talking about the diversity. So when we're going to a client meeting, where are the women who are you're taking to that meeting? And if the answer is well, there's not one who's technical yet, the most senior, the most technical, well, great bring her on and use this as a training opportunity. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk and show that to our clients. >> I think that's really good. You guys are senior leaders, one can do that, demonstrate that, but also you're in the field for Accenture. You're in front of your customers. What are you seeing out there and what excites you about being in these industry? >> Yeah, I love the fact that there are so many more women in this space. I love that we're having so many women out there with intention. We've had six female CEOs do women in Cloud panel discussions with us and with our team. So you made the comment early about cloud moving so fast. That's the most exciting thing for me and the fact that it is moving at such a pace that no one client is going to be able to get the skills fast enough. They need companies like Accenture. They need companies like AWS to help them where we're leveraging all the knowledge from our own other clients and bringing that together so we can help them accelerate their development. What about you? >> Absolutely. Now I would echo that as we used to say at AWS plus one to that. But I'm really hopeful because what I'm seeing is the number of folks with my lived experience better at senior executive levels, not only within Accenture and AWS, but in our customers. And I think going back to the point that you were making earlier regarding Cloud being a level up and giving folks opportunity, folks have to be able to see a path, right? It's one thing to just get a certification and tick a box, that's great. But if you don't see a pathway to being able to utilize that in a way that allows you to move up and seeing where we are now, just as a firm, just really, really excites me that every time I get onto a call and I see another strong, amazing woman, I'm like, man, this is amazing. And it's something that... I think it's a phenomenon that I've started to see maybe within the last like five years or so. And probably even within the last two to three years, I've started to see that even more so, so that really excites me. >> Well, first of all, you guys are great. You're contagious, okay? Which is good, a good thing. I love how you brought the whole path thing because path finders was a big part of Adam's Leslie's keynote, and it must be really fun to see people taking the path that you guys are pioneering- >> We're ploughing, we're ploughing >> Yes we are. We're ploughing and you know what else we're doing? We're lifting, as we climb. That is important. I would say that, we don't have all of these amazing opportunities and blessings just to talk about what we have, but if you're not actually bringing somebody else along and giving those opportunities to folks, then it's all for not. >> You got people and the Cloud, to get them people, which is, we're humans and the mechanisms software to bring it together, magic. >> Absolutely >> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thanks for having us. >> Okay this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage from re:Invent 2021 AWS web services. Thanks for watching (soft instrumental music)

>>Okay, We're back at AWS Re. Invent. You're watching the >>cubes. Continuous coverage >>coverage. This is Day four. I think it's the first time it reinvent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering Reinvent. Tom Miller is here is the senior vice president of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane. Who's the global cloud? Practically practise lead at Merkel. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tom. Tell us about Merkel. For those who might not be familiar with you. >>So Merkel is a customer experience management company. That is, um, under the Dentsu umbrella. Dense. Who is a global media agency? We represent one of the pillars which is global, our customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkel does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. They're a tech company. Yes. >>Okay, so there's some big big tail winds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic. You know, the force marched to digital. Uh, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? >>So what we're seeing is, uh we've got, uh, as a start. We've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on Prem that we manage today within a sequel environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data to be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realising they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environments. >>And you're relatively new to the ws world, right? Maybe you can talk >>about that anchor actually, as a partner. We may be new, but Merkel works with AWS has been working with AWS for over five years as a customer as a customer. So what we did was last year we formalise the relationship with us to be, uh, an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restock programme, basically which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialisation of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of, uh Dentsu umbrella are our core focuses on customer experience, transformation and how we do that Customer experience. Transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernise the solutions that Martin can take to the market. >>So your on Prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on a lot of technical that when the cloud more agility, infinite resources do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe >>your I can take that what time just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Markle, helping big brands 1400 Fortune 500 brands to organise their marketing ecosystem, especially Martek ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints customer customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about, and and these databases currently set on Prem on Merkel's own data centre. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernise them. Give all these ai ml type of capabilities advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS is the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service. We do that as a service. >>Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business right? Take away. It's it's classic. I mean, you really it's happening. This theme of, you know a W started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ. Goldman Sachs. You guys in the media world essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes, super clouds. We call >>them Super Cloud. Yeah, it's about helping our clients understand What is it they're trying to accomplish? And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey where the customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey and doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical form. >>I was listening to the, uh, snowflake earnings call from last night and they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media and all. I keep talking about direct direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot of media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily. I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to, Technology is enabling that is that kind of the play here? >>Yes, Director Consumer is a huge player. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalisation comes becomes a big theme, especially indeed to see type of environment, because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's there like. What's their dislike? Which products which services are they interested in? So that's that's all kind of advanced analytics machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkel is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and and build those next generation solutions for access. So what kind >>of initiatives are you working >>on? So there are, like, 34 areas that we are working very closely with AWS number one. I would say Think about our marketers friend, you know, and they have a transformation like direct to consumer on the channel e commerce, these types of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools? What technologies will be part of that ecosystem. That's where Merkel provides consulting services to to give them a road map, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two as Tom mentioned migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernise their environment by migrating them to cloud number three. Merkel has a solution called mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are Modernising all that solution of making that available on AWS marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing Data Lake leveraging AWS technologies like blue, red shift and and actually modernise their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data. Join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on amazon dot com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four or five focus areas. So I was >>gonna ask you about the data and the data strategy like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists that your clients have first party data and you might recommend bringing in other data sources. And you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >>Well, ultimately, client also data because that that's their customers' data. Uh, to your point on, we helped them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call is. So Merkel has a service called data source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests so we monetise all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS data exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data. Take this third party data from Merkel and then, uh, segment their customers much more intelligently. >>And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile. >>Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer Will work with the chief technology officer. We kind of we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get both get what they want. >>And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in their CDOs. Chief Digital officer CMO. Sometimes they're all they're one and the same. Other times they're mixed. I've seen see IOS and and CDOs together. Sure, you sort of. It's all data. It's all >>day. >>Yeah, some of the roles that come into play, as as Tom mentioned. And you mentioned C I o c T. O s chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the side. And then we have the CMOS chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what I t speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct to consumer Omni Channel E commerce, those are more business driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then at the same time, how do we translate translate those strategic initiatives into it transformation because it does require a lot of idea transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >>So you got data. You've got tools, you've got software. You've got expertise that now you're making that available as a as a service. That's right. How far are you into that? journey of satisfying your business. >>Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, 5 to 7 years ago at Merkel, >>where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off >>the cloud again. We use clouds in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyse it and and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is, uh, SAS, offering software as a service offerings like Adobe Salesforce and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum. When it comes to cloud and you got >>a combination, you have a consulting business and also >>so Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business that data assets that I was talking about, that we monetise. We have promotions and loyalty. We have media, so we recover multiple services portfolio. >>How do you mentioned analytics a couple times? How do you tie that? Back to the to the to the sales function. I would imagine your your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yes, >>So that's a very important line because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it? Because that's the actionable part. So a few areas I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to the to a set of customers Now who those set of customers are, You know where they should target this, who their target customers are, what the demographics are that's all done through and analytics and what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence machine learning those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalised the offerings that they're going to offer to. The customers >>used to be really pure art, right? It's really >>not anymore. It's all data driven. Moneyball. Moneyball? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe still a little bit of hard in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you've got to go with the data. >>That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in and how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer. That's exactly you know. It's a combination, >>and we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel, >>teach them how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in 2 to 3 years. Where do you want to take it? >>I think future is Cloud AWS being the market leader. I think aws has a huge role to play. Um, we are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS cells in, uh, majority of the sales happen in our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that would be a very powerful story for us to be >>good news for AWS. They little your DNA can rub off on them would be good, guys. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube Day four aws re invent. Were the Cube the global leader in high tech coverage? Right back. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. We're really excited to have Anthony Lye here. He's the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. And Jonsi Stefansson as the CTO and VP of cloud at NetApp. Guys, good to see you. >> Same to you. >> Likewise. >> It's great to be back. >> You know, Anthony. Well so, we saw each other virtually at the AWS Storage Day, the big announcement, we're going to talk about that. But I go back and I said this to you several years ago, we were sitting, you know, some after party and you said "We are going to transform NetApp. We are going all in on cloud." We've seen NetApp transform many, many times. This is probably the biggest in history. >> No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, I can't believe it, but you know, it will be five years for me in February. And in those five years, I think we really have done things that nobody expected. And I think we've proven to our existing customers, to our competitors, and now with Amazon, to a whole new set of customers that our intellectual property that we build and the acquisitions that we've done have made a lot of sense. I think we've demonstrated this wonderful concept of symmetry. Customers now understand and believe that a dollar invested in an App, wherever it is on premise or in the cloud is a dollar that moves wherever they want it to move and progresses as their own businesses progress. >> So Jonsi, for the latest announcement that you guys made to integrate ONTAP into the AWS cloud, you had to do some deeper integration, right? It wasn't just wrap your stack and Kubernetes and shove it into the cloud. But can you just talk about what you had to do? What the collaboration was like? >> The collaboration with AWS has been fantastic. It literally took two and a half years, you know, from the point where we decided to agree on the design principles, how we were actually going to deliver this as a service, the integration into every single aspect of AWS, you know, whether it's the console, the FSx, API, the integrations, to all the additional services that AWS has, like RDS, like Aurora, like the SageMaker, like EKS and ECS. And I mean, we are just getting started with the integration points and the collaboration and the teamwork. I would call it teamwork more than a collaboration. The teamwork with all these teams and maybe especially at name who was the leader of the storage sort of a unit in AWS has been fantastic. >> Dave: Yeah. Well so, this is the 10th re:Invent. This is the 9th year we've been here. We've seen a dramatically different cloud than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and a different storage business. I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't know. I didn't even think about it as the old storage business anymore. Essentially, you're building a cloud on top of clouds. A super cloud if you will. >> Anthony: Yeah, I mean. I think, look, the strategy was, as I said, very, very simple to us, which was, you know, fundamentally companies, you know, run their applications on the basic primitives of compute storage and networking. And the gold standard for file was always ONTAP. And I think what we did, which I think was unique was we didn't just, as you said, throw it onto a cloud, stick it in a virtual machine and tell you, the customer "There. It's ONTAP just as you remember it." We reimagined it. And we architected