(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm here with my co-host John Furrier and we're running one of the largest, most significant technology events in the history of 2021. Two live sets here in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And we are absolutely delighted. We're incredibly delighted to welcome a returning alumni. It's not enough to just say that you're an alumni because you have been such a fixture of theCUBE for so many years. Annie Weinberger. And Annie is head of product marketing for applications at AWS. Annie, welcome. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be back. >> It's wonderful to have you back. Let's dive right into it. >> Okay. >> Talk to us about Connect. What does that mean when I say Connect? >> Yes, well, I think if we talk about Amazon Connect, we have to go back to the beginning of the origin story. So, over 10 years ago, when Amazon retail was looking for a solution to manage their customer service and their contact center, we went out and we looked at different solutions and nothing really met our needs. Nothing could kind of provide the scale that we needed at Amazon, or could really be as flexible as we needed to ensure that we're our customer obsession could come through in our customer service. So we built our own solution. And over the years, customers were coming to us and asking, you know, what do you use for your customer service technology? And so we launched Amazon Connect, our omni-channel cloud contact center solution just over four years ago. And it is the one of the fastest growing services at AWS. We have tens of thousands of customers using it today, like Capital One into it, Bank of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Best Western, you know, I can go on and on. And they're using it to have over 10 million interactions with customers every day. So it's, you know, growing phenomenally and we just couldn't be more proud to help our customers with their customer service. >> So, yeah. Talk about some of the components that go into that. What are the sort of puzzle pieces that make up AWS Connect? Because obviously connecting with a customer can take a whole bunch of different forms with email, text, voice. >> Yeah >> What's included in that? >> So it's an omni-channel cloud contact center. It provides, you know, any way you want to talk to your customers. There's traditional methods of voice. There's automated ways to connect. So IVRs or interactive voice responses where you call with voice prompts, there's chat, you know. We have Lex Bots that use the same technology that powers Alexa for natural language understanding. And I think customers really like it for a few reasons. One is that unlike kind of other contact center solutions, you can set it up in minutes. You know, American Preparatory Academy had to set up a contact center, they did it in two days. And then it's very, very easy to customize and use. So another example is, you know, when Priceline was going through COVID and they realized their call volume went up 300% overnight, and everybody was just sitting near the queue waiting to talk to an agent. So in 20 minutes, we were able to go in and very easily with a drag and drop interface, customize the ad flow so that people who had a reservation in the next 72 hours were prioritized. So very, very easily. >> You just jumped the gun on me. I was going to ask this because we never boarding that Connect during the pandemic was a huge success. >> Annie: Yes. >> It was many, many examples where people were just located, disrupted by the pandemic. And you guys had tons of traction from government public sector to commercial across the board. Adam Solecki told me in person a couple weeks ago that it was on fire, Connect was on fire. So again, a tailwind, one of those examples with the pandemic, but it highlights this idea or purpose built, ready to go. >> Pre-built the applications. >> Pre-built application. This is a phenomenon. >> It's moving up the stack for AWS. It's very exciting. I think, yeah, we had over 5,000 new contact centers stood up in March and April of 2020 alone. >> Dave: Wow. >> Give it some scale, just go back to the scale piece. Cause this is like, like amazing to stand up a call center like hours, days. Like this is like incredible to, give us some stats on some examples of how fast people were standing up Connect. >> Yeah, I mean, you could stand it up overnight. American Preparatory Academy, as I mentioned did it in two days, we had, you know, this county of Los Angeles did theirs I think at a day. You could go and right now you don't need any technical expertise, even though you have some. >> theCUBE call center, we don't need people calling. >> We had everyone from a Mexican restaurant needed to take to go orders. Cause now it's COVID and they don't have a call. They've been able to set that up, grab a phone number and start taking takeout orders all the way to like capital one, you know, with 40,000 agents that need to move remote overnight. And I think that it's because of that ease to set up, but also the scale and the way that we charge. So, you know, it's AWS consumption-based pricing. You only pay for the interactions with customers. So the barrier to entry is really, really low. You don't have to migrate everything over and buy a bunch of new licenses. You can just stand it up and you're only charged for the interactions with customers. And then if you want to scale down like into it, obviously tax season they're bringing on a lot more agents to handle calls, when those agents aren't really needed for that busy time, you're not paying for those seats. >> You're flex. Take me through the, okay, that's a win, I get that. So home run, great success. Now, the machine learning story is interesting too, because you have the purpose-built platform. There's some customizations that can happen on top of it. So it's not just, here's a general purpose piece of software. People are using some customizations. Take us through the other things. >> Well, the exciting thing is they're not even real customizations because we're AWS, we can leverage the AML services and built pre-built purpose-built features. So there it's embedded and you know, Amazon Connect has been cloud native and AI born since the very beginning. So we've taken a lot of the AI services and built them into you don't need any knowledge. You don't have to know anything about AIML. You can just go in and start leveraging it. And it has huge powerful effects for our customers. We launched three new features this year. One was Amazon Wisdom. That's part of Amazon Connect. And what that does is, you know, if you're an agent and you're on the phone and customer's asking questions, today what they have to do is go in and search across all these different knowledge repositories to find the answer or, you know, how do I issue a refund? You know, we're hearing about this feature that's broken on our product. We're listening behind the scenes to that call and then just automatically providing the knowledge articles as they're on the call saying, this is what you should do, giving them recommendations so we can help the customer much more quickly. >> I love them moving up the stack. Again, a huge fan of Connect. We've highlighting in all of our stories. It's a phenomenon that's translating to other areas, but I want to tie back in where it goes next cause on these keynotes, Adam Solecki's and today was Swami, the conversations about a horizontal data plane. And so as customers would say, use Connect, I might want, if I'm a big customer I want to integrate that into my data because it's voice data, it's call centers, customer data, but I have other databases. So how do you guys look at that integration layer snapping it together with say, a time series database, or maybe a CRM system or retail e-commerce because again, it's all data but it's connected call center. Some may think it's silo, but it's not really siloed. So, I'm a customer. How do I integrate call center? >> Yeah and it's, you know, we have a very strong partner with Salesforce. They're actually a reseller of Connect. So we work with them very, very closely. We have out of the box integrations with Salesforce, with your other, you know, analytics databases with Marketo with other services that you need. I think again, it's one of the benefits of being AWS, it's very extensible, very flexible, and really easy to bring in and share the data that we have with other systems. >> John: So it's not an issue then. >> One of the conversation points that's come up is the, this idea that a large majority of IT Spend is still on premises today. In other words, the AWS total addressable market hasn't been tapped yet. And, you imagine going through the pandemic, someone using AWS Connect to create a virtual call center, now as we hopefully come out and people some return to the office, but now they have the tools to be able to stay at home and be more flexible. Those people, maybe they weren't in the cloud that much before. But to John's point, now you start talking about connecting all of those other data sources. Well, where do those data sources belong? They belong in AWS. So, from your perspective, on the surface it looks like, well, wait, you have these products, but really those are gateways to everything else that AWS does. Is that a fair statement? >> I think it's very, yeah. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> The big thing I want to get into is okay, we're, I mean, we don't have a lot of people calling for theCUBE but I mean, we wouldn't use the call center, but there's audio involved. Are people more going back to the old school phones for support now with the pandemic? Cause you've mentioned that earlier about the price line, having more- >> I think it's, you know, when we talk to our customers too, it's about letting, letting any customer contact you the way they want to. You know, we, you know, I was talking to Delta, spoke with us yesterday in the business application leadership session. And she said, you know, when someone has a flight issue, I'm sure you can attest to this. I did the same thing. They call, you know, if your, if your flight got canceled or it's looking like it's going to keep pushing, you don't necessarily want to go, you know, use a chat bot or send an email or a text, but there's other use cases where you just want a quick answer, you know, if you contact, I haven't received my product yet, you know, it said it was shipped, I didn't get it. I don't necessarily want to talk to someone, but so, it's just about making that available. >> On the voice side, is it other apps are integrating voice? So what's the interface to call center? Is it, can I integrate like an app voice integrated through the app or it's all phone? >> Because for the agents, there's an agent UI. So they'll see kind of calls that they have in their queue coming up, they'll see the tasks that they have to issue or refund. They'll see the kind of analytics that they have. The knowledge works. There's a supervisor view, so they could go see, you know, we with contact lens for Amazon Connect, we had a launch this, you know, this week, every event around contact lens, it lets you see the trends and sentiment of what's going on the call. It gives them like those training moments. If people aren't using the standard sign-off or the standard greeting on the call, it's a training moment and they can kind of see what's happening and get real-time alerts. If two keywords of a customer saying they cancel into the call, that can get a flag and they can go in and help the agent if necessary. So. >> All kinds of metadata extraction going on in real time. >> Yeah. >> How do you, how would AWS to go through the process of determining what should be bespoke solution hearing versus something that can be productized? And we know there are 475 different kinds of instances. However, you can come up with a package solution where people could pick features and get up and running really quickly. How is that decision making process? >> Well, I mean, you know, 90% at least of what we do build, it comes from what our customers ask for. So we don't, it's the onus is not on us. We listen to our customers, they tell us what they want us to build. Contact center solutions are their line of business applications are purchased by business decision makers and they're used to doing more buying than building. So they wanted to be more out of the box, more like pre-built, but we still are AWS. We make it very, very extensible, very easy to customize, like pull in other data sources. But when we look at how we are going to move up the stack and other areas, we just continue to listen to our customers. >> What's the biggest thing you learned in the pandemic from the team? What's the learnings coming out of the pandemic as hybrid world is upon us? >> I mean, I think a few things with, you know, starting, as you mentioned with the cloud, that the kind of idea of a contact center being a massive building, usually in the middle of America where, you know, people go and they sit and they have conversations. If that was really turned on its head and you can have very secure and accessible solutions through the cloud so that you can work from anywhere. So that was really fantastic to see. >> That's going to be interesting to see moving forward. How that paradigm shifts some centralized call centers, but a lot of this aggregated work that can be done. >> I mean, who knows the, you know, gig economy could be in the contact center, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely >> Yeah >> Maybe get some CUBE hosts, give us theCUBE Connect. We get some CUBE hosts remote. >> That's important work, yeah. >> We need, we need to talk. I got to got my phone number in that list. Annie, it's been fantastic to have you. >> Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. >> For John Furrier, this is Dave Nicholson telling you, thank you for joining our continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. Stick with theCUBE for the best in hybrid event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, welcome to the Cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin and I have a Cube alumni joining me Next. Aaron Kelly, the GM of product marketing at AWS Aaron. Welcome back to the program. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Likewise, even though we don't get to all be crammed into Las Vegas together, uh, excited to talk to you about Amazon Connect, talk to our audience about what that is. And then let's talk about it in terms of how it's been a big facilitator during this interesting year, that is 2020. >>Great, yes, for sure. So Amazon Connect is a cloud contact center where we're really looking to really reinvent how contact centers work by bringing it into the cloud. It's an Omni Channel, easy to use contact center that allows customers to spin up contact centers in minutes instead of months. Its very scalable so can scale to 10 tens of thousands of agents. But it also scaled down when you when it's not in use and because it's got a pay as you go business model. You only pay when you're engaging with collars or customers. You're not paying for high upfront per agent fees every month. So it's really been a great service during this pandemic, as there's been a lot of unpredictable spikes in demand, uh, that customers have had to deal with across many sectors, >>and we've been talking for months now about the acceleration that Corbett has delivered with respect to digital transformation. And, of course, as patients has been wearing fin globally. I think with everybody when we're calling a contact center, we want a resolution quickly. And of course, as we all know is we all in any industry are working from home. So are they. So I can imagine during this time that being able to have a cloud contact center has been transformative, I guess, to help some businesses keep the lights on. But now to really be successful moving forward, knowing that they can operate and scale up or down as things change. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And so one of the key benefits of connect his ability to very quickly on board and get started, you know, we have some very interesting and examples like Morrisons, which is a retailer in the UK They wanted to create a new service as you highlighted, which was a door, you know, doorstep delivery service. And so they needed to spin up a quick new contact center in order to handle those orders. They were able to do it and move all their agents remotely in about a day and be able to immediately start to take those orders, which is really powerful, you know. Another interesting example is the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training. Which part of their responsibility is to deliver unemployment benefits for their citizens? Obviously a huge surge of demand there they were able to build an entirely new context center in about nine days to support their citizens. They went from a knave ridge of about 74 call volume sort of capacity per minute to 1000 call on capacity per minute. And in the first day of standing up this new context center, they were able to serve 75,000 Rhode Island citizens with their unemployment benefits. So really ah, great example of having that cloud scalability that ability to bring agents remotely and then helping citizens in need during a very, very difficult time, >>right? So a lot of uses private sector, public sector. What are some of the new capabilities of Amazon connected? You're announcing at reinvent. >>Yeah, So we announced five big capabilities this during reinvent yesterday that really spanned the entire experience, and our goal is to make it better for agents so they're more efficient. That actually helps customers reduce their costs but also create a better collar experience so that C sat could go up in the collars, can get what they need quickly and then move on. And so the first capability is Amazon Connect Voice I D, which makes it easier to validate that the person calling is who in fact, they say they are so in this case, Lee. So let's say you're calling in. You can opt in tow, have a voice print made of you. The next time you call in, we're able to use machine learning to match that voiceprint to know. Yes, it is Lisa. I don't need to ask Lisa questions about her mother's maiden name and Social Security number. We can validate you quickly as an agent I'm confident it's you. So I'm less concerned about things like fraud, and we can move on. That's the first great new feature. The second is Amazon Connect customer profiles. So now, once you join the call rather than me is an agent having to click around a different systems and find out your order history, etcetera. I could get that all surface to me directly. So I have that context. I can create a more personalized experience and move faster through the call. The third one is called Wisdom. It's Amazon Connect wisdom, which now based on either what you're asking me or a search that I might make, I could get answers to your questions. Push to me using machine learning. So if you may be asking about a refund policy or the next time a new product may launch, I may not know rather than clicking around and sort of finding that in the different systems is pushed right to me. Um, now the Fourth Feet feature is really time capability of contact lens for Amazon connect, and what this does is while you were having our conversation, it measures the sentiment based on what you're saying or any keywords. So let's say you called it and said, I want a refund or I want to cancel That keyword will trigger a new alert to my supervisor who can see that this call may be going in the wrong direction. Let me go help Aaron with Lisa. Maybe there's a special offer I can provide or extra assistance so I can help turn that call around and create a great customer experience, which right now it feels like it's not going in that direction. And then the last one is, um, Amazon Connect tasks where about half of an agents time is spent on task other than the call follow up items. So you're looking for a refund or you want me Thio to ship you a new version of the product or something? Well, today I might write that on a sticky note or send myself a reminder and email. It's not very tracked very well. With Amazon Connect task, I can create that task for me as a supervisor. I could then X signed those tax and I can make sure that the follow up items air prioritized. And then when I look at my work. You is an agent. I can see both calls, my chats and my task, which allows me to be more efficient. That allows me to follow up faster with you. My customer, Andi. Overall, it's gonna help lower the cost and efficiency of the Contact Center. So we're really excited about all five of these features and how they improve the entire life cycle of a customer contact. >>And that could be table stakes for any business in terms of customer satisfaction. You talked about that, but I always say, You know, customer satisfaction is inextricably linked to employee satisfaction. They need. The agents need to be empowered with that information and really time, but also to be able to look at. I want them to know why I'm calling. They should already know what I have. We have that growing expectation right as a consumer. So the agent experience the customer experience. You've also really streamline. And I could just see this being something that is like I said, kind of table stakes for an organization to reduce churn, to be able to service more customers in a shorter amount of time and also employee satisfaction, right, >>right that's that. That's exactly right. Trader Grills, which is one of our, you know, beta customers using some of these capabilities. You know, they're saying 25% faster, handle times so shorter calls and a 10% increase in customer satisfaction because now it's personalized. When you call in, I know what grill you purchased. And so I have a sense based on the grill, you purchase just what your question might be or what you know, what special offers I might have available to me and that's all pushed to me is an agent, So I feel more empowered. I could give you better service. You have, you know, greater loyalty towards my brand, which is a win for everyone, >>absolutely that empowerment of the agent, that personalization for the customer. I think again we have that growing demanded expectation that you should know why I'm calling, and you should be able to solve my problem. If you can't, I'm gonna turn and find somebody else who can do that. That's a huge risk that businesses face. Let's talk about some of the trends that you're seeing that this has been a very interesting year to say the least, what are some of the trends in the context center space that you guys were seeing that you're working Thio to help facilitate? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the biggest trends that we're seeing is this move towards remote work. So as you can imagine, with the pandemic almost immediately, most customers needed to quickly move their agents to remote work scenario. And this is where Amazon Connect was a great benefit. For as I mentioned before, we saw about 5000 new contact centers created in March in April. Um, Atiya, very beginning of the pandemic. So that was a very, uh, that's a very big trend we're seeing. And now what we're seeing is customers were saying, Hey, when I have something like Amazon Connect that's in the cloud, it scales up. It provides me a great experience. I just need really a headset in a Internet connection from my agents. I'm not dealing with VPNs and, ah, lot of the complexity that comes with trying to move on on premises system remote. We're seeing a huge, you know, search of adoption and usage around that the ability to very quickly create a new context center around specific scenarios are use cases has been really, really powerful. So, uh, those are the big trends moving to remote remote work and a trend towards, um, spinning of new context that is quickly and then spending them back down as that demand moves or or those those those situations move >>right. And as we're all experiencing, the one thing that is a given during this time is the uncertainty that remains Skilling up. Skilling down volume changes. But looking as if a lot of what's currently going on from home is going to stay for a while longer, I actually not think about it. I'm calling into whether it's, you know, cable service or whatnot. I think What about agent is actually on their couch at home like I am working? And so I think it's being able to facilitate that because is transformative, and I think I think I'll step out on limbs side, you know, very potentially impact the winners and the losers of tomorrow, making sure that the consumer experience is tailored. It's personalized to your point and that the agents are empowered in real time to facilitate a seamless and fast resolution of whatever the issue is. >>Well, and I think you hit on it earlier as well. Agents wanna be helpful. They wanna solve a customer problem. They wanna have that information at their fingertips. They wanna be on power to take action. Because