it to be a cloud service. So it's elastic, it goes up and down. You can change the performance at runtime. And what we really did with Amazon was we wanted to make it a fully managed service. We didn't want people to think about versioning and patching. We wanted to remove all of that and we wanted people to take as much or as little as they needed. And we, and Amazon, we chose that we should own the responsibility for the availability of the service. And we should maintain the service ourselves so that customers of ONTAP can benefit from the solution. But in many ways, customers who've never been ONTAP customers can now take advantage of an enterprise grade file system and all the great things that it does without having to understand how it works. >> And explain why that's important for customers because people, they go, "Wow, you got S3." but it's very simple. Get, put, right? You don't have the full stack of a mature ONTAP. Please explain what that means to customers a little bit. >> You know, file systems are very important things. You know, we basically use them in our work environments every single day, you know. Within your sort of, you know, your Mac book, you have a home directory and sub-directories and files, very elegantly layout applications and layout infrastructures in ways that object repositories cannot. You know, aside from block and file. Sorry, from file and object, you of course, have block storage. And so, file plays a very important role. IDC has file growing at almost twice the pace of object now on the public cloud systems and, you know, file has about 13% of the overall storage market and it's growing. And I don't see any reason why file won't be as big on the Amazon cloud as the S3 has been. >> Dave: So you guys, go ahead, please. >> Yeah. I mean, you also have to take into account that the S3 object storage offerings of AWS is an integrated PaaS in our solution. So that's how we are actually doing automatic tiering. So you actually reap the best of both worlds, where you get the cost management of putting it in object storage, but you get the performance and the data management capabilities that is pretty unprecedented. You know, we are the first store that's offering that can actually do cross-region replication seamlessly by retaining deduplication and compression. But we also play a lot with, you know, block and object storage. So when Anthony was talking about how we've actually delivered this as a service, and this is sort of from our design principles, we are basically delivering this as a software, as a service, because more than an infrastructure as a service, because the stock that we are actually deploying, or the secret sauce of ONTAP, it's a very vast software stack that we are delivering, on top of AWS infrastructure. So I would always call it or categorize it a little bit more than software as a service, rather than infrastructure as a service. >> But it's even more than that, if I'm right, because it's cloud pricing, right? >> Jonsi: Yes. >> So it's not, you're not preying. I mean, when I buy Salesforce, I got to sign up for three-year deal. That's not a consumption-based model. >> Yeah. >> Oh, I think Amazon, you know what Amazon did uniquely and brilliantly was, it retailed technology and it's what makes Amazon so good, is that they choose to sort of simplify things. And when they find benefits as a retailer, they pass them on to the customer and, you know, there's this sort of pay-as-you-go business model, it's really good for the customer. It makes us work harder because, you know, you have to retain your customer sort of every 10 minutes. And that's something that, you know, as you said, with enterprise software and even some of the early SaaS vendors, that's not how it works. And so Amazon has forced us all to be very, very attentive to our customers. >> Dave: And I'd love to talk about what that means for the on-prem business, but if we have time. But you guys won Design Partner of the Year, what's that all about? First of all, congratulations. >> Anthony: Thank you. There's a lot of ISV design partners. You guys came out number one so congratulations on that. What's that all about? Explain what that entailed and how you got that. >> Yeah, I'll say a few words. Maybe Jonsi can add. I mean, the first thing of course is, you know, I S V stands for Independent Software Vendor. So, you know, it's always great because most people would say, "Well, NetApp is on-premise storage hardware." >> Dave: Of course, yeah. >> Which really, we've not really ever been an increasingly with demonstrating that we are a software company and we operate at cloud speed. You know, I can't really take the credit. I would give it to Jonsi and the engineering team. Maybe Jonsi, you can explain, you know, what moral about the award and why I think we were selected. >> So, I mean, I think it says a lot that this is the first time AWS has ever allowed a third party company to be this integrated into their console, into a support ability systems. You know, we make fun of this, me and Anthony all the time, because when we started this, down this path, everybody at NetApp said, "Guys, you're wasting your time." This is why AWS has the marketplace, but we didn't want to go. We already had the marketplace and we wanted to be able to connect to all these associated services and do it in the manner that, you know, this was a true collaboration of engineering teams for a long time to actually deliver the service on both sides so the credit, of course, will always go to the engineers on both sides, even though I designed it, I didn't code it. So, I think that, that alone, being the first to do it in AWS ever. I think we deserve that award. >> So just for our audience, to be clear, we're talking about FSx, ONTAP in the cloud, in the AWS cloud and kind of dance around that. But so that was announced, I guess, in September? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Right? >> Anthony: September, 2nd. >> What's the uptake been like? What's the reaction? >> Unbelievable. >> I'll bet. (laughing) >> No, no, I mean. >> No, I believe it. >> Better than we ever dreamed of. >> Yeah. >> The number of customers, I'm sure I'm not allowed to say the number of customers, but we asked and the fact that, you know, 60% of those customers have never been NetApp customers before, but they see the value in the data management capabilities that we are bringing to the market. >> Dave: So it exceeded expectations and your expectations were probably pretty enthusiastic. >> They were high. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Amazon is on the record. I was with Ed earlier on today, recording a piece and Ed, you know, was very clear that it's one of the fastest growing services now on AWS. You know, it turns out that, you know, the customer base, I think recognizes the, not just the need for a file system, but the uniqueness and capabilities that ONTAP provides, you know, to those customers in how they manage their business and transformations. And so, you know, to be sort of behind the console, to be sort of behind the Amazon CLI and the Amazon API, you see the world very, very differently, you know. I think the Amazon marketplace is a fantastic capability, but I'll tell you, you know, being a core part of the AWS service itself that they sell, that they support, that they bill for. It's a nice place to be. >> So, SaaS company. You're talking to the language of application development, Kubernetes, right? What do you think this means for the future of NetApp specifically, but also generally the on-prem storage business and the storage business in general? >> Well, we just announced our second quarter earnings today and what's happening is our cloud business is growing like crazy. We generated $388 million of ARR and the growth rates are, you know, astronomically high. That is increasingly helping our on-premise business to grow. You know, the nice thing about being in primarily, in the storage and data business is people aren't deleting many things. And the rate at which they're generating information is just accelerating. So, actually the confidence that we give the customer by demonstrating a sort of a cloud first, a sort of principles of all the cloud is actually giving customers to buy more on premise. So, we really don't mind. We are, our job much like Amazon's, is to have this customer obsession and you can't really go wrong, if you just keep asking them what they want. >> Yeah, if you can do so profitably, you're going to be reinvest in your business. Guys, we've got to go. >> Yeah. >> Love to have you back. >> Thank you. >> And you been quite a transformation. You said you're going to do it. You're doing it. So, well done to you. Five years in the making. Okay. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from AWS re:Invent 21. (upbeat music)