at the end of their day, they want to feel like they helped people, right? And so being able to give them that information safe from wisdom or being able to see your entire customer profile, Right? Right. When you come on board or know that you are Lisa, um, and have the confidence that I'm talking to Lisa, I'm not. This is not some sort of, you know, fishing, exercise, exercise. These are all really important scenarios and features that empower the agent, lowers cost significantly for the customer and creates a much better customer experience for you. The collar? >>Absolutely. And we all know how important that is these days to get some sort of satisfying experience. Last question. Erin, talk to us about, you know, as we all look forward, Thio 2021. For many reasons. What can we expect with Amazon? Connect? >>Well, we're going to continue to listen to our customers and hear their feedback and what they need, which what we certainly anticipate is continued focus on that agent efficiency, giving agents mawr of the information they need to be successful and answer customers questions quickly, continuing to invest in machine learning as a way of doing that. So using ML to identify that you are who you say you are, finding that right information. Getting data that I can use is an agent Thio. Handle those tasks and then automate the things that you know I really shouldn't have to take steps is a human to go do so if we need to send you a follow up email when when your product ships or when your refund is issued. Let me just put that in the system once and have it happened when it executes. So that level of automation continuing to bring machine learning in to make the agent experience better and more efficient, which ultimate leads to lower costs and better see set. These are all the investments. You'll see a sui continue for it next year. >>Excellent stuff, Erin, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, ensuring what's next and the potential the impact that Amazon connect is making. >>Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here >>for Aaron Kelly. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:invent 2020, it's virtual this year, we're usually in person this year we have to do remote interviews because of the pandemic, but it's been a great run, a lot of great content happening here in these next three weeks of re:Invent. We've got two great guests here as part of our coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm your host, John Furrier. Barbara Kessler, Global APN Programs Leader, and Ryan Broadwell, Global Director of ISVs for AWS. Thanks for coming on the CUBE, Thanks for joining me. >> Hey, thanks for having us, it's great to be here. >> You know we heard of-- >> Yeah thanks for having us John. >> Thanks for coming on. Sorry we're not in person, but tons of content. I mean, there's a lot of the VODs, the main stages, but the news hitting this morning around Doug's comments from strong focus of ISVs is just a continuation. We heard that last year, but this year more focus investments there, new announcements take us through what we just heard and what it means. >> Yeah John, I'll jump in first and then let Barbara add some additional color and commentary, but I think it is a continuation for us as we look at continuing to build a momentum with our ISVs they're mission critical for us, and we hear that loud and clear from our customers. So as you think about building off what Doug was talking about, I think it's first important for us to start with, we look to help our partners build and build well-designed solutions on AWS, supporting their innovation and transformation and working together to deliver scalable, reliable, secure solutions for our customers. To facilitate this, we offer programs such as AWS SaaS Factory, that provide enablement to our ISVs to build new products, migrate single tenent environments or optimize existing SaaS Solutions on AWS. And we do this through mechanisms like Webinars, Bootcamps, Workshops and even one-on-one engagements. You know, as you talked about, we just heard from Doug announce AWS SaaS Boost, which is a ready to use open source implementation of SaaS tooling and best practices to accelerate ISV SaaS Path. Through SaaS Factory which we've worked on with many ISVs in the last few years and you're well aware of, we have lots of learnings and we've helped a lot of partners make that journey towards SaaS. Partners like BMC, CloudZero, Nasdaq, Cohesity, or F5 transform their delivery and business models to SaaS. We've had a lot of demand for this type of engagement. And we knew it was important that we come up with a scalable way to help partners accelerate their transformation. SaaS Boost provides prescriptive experience to transform applications through an intuitive tool with many core services needed to develop and operate on the AWS Cloud. In addition to that, we look to use the well-architected framework, which is proven to set the architectural best practices for designing in operating systems in the Cloud, to help ISVs build their solutions on AWS. We just launched two additional lenses in well-architected tool, to enable ISVs to conduct these reviews from within the AWS console, one SaaS environment, and one aligned with foundational technical reviews, which helps partners prepare for the technical validation in AWS Partner Programs. >> You know, the SaaS Boost, I love that I was joking on Twitter, it sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that SaaS Boost, don't drink too many of them you get immune to two to strong out, but this is what people want Barbara. This is about the Partner Network. You guys are providing more stuff, more successful programs and capabilities. This is what the demand is for. Help me get there faster path to SaaS. Can you explain what this means for partners? What's in it for them, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Ryan talked about some of the things that we do to help partners build their ISVs and software or SaaS products. But in addition to that, we provide a number of programs and resources to help partners also grow their business through marketing and sales focused programs. That's an area that we are focused on investing deeply with our partner community. For example, we offer APN Marketing Central through which partners can find and launch free customizable marketing campaigns, or even find a marketing agency to work with that has experienced messaging AWS, it also offers APN marketing activity. We recognize that not all partners, especially if they're in their startup stages, have those investments and skill sets yet around marketing. So Marketing Academy offers self service content to teach partners who don't have that capability in house today, to how to drive awareness campaigns and build demand for their offerings. We also offer a broad set of funding benefits to help partners starting from the build stage that Ryan talks about through Sandbox Credits to support their development, all the way through marketing with Market Development Funds as they're selling with what we call our partner Opportunity Acceleration Program, which is how we fund POC to support our partners and winning new customers. We also heard Doug announce in the keynote that we are launching the ISV Accelerate Program. This is our new co-selling program for ISVs that offer compensation incentives for AWS account managers, access to co-sale specialists and reduced marketplace listing fees to help our partners continue to grow their business with us. >> You know, successful selling is amazing. You want to make money. I mean, come on, you bring it a lot to the table. Co-selling I think that's a huge point. Nice call out there. Ryan, can you give some examples of partners that have been successful with these resources? >> Hey John, thank you. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of walk through with one good example and a little bit of detail. And what we've seen with Sisense is a great example of a partner that leveraged these resources and the work that they've done with Luma Health. So Luma Health serves millions of patients, provides a Cloud-hosted patient engagement platform that connects patients and providers. You know when word about COVID started, spreading Luma helped solve a big increase in questions and concerns from patients and the providers. Luma Health saw an opportunity to create new products, to help patients and providers during the pandemic, to decide what to build and how to build it, the company wanted to analyze sentimental signal and data real-time. Using Sisense, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Web Services, Data Migration Services, Luma Health built a platform that delivered analytics and insights it needed, democratizing access to the data for all users. As a result, Luma Health uncovered insights such as facts that SMS was the preferred method of communication and that many patients had similar questions. Just three weeks after their hypothesis, Luma Health released new products based on its insights, a turn-key EHR enabled healthcare solution, zero contact check-in and COVID-19 Broadcast Messaging System. >> So a lot of good successes. The question that I would ask you guys, this is the probably what's on everyone's mind is I'm a partner, I'm growing, obviously I'm in the partner network because I'm being successful. I don't have a lot of time. I need to figure out all the stuff that you have. You have so much going on that's good for me. I don't know what to do. Can you help me figure out what resources and programs to leverage? I could imagine this is a question that I would have, I want it too, I want to make money co-sell, I want to get into this program. What's the best path? I mean, what do I do? Can you share how you help your partners get on the right road, have the right resources, What are the right programs? 'Cause it makes it more consumable. This is probably a big challenge, can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, happy to explore that. So we certainly find a lot of opportunity to innovate with our partners and customers and a result we do offer a broad range of programs, resources, material to meet the diverse needs of those partners and customers. One focus of these programs and enablement models that we offer partners, is to help our partners build their products and build their business with us. And the other focus is to create program structures that help customers find the right partner and the right solution at the right time. But we recognize it's a lot (chuckles) and we want to make sure that our partners are easily able to find what's most relevant to them. And to deliver this more effectively for ISV partners specifically, Doug just announced the launch of ISV Partner Path. As with everything we do at AWS, this new program structure works backwards from our customers and our partners to deliver the needs of both of those audiences. When a customer identifies a need for a solution, they search for that solution based on their business needs and the outcomes that they're looking to deliver rather than searching based on a partner profile. So ISV Partner Path pivots the focus that we have today on partner-level tier badging to instead focus on solution-level validation badging that helps us better align to what our customers are looking for and how they look for software products. The new model responds to that partner and customer feedback that we've heard, it removes APN tier requirements for ISVs and introduces the ability to engage across all of the products, services, and solutions that a partner offers and it pivots the partner badge attainment. So today our partners attain badging based on a tier and moving forward, they'll attain that badging to go to market with solutions that are validated and have gone through a technical assessment to either integrate effectively or run effectively on AWS. So if you were requirements to access APN programs from differentiation to funding and co-selling, partners can engage more quickly in a more meaningful way and in a more clear path to develop their solution offering and go to market with AWS. >> Ryan anything you want to add on in terms of structural support in terms of account management and does everyone get in on a wrap? Is there certain levels of attention? When does that come into play? >> Yeah, I think Barbara has made a great point in that we have a lot of great programmatic resources, but there's also no substitution for engagement with a person. And we have Partner Development Resources available to engage with our partners and help them develop their individualized plans that help them understand how they maximize the opportunity with their customer set and expand their customer sets. This starts as soon as a partner registers with the AWS Partner Network, they're contacted by a Partner Development team member within the first business day. This is a commitment we find incredibly important to the partner. And even when we have five or more new partners registering every single day. We look to go beyond that and it's not just about onboarding to your point John, our partner team works backwards from the customer and the partner to help develop what is that joint plan? How do we focus on what strategic to the partner and what becomes strategic to our customers? With that plan our team works to activate that broadly across the team in support of achieving our joint goals. And then naturally all partnerships, we want join accountability, we want mechanisms to measure success. >> You know I talked to a lot of channel partners over the years in my career, and the Cloud it really highlights the speed and the agility feature, but it all comes down to the same thing. I want to get my solution in front of the customer, I want to make money, I want to make it easy to use, make it easy to consume. I want to leverage the Cloud. This is kind of the process, this is how it always happens. This is what they want and you guys are bringing a lot to the table and that's important. And I think co-selling having the kind of support, making it consumable is easy and super great. So I have to ask you with that, what's your advice for people who are jumping in? Because you're seeing more on boarding of ISVs than ever before. And we've been commenting on theCUBE for multiple years. We've been seeing the uptick in software SaaS ISVs. And remember Amazon is not in the SaaS business a hundred percent. And government just collapsed the platform as a service in the IS categories that highlights the fact that your entire ISV landscape is wide open and growing. So there's new ISV is coming in. (chuckles) What advice would you give them to get started, experience and -- >> Yeah, I can take that. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I can take that one thank you. And I actually want to build on something Ryan said, we actually have more than 50 new partners joining the AWS Partner Network every single day. And so having the right structure for those partners to easily navigate and the right resources for them is something that's very top of mind for us. I think I can distill down about two primary pieces of advice from my perspective for a new partner who's trying to figure out how to work with us and get involved. First and foremost, build a relationship with your Partner Manager, help them know and understand your business, the customers that you focus on, the solutions you provide. The Partner Manager is your advocate and could be your mentor in working with AWS. Make sure they know what you're good at. Partners are able to build the best traction with our shared customers and our AWS sales team when it's very clear what they're good at and how their solutions solve specific customer problems. And specialization through programs such as competency, which validate solutions based on industry in this case or workload is really key to helping communicate that specific value. And second, I would say avail yourself of the resources available to you. We offer a number of self-serve resources, such as the new ISV Navigate Track that is launching in conjunction with ISV Partner Path that provides individuals the sort of step by step guidance to move through that engagement with us, they connect them to all the resources that they need. Marketing Central which we discussed earlier to drive marketing campaigns that can be very self-served and driven by the Partner Central, which offers a wealth of content, white papers, et cetera. That's our portal through which partners engage. And you can also access things like training and certification discounts to build your Cloud skills to support your business. But I think both of those are really important things to keep in mind for partners who are just kind of getting started with us as well as partners who've been working with us for a while now. >> Ryan, what do you want to add to that because again, there's more ISVs is coming. And again, Amazon has been very disruptive in it's enablement of partners. Not everyone fits into a nice clean bucket. I mean what looks like a category might be old and being disrupted into to a new category being developed. All these new categories and new solutions. It's hard to put people into buckets. So you have a tough job, how do you give advice to your partners? >> It is tough, and the rate of transformation continues. And the rate of innovation continues to quicken. My advice is lean in with us. We continue to invest our efforts in developing this vibrant community of partners. So lean in, we'll continue to iterate around and optimize our joint plans and activities. And we'd look to be able to continue to drive success for our customers and our partners. >> Well, you guys do a great job. I want to say I've watched the APN grow and change and evolve. Market demand is there and you got the Factory, you got the Boost, you got the Lenses, you got the Partner Network, the people. It's people equation with software so congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Okay, great event here, re:Invent 2020 Virtual. This is theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier your host, wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>on >>the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Okay. Welcome back, everyone. That's the cubes. Live coverage here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John for your host with David Lantana in Boston. Massachusetts. Uh, we got a great panel here. Analysts just gonna break it down. Keynote analysis. Day one, we got Ah, longtime Web services expert analyst Diane Hinchcliffe, principal researcher at N V. P. It constantly research, but he goes way back. Dan, I remember, uh, 2000 and one time frame you and I'm >>reading Last time you and I hang out with Michael Arrington's house back in the TechCrunch days >>back when, you know you were on this was Web services. I mean, that's always, uh, serves on the architectures. They called it back then. This was the beginning. This really was the catalyst of cloud. If you think about virtualization and Web services in that era, that really spawned where we are today so great to >>have you on as an Amazon got their start saying that everyone could get whatever they want to on a P. I now right, >>all right? Well, we've been riding this wave. Certainly it's cotton now more clear for the mainstream America. And I quoted you in my story, uh, on Andy Jassy when I had my one on one with them because I saw your talk with star Bit of the weekend and in the way you kicked it off was the Pandemic four was forced upon everybody, which is true, and that caught my attention was very notable because you talked to a lot of C E. O s. Does jazz sees pitch resonate with them? In your opinion, what's your take on on that on that posture? Because we heard, hey, you know, get busy building or you're dying, right? So get busy building. That's what >>I thought that was a good message. But I mean on and certainly I saw tweets and said, Hey, he's just he's just directly talking to the CEO. But if you ask me, he's still talking to the CTO, right? The technology officer who's got a feels all this technology and bend it into the shape that it will serve the business. You talk to a CEO who wants is trying to get on the cloud their biggest challenges. I know I need armies of people who know all these brand new services. You saw the development velocity of all the things that they announced and things they re emphasized there was There was a lot of things that were bringing back again because they have so many things that they're offering to the public. But the developer skills or not, they're the partner skills are not there. So you talked to CEO, says All right, I buy in and and I have had to transform overnight because of the pandemic, my customers have moved, my workers have moved on, and I have to like, you know, redirect all my I t Overnight and Cloud is the best way to do that. Where's my where's all the skills for the training programs, the department programs that allow me to get access to large amounts of talent? Those are the types of things that the CEO is concerned about is from an operational perspective. We didn't hear anything about, like a sales force type trailhead where we're going to democratize cloud skills to the very far end of your organization. >>Yeah, they're just kind of scratching the service. They didn't mention that, you know, far Gates away to get into server list. I mean, this is ultimately the challenge Dave and Deena like, don't get your thoughts on this because I was talking Teoh a big time CTO and a big time see so and that perspectives were interesting. And here's the Here's the Here's what I want you to react Thio the sea level Say everything is gonna be a service. Otherwise we're gonna be extinct. Okay, that's true. I buy that narrative, Okay, Make it as a service. That's why not use it. And then they go to the C t. And they say, implement, They go Well, it's not that easy. So automation becomes a big thing. And then so there's this debate. Automate, automate, automate. And then everything becomes a service. Is it the cart before the horse? So is automation. It's the cart before the horse, for everything is a service. What do you guys think about that? >>We'll see. I mean, CEO is to Diane's point, are highly risk averse and they like services. And those services generally are highly customized. And I think the tell in the bevy of announcements the buffet have announces that we heard today was in the marketplace what you guys thought of this or if you caught this. But there was a discussion about curated professional services that were tied to software, and there were classic PDM services. But they were very, you know, tight eso sort of off the shelf professional services, and that's kind of how Amazon plays it. And they were designed to be either self serve. It's a Diane's point. Skill sets aren't necessarily there or third parties, not directly from Amazon. So that's a gap that Amazon's got too close. I mean, you talk about all the time without post installations, you know, going on Prem. You know who's gonna support and service those things. You know, that's a that's a white space right now. I think >>e think we're still reading the tea leaves on the announcements. But there was one announcement that was, I thought really important. And that was this VM Ware cloud for a W s. It says, Let's take your VM ware skills, which you've honed and and cultivated and built a talent base inside your organization to run VMS and let's make that work for a W s. So I thought the VM Ware cloud for a W s announcement was key. It was a sleeper. It didn't spend a lot of time on it. But the CEO ears are gonna perk up and say, Wait, I can use native born skills. I already have to go out to the cloud So I didn't think that they did have 11 announcement I thought was compelling in that >>in the spending data shows of VM Ware Cloud on AWS is really gaining momentum by the way, As you see in that open shift So you see in that hybrid zone really picking up. And we heard that from AWS today. John, you and I talked about it at the open I produces in >>Yeah, I want to double down on that point you made because I want to get your thoughts on this a Z analyst because you know, the VM ware is also tell. Sign to what I'm seeing as operating and developing Dev ops as they be called back in the day. But you gotta operate, i t. And if Jassy wants to go after this next tier of spend on premise and edge. He's gotta win the global i t posture game. He's gotta win hybrid. He's got to get there faster to your point. You gotta operate. It's not just develop on it. So you have a development environment. You have operational environment. I think the VM Ware thing that's interesting, cause it's a nice clean hand in glove. VM Ware's got operators who operate I t. And they're using Amazon to develop, but they work together. There's no real conflict like everyone predicted. So is that the tell sign is the operational side. The challenge? The Dev, How does Amazon get that global I t formula down? Is it the VM Ware partnership? >>I think part of it