>> You're watching theCUBE. Welcome to our continuous coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. We've got an amazing event that's been going on for the last four days with two live sets, two studios, more than 100 guests, and two very distinguished gentlemen here on the set with us live in Las Vegas. I'd like to welcome Krishna Mohan, Vice President and Global Head of TCS's AWS Business Unit. Welcome Krishna. >> Thank you Dave. >> Dave: And also with us Aditya Jagapal Nagarajan. >> Thank you. >> Dave: I hope I did your name justice. >> Perfect. >> Right, I tried. And Aditya is Head of Strategy and Business Operations for the TCS AWS Business Unit. Krishna, starting with you, tell us about TCS and AWS over the last year. What's been going on. >> Yeah. >> Thank you Dave for having me here. It's great to be in person actually, back in re-Invent, back in person, 25,000 people, but still we have pretty good measures, health measures that way. So I'm very happy to be here. TCS AWS business unit was formed three quarters back and we actually had always AWS partnership, but we actually felt that it's important to kind of have a separate business unit, which is the full stack, multi dimensional unit providing cloud migration modernization across applications, data, and infrastructure, and also main focus on industry solutions. So it has been a great three quarters, and our partnership only enhanced significantly, predominantly what we're actually seeing in the last one year. The cloud overall transformation, I think it kind of taken a different shape. It used to be cloud migration, modernization, cloud native development, but from there it has moved to enterprise transformation, that's happening on cloud, and specifically AWS majority of the time. So with that, we actually see a lot of customers. Broadly you can categorize them into three, cloud for IT, cloud for business, and cloud for innovation. And we're definitely seeing maximum traction there with our customers across the three categories. So I'm super excited to be here at the re-Invent, you know, a couple of our customers were in the keynote, Abort and Adam and Doug. In the Western Union was the keynote, Shelly covered at Western union transformation in the partner keynote with Doug, and very happy to see Linda Cower, the transformation in the United Headlines with Adam. So it's really great to see how we are helping the customers on the transformation. That's definitely, you know, the way that we see. And we have made significant progress on the overall in the last three quarters. And these kinds of wins and business transformation that has actually happened is what resulted in TCS getting the Raising Star GSA award for us. So I'm pretty happy to actually carry this little thing here. >> Is that what this is? >> Absolutely. So it means a lot because our customer in our kind of reinforcing the value, the TCS, along with AWS is bringing to the customer. >> So I wasn't going to say anything. I just assumed that you were a 2001 Space Odyssey fan and you just brought, you know, a version of the monolith with you. I wasn't sure. Congratulations. >> Thank you. That's a quite an achievement especially in the relatively short period of time. And especially with the constraints that have been placed upon all of us. Did they give you like a schwag bag with a bunch of, with, you know, like they do at the academy awards? Are you familiar with that. >> We had a great fun event on Monday afternoon. >> Fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Aditya, talk about, you're a consultancy, your organization is a consultancy. Talk about how you engage with the customers that you are helping to bridge the divide between what their business requirements are, and the technology that AWS is delivering. Because I think we all agree that everything we're seeing here from AWS is wonderful, but without an organization like yours, actual end users, actual customers, have a hard time driving benefits. So, how do you approach that? >> Gladly thank you, Dave, and thank you for theCUBE for having us here. And just borrowing from what Krishna talked about, the three layers of value creation, the cloud for IT, cloud for business and cloud for innovation. We see the journeys clients take, to start with how they look at IT modernization, and go all the way to business transformation, and look at ecosystem transformation as well. For example, we just heard about Western Union and we just came off of one with SWBC where they have completely modernized the payment systems on AWS and TCS has been the partner for transforming that for them. And that not only just means the technology layers, but also re imagining business processes in the cloud. Moving on from the financial side, if you look at the digital farming, for example, we have been working with some of the leading, the transmitter players in the healthcare industry and in the manufacturing space to look at helping farmers with AI. Right? And helping them look at how they can ensure better analytics and drone capabilities for digital farming. Drug trial development and acceleration for time to market has been a front and center for all of us in the last two years where I've been helping pharmacy organizations get better and will bring up drug trials and reach the end customers better with cloud. So there's various examples here. >> I want to poke on that a little bit. >> Aditya: Yeah. So when TCS is engaging a customer, say in farming versus pharma, how much of your interaction with them is specialized by industry vertical or specific area expertise versus the generic workings that are going to be supporting that effort in the background? What does that look like? Are you going in first with a pharma discussion, first with the farm discussion, as opposed to an overall discussion? >> It's a great point you mentioned Dave because that's the sort of essence of TCS. Because the way we look at it, we actually appeal to the industry specific. So our domain and contextual knowledge is very important to appeal to the customers and to the various stakeholders, no longer are the days where you talk about technology as a means to an end. We talk about how end customers can benefit in that context of what they're going through in that industry. And how can then technology be part of that strategy, right? So, hence, as you rightly said, domain and context first, followed by technology powering the outcome. >> Even though farm and pharma sound a lot alike. >> Right, I showed you the very difference. >> And they may share some things in common. Yes, very, very different. Krishna, talk about your go to market motion. How are clients aware of TCS? Do you have teams that engage clients directly and then bring AWS into the conversation? Or are you being brought in by AWS? Is it a combination? What does that look like? >> So, very good relevant question. So our GTM strategies is TCS has been in the, you know, serving the enterprise customers and IT transformation for 52 years now. So we have a huge base. But specifically from an AWS BU perspective, we are focusing on selective verticals, banking financial services and insurance is large, life sciences, health care, and travel, transportation and hospitality. So these are the verticals that we're actually focusing on, and given our presence in the enterprise sector, we already have a direct sales teams who are engaging with the customers directly on enterprise transformation and business transformation. And once we have that conversation, we actually take all these solutions that we have built on AWS and along with AWS. There are few customers in the last three quarters, after farming the AWS business unit, one thing that we did is with AWS we're proactively going and identifying the logos and the customers. And with the focus not on technology, with the focus on how to solve their problems on the business side and how to create new business models. So it's kind of both. We bring in, AWS brings in logos as well, so Greenfield accounts, and as well as our contextual knowledge of the industry is how the GTM is working out, and working out pretty good. >> You mentioned, you've been at this for 52 years. >> Aditya: Yeah. >> You must've been very young when you started doing this. Talk about the internal dynamics. So think of TCS, the larger organization. You represent the AWS business unit. TCS has been doing this for a long time, predating what we think now of as cloud. I'm sure that you have long existing relationships with customers, where you've been