is there, finally learning to say that the leverage that the vast pool of operational data they have on their literally watching millions of organizations run all the different services they should know a lot and I say made that point today, he said, Well, people ask us all the time. You must have all these insights about when things were going right or wrong. Can you just tell us? And so I think the announcement around the Dev ops guru was very significant, also saying you don't necessarily have to again teach all your staff every in and out about how to monitor every aspect of all these new services that are much more powerful for your business. But you don't yet know how to manage, especially at scale. So the Dev Ops guru is gonna basically give a dashboard that says, based on everything that we've known in the past, we could give you insights, operational insights you can act on right away. And so I think that is again a tool that could be put in place on the operational side. Right. So b m where for cloud gives you migration ability, uh, of existing skills and workloads. And then the Dev Ops crew, if it turns out to be everything they say it is, could be a really panacea for unlocking the maturity curve that these operators have to climb >>on. AWS is in the business now of solving a lot of the problems that it sort of helped create. So you look at, for instance, you look at the sage maker Data Wrangler trying to simplify data workloads. The data pipeline in the cloud is very very complex and so they could get paid for helping simplify that. So that's a wonderful, virtuous circle. We've seen it before. >>Yeah. I mean, you have a lot of real time contact lens you've got, um, quick site. I mean, they have to kind of match the features. And And I want to get your guys thoughts on on hybrid because I think, you know, I'm still stuck on this, Okay? They won the as path and their innovations Great. The custom chips I buy that machine learning all awesome. So from the classic cloud I as infrastructure and platform as a service business looking good. Now, if you're thinking global, I t I just don't just not connecting the dots there. See Outpost? What's riel today for Amazon? Can you guys share E? I mean, if you were watching this keynote your head explode because you've got so many announcements. What's actually going on if you're looking at this is the CEO. >>So the challenge you have is the CEO. Is that your you have 10, 20 or 30 or more years of legacy hardware, including mainframes, right. Like so big insurance companies don't use mainframe because their claims systems have been developed in their very risk averse about changing them. Do you have to make all of this work together? Like, you know, we see IBM and Redhead are actually, you know, chasing that mainframe. Which angle, which is gonna die out where Amazon, I think is smart is saying, Look, we understand that container is gonna be the model container orchestration is gonna be how I t goes forward. The CEO is now buy into that. Last year, I was still saying, Are we gonna be able to understand? Understand? Kubernetes is the regular average i t person, which are not, you know, Google or Facebook level engineers Are there gonna be able to do do containers? And so we see the open sourcing of of the AWS is, uh, kubernetes, uh, server on. We see plenty of container options. That's how organizations could build cloud native internally. And when they're ready to go outside because we're gonna move, they're gonna move many times slower than a cloud native company to go outside. Everything is ready there. Um, I like what I'm seeing without posts. I like what I'm seeing with the hybrid options. The VM ware for cloud. They're building a pathway that says you can do real cloud. And I think the big announcement that was that. That s a really, uh, spend time on which is that PCs for everywhere. Um, a saying you're gonna be able to put Amazon services are compute services anywhere. You need it, e think that's a smart message. And that allows people to say I could eventually get toe one model to get my arms around this over time >>day. What does that mean for the numbers? I know you do a lot of research on spend customer data. Um, CEO is clearly no. This is gonna be the world's never go back to the same way it was. They certainly will accelerate cloud toe. What level depends upon where they are in their truth, as Jassy says. But >>what does >>the numbers look at? Because you're looking at the data you got Microsoft, You got Amazon. What's the customer spend look like where they're gonna be spending? >>Well, so a couple things one is that when you strip out the the SAS portion of both Google and Azure, you know, as we know, I asked him pass A W S is the leader, but there's no question that Microsoft is catching up. Says that we were talking about earlier. Uh, it's the law of large numbers Just to give you a sense Amazon this year we'll add. Q four is not done yet, but they'll add 10 billion over last year. And Jesse sort of alluded to that. They do that in 12 months. You know, uh, azure will add close to nine billion this year of incremental revenue. Google much, much smaller. And so So that's, you know, just seeing, uh, as you really catch up there for sure, you know, closing that gap. But still Amazon's got the lead. The other thing I would say is die on you and I were talking about this Is that you know Google is starting. Thio do a little bit better. People love their analytics. They love the built in machine learning things like like big query. And you know, even though they're much, much smaller there, another hedge people don't necessarily want to goto Microsoft unless they're Microsoft Shop. Google gives them that alternative, and that's been a bit of a tailwind for Google. Although I would say again, looking at the numbers. If I look back at where Azure and AWS were at this point where Google is with a few billion dollars in cloud the growth rates, I'd like to see Google growing a little faster. Maybe there's a covert factor there. >>Diane. I want to get your thoughts on this transition. Microsoft Oracle competition Um, Jesse knows he's got a deal with the elite Salesforce's out there. Oracle, Microsoft. Microsoft used to be the innovator. They had the they had the phrase embracing extend back in the day. Now Amazon's embracing and extending, but they gotta go through Oracle and Microsoft if they wanna win the enterprise on premise business and everybody else. Um, eso welcome to the party like Amazon. You What's your take on them versus Microsoft? Calling them out on sequel server licensing practices almost thrown him under the bus big time. >>Well, I think that's you know, we saw the evidence today that they're actually taking aim at Microsoft now. So Babel Fish, which allows you to run Microsoft sequel server workloads directly on Aurora. Uh, that that is what I call the escape pod that gives organizations an easy way That isn't Will parliament to redesign and re architect their applications to say, Just come over to AWS, right? We'll give you a better deal. But I think you've got to see Amazon have, um, or comprehensive sales plan to go into the C. E. O s. Go after the big deals and say, You know, we want to say the whole cloud suite, we have a stack that's unbeatable. You see our velocities, you know, best in class. Arguably against Microsoft is the big challenger, but we'll beat you on on a total cost of ownership. You know, your final bill. At the end of the day, we could we commit to being less than our competitors. Things like that will get the attention. But, you know, uh, Amazon is not known for cutting customized deals. Actually, even frankly, I'm hearing from very CEO is a very large, like Fortune 20 companies. They have very little wiggle room with Microsoft's anybody who's willing to go to the big enterprise and create custom deals. So if you build a sales team that could do that, you have a real shot and saying getting into the CEO's office and saying, You know, we want to move all the I t over and I'm seeing Microsoft getting winds like that. I'm not yet seeing Amazon and they're just gonna have to build a specialized sales team that go up against those guys and migration tools like we saw with Babel fish that says, If you want to come, we can get you over here pretty quick. >>I want to chime in on Oracle to John. I do. I think this is a blind spot somewhat