doing things for them that aren't cloudy, and those things keep the lights on at TCS, right? Important sources of revenue. Yet you're going in and you're consulting and saying, hey, you know, it might be better for you, Mr. Customer, to work with AWS and TCS, as opposed to maybe being at a data center that TCS manages, I mean, how do you manage that internal dynamic? You've got to have people at TCS who are saying, stay away, that's my revenue, don't move my cheese. What does that look like? >> Very valid question Dave. So the way that TCS is actually looking at is, twin engine strategy. There's a cost and optimization strategy, which we have. We sell the customers and operations, running the BAU if you will, business as usual, then you have something called growth and transformation. So as a strategy that we are very clear that the path of business transformation is growth and transformation channel. So we as a company are very comfortable cannibalizing our C and O in a business because we want to be relevant to the market, relevant to the customer, and relevant to the partner ecosystem. So the only way you are relevant is actually to challenge yourself, cannibalize your own business, and for the long, you know, strategy of looking at how to grow. And that's how our twin engine strategy is working. And there are a lot of customers where we have developer with contextual knowledge serving 20 years, 25 years of the customers. We know how they work, what their business is actually, you know, what's going to be the future of the business. So we are in a better position to actually transform them. And as a company, we already took cannibalize our revenue. >> So Adi, give us an example of working with a customer and give us an idea of what that customer's perspective is in terms of their place on the spectrum of, I don't want to move anything if I don't have to versus, hey, you guys can't move fast enough to deliver what I want. Where are you seeing that spectrum of customer requirements at this point? Do you feel like you're having to lead people to water still? Where are we with that? >> Well, if you asked me this question a couple of years ago, it would be about, hey, look, here's a beautiful water and the lake looks good, why don't we spend by the side and see what it tastes like? Now the question is, how much water to drink? Right? So the point being that customers have fast realized that cloud is not just an IT decision, it's a business transformation decision. So if I may just call it back what Krishna talked about, the dual engine strategy. A clear Testament to that is some of our relationships, most of our relationships are the matter has been over two decades with our clients. And that's a perfect indication of being constantly relevant for them because as their models change, as their markets change, customer expectations change, we need to constantly innovate ourselves. >> You're innovating your business just like that. >> Absolutely. >> Correct. >> So you know, as we say, you're in the boat with them and you're going through the same changes. >> And so coming back to the question which you asked, the point was we give them a point of what experience they can have with cloud by each stakeholder. The CIO wants to look at how we can look at better sustainability of their operations, keep the lights on as you said, enhance stability with more automatable capabilities, looking at DevOps, the business is completely looking at how can cloud fundamentally change my business model. And you have both these stakeholders coexisting with the same outcome towards enterprise transformation. And that's the experience which we work with them to shape. To say what the starting point is? Where would they like to go? And how can we go to them in the journey? What's interesting here is, nobody has all the answers. Neither is AWS nor customer the TCS, but we are here to create a culture of discovering the right goal and the right answers. It's very important. That's the approach to getting it working. >> Krishna and our last minute together. You've just received the Rising Star Award, 2022 is rapidly approaching, this doesn't put any pressure on you at all for 2022 because people are going to ask, what are those rising stars do again in 2022? What's on the horizon, what are the two of you excited about for next year? >> I think we are super excited with how AWS, you know, definitely in Adam's keynote, if I had to take a couple of points that I'm taking away is in addition to enhancing their core cloud capabilities, but if there's pivoted on industry solutions, you know, the fin space that they have announced, and the industrial solutions that they have announced. So that is where it very clearly aligns to our strategy of TCS, helping customers look for change their business models, implement new business models, create ecosystem play. And that's basically where we are really super excited. And another point which I took from Adam is the, they're focused on Edge with IOT and private 5G. And that's very, very important especially when you look at it both IT, as well as the IOT transformation. So we are super excited with the potential, all the new bells and whistles AWS is rolled out in last four days, And looking forward for few more of this. >> Congratulations again. It's a fantastic acknowledgement of what you've been able to do over the last, just three quarters as you mentioned, closing out 2021 in a very, very good way. Looking forward to 2022. Thank you gentlemen for joining us today here on theCUBE, and thank all of you for joining us, for continuing continuous Cube coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. We are the leader in hybrid technology event coverage. I'm Dave Nicholson stay tuned for more from theCUBE.

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

>>Welcome back everybody to AWS reinvent. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante with my co-host David Nicholson. We're here all week. We got two sets, 20 plus thousand people here live at AWS reinvent. 21 of course last year was virtual. We got a hybrid event running. We had two studios running before the show running. A lot of pre-records really excited to have ninja Bardelli Walla, who is the chief product officer at data robot. Really interesting AI company. We're going to talk about insights with machine intelligence and then shout. It's great to see you again. It's been awhile. >>Great to see you as well. And I'm so happy to be on the cube. I think eight years since I first came on. >>When you launched the company that you founded back then Peck Sada on the cube, that was part >>Of the inner robot >>Family part of data, robot family. And of course, friend of the cube. Chris Lynch is the executive chairman of data robot. So a lot of connections, I always joke a hundred people in our industry, 99 seats, but tell us about data robot. What's the, what's the scoop these days. >>Thanks. Thanks very much for the opportunity to speak with both of you. Uh, I think we're seeing some very interesting trends. Uh, we've all been in the industry long enough to recognize, uh, that hype cycles they're cycles. They go in waves and, uh, the level of interest in AI has never been higher. Uh, every company in the world is looking for the opportunity to take advantage of AI, to improve their business processes, whether it's to improve their revenue it's to lower their cost profile or it's to lower their risk. What we're seeing that's most interesting is that, uh, we spend a lot of time working with companies on what we consider applied AI. That is how do we solve real business problems, uh, with the technology and not just run a bunch of experiments. You know, it's very tempting for a lot of us, Dave and David, uh, to, to do, uh, you know, spin up a spark cluster with 10,000 nodes and slosh a bunch of data through it. >>But the question we always ask at data robot is what is the business value of doing this? Why are we using these AI techniques and in order to solve what problem? So the biggest trend we see a data robot and one that we feel we're very well positioned to solve is that companies are coming out of that experimental phase. There's still a lot of experimentation going on and they're saying, okay, we, we stood up a cluster. Uh, we got a bunch of Python notebooks running around here, but we haven't really seen a return on our investment yet data robot, can you help us actually make AI real and concrete in terms of achieving a specific business outcome for us? >>Well, and I want to test something on your niche. That's something we've talked about a lot on the cube is a change in the way in which companies are architecting their data. When we first, it was like, okay, create a Hadoop cluster. And that spark came along to make that easier, but it was still this highly technical, highly centralized, hyper specialized roles where the business, people who have a really good understanding of the outcome had to kind of beg to get what they wanted because it was so technical and the success was defined as, Hey, it worked or we ran the experiment and it looks like it has promise. So now it seems like with companies like data robot, you're democratizing AI, allowing organizations to inject AI into their business processes, their applications. And it seems to be more business led. One of you could comment on that. >>I think that is a various dude observation. Uh, we launched this concept a little bit earlier this year of AI cloud. And the idea behind AI cloud is if you want to democratize AI, which is in fact has been DataRobot's vision since 2012, we were the first company on the cloud. The first AI cloud that ever existed was data robots in 2014. And the entire idea was that we knew that data scientists would always play a very important role in an organization, but yet the demand for AI would vastly outstrip the supply. And so in order to solve that challenge, we built AI cloud. We've actually spent over a million engineering hours in building this technology over the, over the last decade and put this together in a way where all of the different personas and the organizations, you have people who create AI applications. >>Those are the folks we usually think about, but those are the data scientists. Those are the analysts, those are the data engineers, but then you actually have to put it into production. You've got to run the system. So you also have to democratize this capability for the folks who are going to operate the system for the folks in risk and compliance. We're actually going to, uh, ensure that the system is operating in accordance with your policies and compliance regimes. And then the third wave of democratization, which we've just embarked on is then how do you bring AI into the hands of the actual business people? How do you put on a mobile device or a web browser, or in context, in an application with the decision, the ability for AI to drive a decision in your organization, which leads to an action, which helps drive you towards the outcome you're trying to optimize for. >>So AI cloud is about this pervasive tapestry, bringing together the creators, the consumers, the individuals who operate these systems into a single system that can lower the barrier to entry for people who don't have the skills, but allow you to plug in and go deep underneath the covers and modify whatever you need to, if you have that level of technical skill and that ability for us to kind of slide, slide the slider in one direction or the other, I could slide it to the right and say, I want all automation, something data robot has pioneered and is absolutely the leader in, but we can also, especially in these last couple of years, say, I want to be able to use as much code as I want to bring in. And the beauty of the model is that customers can choose how much they want to let the machine drive or how much they want to let the human being drive. David. I love that, >>That idea of a slider, because now you're talking about generalists getting access to really powerful tools. >>Yeah, no, exactly. And I, I'm curious, what's your view on where we are culturally with AI at this point? And what I mean by culturally is the idea that, okay, that's great. You put powerful tools in the hands of business users. Um, do most of us still need to have a lot of visibility under the covers to understand the inner workings so that we trust what we're being told? You know, I'm fine pulling a lever and having a little biscuit come out of SWOT as long as I've gotten a tour of the kitchen at some point in time. Yes. I mean, where are we with that? Where where's the level of >>Absolutely fantastic question and it's one that's, it's actually pervasive to the way data robot operates. So trust gets, uh, engendered by multiple different capabilities that you build throughout the platform. The first one is around, uh, explainability. So when you get a prediction from a system, just like you mentioned, you know, if, if the stakes are not very high, you know, you, uh, we're here in Las Vegas, of course I'm thinking of slot machines. If you get a biscuit at the end of it and it tastes pretty good. Hey, great. Right? When you're making a mission critical business decision, you don't want to be in the position where you don't understand why the system is making the decision. It does. So we have historically invested an enormous amount of effort in explainability tools, having the system actually at a prediction level, explain to you, why is it making the recommendation it's making? >>For example, the system says this customer has a high likelihood of churn. Why? Because their account balance has been declining over the last five months. Uh, number two, because their credit score has been going down. And what gives you the trust is actually the machine and the human able to communicate in the same language and same vernacular about the business value. So that's one part of it. The second part is about transparency, right? So one of the things that the automated machine learning movement, that data robot pioneered, uh, has been, I'd say rightfully criticized for frankly, is that it's too much of a black box. It's too much magic. I load my dataset. I press the start button and data robot does everything else for me. Well, that's not very satisfying when you have a 10 or a hundred million dollar decision coming on the other side, even if the technology is actually doing the job correctly, which data robot usually does. >>So where we've morphed and evolved our position in the market and where I have driven our technology portfolio at data robot is to say, you know what? There is a very important aspect of trust that needs to be brought to bear here, which is that if somebody wants to see code, let them see code. And in fact, the beauty of AI cloud is that on the same platform, the people who don't like code, but are, are very good at understanding the business domain con uh, the business domain knowledge and the context. They now have the ability to do that. But when they're at the stage before they're going to deploy anything to production. Now you can raise your hand at data robot and actually use our workflow and say, I need a coder to review this. I want the professional data scientist who has all this knowledge who understands and has read up on the latest advances in hyper parameter tuning to look at the model and tell me that this is going to be okay. And so we allow both the less technical folks and the very deep technical data scientists, the ability to collaborate on the same environment, which allows you to build trust in terms of the human side of, Hey, I don't want to just let anybody throw a model into production. I like, >>I mean, I see those, the transparency and the explainability is almost two sides of the same coin, right? Because you know, if you're gonna be accused of gender bias, you can say, no, here's how the system may, it's not like, you know, you think about the internet. It tells you it's a cat, but you don't really know how the machine determined that you're breaking apart, blowing away that black box. And the other thing I like what you said was you have data producers and data consumers, and you also talked about context because a lot of times the data producers, they don't necessarily care about the context or the PI data pipeline. People necessarily care about the context. So, okay. So now we're at the point where you're democratizing data, you're doing some great work. What are some of the blockers that you see today that you're obliterating with data robot? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Sure. >>So, so I think, uh, you know, one very important concept is that, uh, in a democracy, we talked about democratization. You still have rules, you still have governance. It's not a free for all the free for all version of that is called NRG. That's not what any company wants, right? So we have to blend the freedom and flexibility that we want businesses to have with the compliance and regulatory observability that we need in order to be successful. So what we're seeing in, in our, in our customer base and what companies are coming to data robot to discuss is, okay, we've tried these experiments. Now we want to actually get to real business value. And one of the things that's really unique about data robot is that we have put, uh, we have, we've worked in our system on over 1 million projects, training models, inside data robot. >>We have seen every type of use case across different industries, whether it's healthcare or manufacturing, uh, or, or retail, uh, we have the ability to understand those different data sets and actually to come up with models. So we have that breadth of information there if you aggregate that over time, right? So again, we did not come to AI. This is not a fad for us. We didn't start as one kind of company than slap the AI label on and say, Hey, we're an AI company now, right? We have been AI native since day one. And in that process, what we have found is working on these, this million plus projects on these data sets across these industries, we have a very good sense of which projects will actually deliver value and which don't. And that gets to a previous point that you were making, which is that you have to know and partner with an organization who it's not just about the technology. So we have fantastic people who we call our customer facing data scientists who will tell the customer, look, I know you think this is a really high value use case, but we've tried it at other customers. And unfortunately it didn't work very well. Let's steer you, cause you need with a, with a technology that is largely at the early stage and the maturity that organizations have with it, you need to help them in order to deliver success. And no vendor has delivered more successful production deployment of AI than data road. >>No, don't go down that path. It's a dead end as a cul-de-sac. So just avoid it. So we talked about transparency, explainability governance. Can you get that to the point where it's self-serve as you, as you put data in the hands of business, people where the context lives, the domain experts, can you get to self-serve and federate that governance? Yes. >>So you can, uh, that's one of the key principles of what we, what we do at data robot. And it comes back to a concept that I learned, uh, you, you both will remember. We were in the Sarbanes-Oxley crazy world of, I dunno, was that 15 years of saved data warehousing. >>Everybody wanted to talk about socks. You know, my wife would hear me on the phone. She'd be like, what is your sudden obsession with socks? I'm like, no, no, it's not what you fit. And so, um, but what came from Sarbanes Oxley are, are these, uh, longstanding principles around the segregation of duties and segregation of responsibilities. You can have democracy democratization with governance, if you have the right segregation of duties. So for example, I have somebody who can generate lots of different models, right? But I don't allow them to, to, uh, in a self-service way, just deploy into production. I actually have a workflow system which will go through multiple rigorous approvals and say, these three people have signed off, they've done an audit, uh, an, an audit assessment of this model. It's good to go, let's go and drop it into production. So the way that you get to self-service with governance is to have the right controls and policies and frameworks that surround the self-service model with the right checks and balances that implement the segregation of duties I'm talking >>And you get that right. And then you can automate it and then you can really scale, right? You gotta have your back because it's such a great topic. We, we barely scratched the surface. It was great to see you again, congratulations on all the success. And, uh, as I say any time, let's do this again. Fantastic. Thank >>You so much. All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching you watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, Dave Volante for David Nicholson. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube, the leader in high-tech coverage.

>>Here you are new. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with John farrier, John, we have two live sets. There's a dueling set right across from us two remote studios over 100 guests on the cube at AWS reinvent 2021. Been great. We've had great conversations. We're talking about the next generation of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. Lisa Bernays here, the CEO and co-founder of D L Z P group. Lisa. Welcome. >>Hi, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and John. It's a great opportunity >>And John's lucky he gets to lease us for the price of London. One second. Talk to me about da DLDP. This is a woman and minority owned company. Congratulations. That's awesome. But talk to us about your organization and then we'll kind of dig into your partnership with AWS. >>Sure. So DLC P group, we found it in 2012. Um, and for us, we were at the time we were just looking for a way to offer a value added service to our customers. We wanted to always make sure that we were giving them the best quality, but what I also wanted to do is I wanted to create an environment for my employees, where they felt valued, and we kind of built these core values back then about respect, flat hierarchy, um, team, team learning, mentorship, and we incorporated, so everybody can do this remotely from around the world. So we've always made sure that our employees and customers are getting the best value. >>Well, what kind of customers, what target market, what kind of customers do you guys work with? >>Well, we've actually made sure that we're diverse. We make sure that we have 50% in public sector and 50% in private sector, but it's been very, very interesting journey for us because once we started one sec, like we started with cities and then a number of cities started contacting us to do more business. So it's always been this hurdle to make sure we're diverse enough to make sure we offer the best solutions. >>And you jumped in with AWS back in 2012 when most folks were still to your point. I saw your interview earlier this summer, thinking about Amazon as a bookstore, why a debit? What did you see as the opportunity back in 2012 with them? >>Well, when we first heard about AWS, my first thought is, well, it's amazon.com. What is AWS? And then once we started talking to them, we saw the capabilities and the potential there. We saw what it could do. So we partnered with them to actually have the first working PeopleSoft customer on AWS. So that's a large ERP application and that helped build the foundation to prove what could actually run on the cloud. And since then, we've been able to prove so much more about the technology and what AWS is accomplishing. >>Was it a hard sell back in the day? >>It was a little bit hard, but it was interesting because we were speaking with one of our customers they're on premise and they're like, well, you know, we're going to have to re do a whole data center. We're talking about millions of dollars. We don't really have the budget to redo this. And that's when we're like, well, we have this great partnership with Amazon. We think this would be the perfect opportunity to let you try the cloud and see how successful it was. >>At least I want to point out you got your, one of the Pathfinders that Adams Leschi pointed out because back in 2012, getting PeopleSoft onto the cloud, which is really big effort, but that's what everyone's doing now. I just saw the news here. SAP is running their application on graviton too, right? So you start to see and public sector during the pandemic, we saw a ton of connect. So you were really on this whole ERP. ERP is our big applications. It's not small, but now it's, everyone's kind of going that way. What's the current, uh, you feel how you feel about that one? And what's the current update relative to the kind of projects you got going on? >>Well, we've, we've evolved quite a bit. I mean, PeopleSoft is always going to be in our DNA. A lot of my employees are ex or Oracle employees. They have developed a lot of the foundations for PeopleSoft, but since then, like we've worked with serverless technology when that was released a number of years ago, we, we asked our team, okay, AWS just talked about Lambda, serverless technology, go figure out what is the best solution. We ended up running ours, our website serverless. We were one of the first. And from that, we brought our website costs down from hundreds of dollars to pennies a month. So it's a huge savings. And then we started, um, about two years ago, we spoke with our utility company. Um, there were saying how with machine learning, they were only going to be able to get a 75% accuracy for their wind turbines. And we said, well, let us take a shot at it. We have some great solutions on AWS that we think might work. We were able to redo their algorithm using AWS cloud native tools, open source data to get a 97 to 99% accuracy on a daily basis. And that saves them millions of dollars each day. >>Don's right. And as Adam was saying with some of the folks, customers, he was highlighting on main stage the other day, you are a Pathfinder. How did you get the confidence? Especially as a female minority owned business. I'd love to just get maybe for some of those younger viewers out there. How did you get the confidence to, you know what? I think we can do this. >>I think for me, I, I, I don't like to take no for an answer. There's always a solution. So we're always looking at technology, seeing how we can use it to get a better answer. >>What do you think about reinvent this year? A lot of goodies here every year, there's always new creative juices flowing because it's a learning conference, but it's also feels like a futuristic kind of conference. What's your take this year? >>I don't know if you happen to attend midnight madness when they were talking about robotics and the future with that. I mean, we've been talking about that for a number of years of what could be created with robotics. Like even my son back in middle school was talking about creating a robot Butler. He just, everybody knows what the future is. And it's so great that we finally have the foundation in technology to be able to create these >>Well, if you're someone that doesn't like to say, no, does your son actually have a robot Butler these >>Days? He's still working on it. >>That's a good answer to say, Hey, sorry, your mom's not going to be there to get the robot. The latency thing. This is the robot. First of all, we'd love the robotics, I think is huge. We just had George on who's the fraught PM for ECE to edge and late, the wavelength stuff looks really promising for the robotics stuff. Super exciting. >>Yes. We can't wait to start playing with it more. I mean, it's something that our team has been dabbling. We spent probably about 30% of our time on R and D. So we're looking at the future and what we can invent next because >>You guys can affect such dramatic changes for customers. You talked about that wind turbine customer going from 75% accuracy to 97, 90 8%. Where are your customer conversations? Cause that's, is, are they at the C level with showing organizations that dramatic reduction in costs and workforce productivity increased that they can get? >>We talk with everyone it's it could be the solution architect. It could be an intern. It could, and we're just sharing our ideas with them. And we also talk with the C level. Um, it's just, it's everybody is interested in and they have different, different ideas that they want to share. So with the solution architect, we can share with them the code and how we're going to architect it. While the C level, we just pointed out black and white, this is your cost. Now this is what your cost is going to be. And everybody is happy. They, they jump on board with it. >>Lisa, you mentioned 30% R and D by the way, it's awesome. By the way, that's well above most averages, what are you working on? Because I totally think companies should have a big R and D play around budget, get a sandbox, going get some tinkering. Cause you never know where the real discoveries we had. David Brown who runs NC to nitro, came out of a card on the network. So you'd never know where the next innovation comes from. What's the, what are you guys doing for R and D? What's the fun projects are what endeavors. >>So there's two of them. One is actually a product, which is a little bit out of our comfort zone, but we're, we're, we're looking to develop something that will be able to help, um, NASA. So that's the goal where, you know, we've been working on it since they released their ma their mission to Mars projection. So it's something that we're very passionate about, but then we're also building a software. Uh, we've been working on it for about three years now and we actually have two customers prototyping it. So we're hoping to be able to launch it to the public within the next year. >>You mentioned NASA and I just about jumped out of my chair. That was my first job out of grad school was really the space program. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're helping them do? I love how forward-thinking that they are, obviously they always have been, but tell me a little bit more about that. >>So I can't share too much because it's one of those things is a common sense thing. Once you think about a little bit more, it's kind of like why didn't anybody never think about this? So we're using new technology and old technology together to combine the solution. >>Ooh, I can't wait to learn more. Talk to us about these. Think big for small business TB SB program at AWS. How long have you guys been a part of that and what is it enabling? What is it going to enable you to do in 2022? So >>The think big for small business program was the brainchild is Sandy Carter. And I am always, always going to be grateful to her. Um, I met with her in 2019. I shared her journey, our journey with her about how we started out being a premier partner and then over time, because there's so many other partners, we were downgraded. And because just because we're a small business, and even if I had every employee, even my admin staff certified, we would never have enough employees to be to the next level, even though we had the customers, the references. So she listened to us and other small businesses and created the program. And it's been a great opportunity for us because we're, we're gaining access to capital, you know, funding for opportunities. We're getting resources for training. So it, for us, it's been a huge advantage. >>It sounds like a part of that AWS flywheel that we always talk about. John Sandy Carter being one of our famous Cuba alumni. She was just on yesterday with you. Okay. >>And there's so many opportunities for all businesses because you can, you can tackle these problems. You don't have to be a large partner. You can have specialty in AI works really well in these specialized environments. And even technically single-threaded multithreaded applications, which is a technical CS term is actually better to have a single threaded. If you have too many cores, it's actually bad technically. So the world's changing like big time on how technology. So I'm a huge fan of the program. And I think like it's just one of those things where people can get it from cloud and be successful. >>Yes. And that's the goal. I mean, there is so much opportunity in the cloud and we bring interns on all the time, just so they can learn. And what, what resonated with me the most was we brought a high school senior in, he goes, I was with you guys for three months. I learned more in three months, I did four years of high school. And he's like, you set me up for the future. >>Oh my gosh. If there's not validation for you doing in that statement alone. My goodness. Well, you know, some of the things that, that are so many exciting announcements that have come out of this reinvent, so great to be back in person one. Um, but also, you know, being able to help AWS customers become data companies. Because as we were been talking about the last couple of days, every company has to be a data company. You gotta figure it out. If you're, if you haven't by now, there's a competitor right back here, who's ready to take your spot. Talk to us about what excites you about enabling companies to become data companies as we head into 2020. >>Well, for us, everybody has so much data nowadays. You know, I mean even think about cell phones, how much data is stored in that. So each device has so much information, but what do you do with it? So it's great because a lot of these companies are trying to figure out what, how can we use this data to prove that improve the experience for our customers? So that's where we've been coming in and showing them, okay, well, you can take that data. You look at Lisa and John cell phone. You see that they, they love to look up where they're going to go on their next vacation. You can start creating algorithms to make sure that they get the best experience one for the next vacation to make sure it's not a won't Rob the bank. >>Awesome. And going on vacation tomorrow. So I'll be, I'll be expecting some help from you on that. It's been great to have you on the program. Yeah. Congratulations on the success, the partnership, and where can folks go if if young or old years are watching and are interested in working with you, it's the website where they, where can they go to learn more >>Information? So they can go to D L Z P group.com >>DLZ P group.com. Awesome. Lisa, thanks so much for coming back on the program. Great >>To see you. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.