for AWS, Oracle and mainframes. Jesse talks that talks like, Oh yeah, these people, they wanna get off there. And there's no question there are a number of folks that are unhappy, certainly with Oracle's licensing practices. But I talked to a lot of Oracle customers that are running the shops on Oracle database, and it's really good technology. It is world class for mission critical transaction workloads. Transaction workloads tend to be much, much smaller data set sizes, and so and Oracle's got, you know, decades built up, and so their their customers air locked in and and they're actually reasonably happy with the service levels they're getting out of Oracle. So yes, licensing is one thing, but there's more to the story and again, CEO or risk averse. To Diane's point, you're not just gonna chuck away your claim system. It's just a lot of custom code. And it's just the business case isn't there to move? >>Well, I mean, I would argue that Well, first of all, I see where you're coming from. But I would also argue that one of the things that Jesse laid out today that I thought was kind of a nuanced point was during the vertical section. I think it was under the manufacturing. He really laid out the case that I saw for startups and or innovation formula, that horizontal integration around the data. But then being vertically focused with the modern app with same machine learning. So what he was saying, and I don't think he did a good job doing it was you could disrupt horizontally in any industry. That's a that's a disruption formula, but you still could have that scale. That's cloud horizontal scalability, cloud. But the data gives you the ability to do both. I think bringing data together across multiple silos is critical, but having that machine learning in the vertical is the way you could different so horizontally. Scalable vertical specialization for the modern app, I think is a killer formula. And I think >>I think that's a I think it's a really strong point, John, and you're seeing that you're seeing in industries like, for instance, Amazon getting into grocery. And that's a data play. But I do like Thio following your point. The Contact Center solutions. I like the solutions play there and some of the stuff they're doing at the edge with i o T. The equipment optimization, the predictive maintenance, those air specialized solutions. I really like the solutions Focus, which several years ago, Amazon really didn't talk solution. So that's a positive sign, >>Diane, what do you think? The context And I think that was just such low hanging fruit for Amazon. Why not do it? You got the cloud scale. You got the Alexa knowledge, you know, got machine learning >>zone, that natural language processing maturity to allow them to actually monitor that. You know that that contact lens real time allows them a lot of supervisors to intervene them conversations before they go completely south, right? So allowing people to get inside decision windows they couldn't before. I think that's a really important capability. And that's a challenge with analytics in general. Is that generates form or insights than people know how to deal with? And it solutions like contact lens Real time? This is Let's make these insights actionable before it's broken. Let's give you the data to go and fix it before it even finishes breaking. And this is the whole predictive model is very powerful. >>Alright, guys, we got four minutes left. I wanted Segway and finish up with what was said in the keynote. That was a tell sign that gives us some direction of where the dots will connect in the future. There's a lot of stuff that was talked about that was, you know, follow on. That was meat on the bone from previous announcements. Where did Jassy layout? What? I would call the directional shift. Did you see anything particular that you said? Okay, that is solid. I mean, the zones was one I could see. What clearly is an edge piece. Where did you guys see? Um, some really good directional signaling from Jassy in terms of where they really go. Deal with start >>e I felt like Jassy basically said, Hey, we invented cloud. Even use these words we invented cloud and we're gonna define what hybrid looks like We're gonna bring our cloud model to the edge. And the data center just happens to be another edge point. And hey, I thought he laid down the gauntlet. E think it's a very powerful message. >>What do you think Jesse has been saying? That he laid out here, That's >>you laid out a very clear path to the edge that the Amazons marching to the edge. That's the next big frontier in the cloud. It isn't well defined. And that just like they defined cloud in the early days that they don't get out there and be the definitive leader in that space. Then they're gonna be the follower. I think so. We saw announcement after announcement around that you know, from the zones Thio the different options for outpost um, the five g announcement wavelength. All of those things says we're gonna go out to the very tippy edge is what I heard right out to your mobile devices. Right after the most obscure field applications imaginable. We're gonna have an appliance So we're gonna have a service that lets you put Amazon everywhere. And so I think the overarching message was This is a W s everywhere it z gonna go after 100% of I t. Eventually on DSO you can move to that. You know, this one stop shop? Um and you know, we saw him or more discussions about multi cloud, but it was interesting how they stand away from that. And this is what I think One area that they're going to continue to avoid. So it was interesting, >>John, I think I think the edges one by developers. And that's good news for Amazon. And good news for Microsoft. >>We'll see the facilities is gonna be good for me. I think guys, the big take away You guys nailed two of them there, but I think the other one was I think he's trying to speak to this new generation in a very professorial way. Talk about Clay Christensen was a professor at his business school at Harvard. We all know the book. Um, but there was this There was this a posture of speaking to the younger generation like hey, the old guy, the old that was running the mainframe. Wherever the old guys there, you could take over and run this. So it's kind of like more of a leadership preach of preaching like, Hey, it's okay to be cool and innovative, right now is the time to get in cloud. And the people who are blocking you are either holding on to what they built or too afraid to shift. Eso I think a Z we've seen through waves of innovation. You always have those people you know who are gonna stop that innovation. So I was very interesting. You mentioned that would service to the next generation. Um, compute. So he had that kind of posture. Interesting point. Yeah, just very, very preachy. >>E think he's talking to a group of people who also went through the through 2020 and they might be very risk averse and not bold anymore. And so, you know, I think that may have helped address that as well. >>All right, gentlemen, great stuff. Final word in the nutshell. Kena, What do you think about it in general? Will take away. >>Yeah, I I think we saw the continued product development intensity that Amazon is going to use to try and thrash the competition? Uh, the big vision. Um, you know, the real focus on developers first? Um and I think I t and C e O's second, I think before you could say they didn't really think about them too much at all. But now it's a close second. You know, I really liked what I saw, and I think it's It's the right move. I'd like to Seymour on on hybrid cloud migration than that, even when we saw them. >>All right, leave it there. Don. Thanks for coming on from this guest analyst segment. Appreciate you jumping in Cuba. Live. Thank you. >>Thanks. Alright. >>With acute virtual. I'm your host John per day Volonte here covering A W s live covering the keynote in real time State more for more coverage after the break

>> Hi, my name is Andy Clemenko. I'm a Senior Solutions Engineer at StackRox. Thanks for joining us today for my talk on labels, labels, labels. Obviously, you can reach me at all the socials. Before we get started, I like to point you to my GitHub repo, you can go to andyc.info/dc20, and it'll take you to my GitHub page where I've got all of this documentation, socials. Before we get started, I like to point you to my GitHub repo, you can go to andyc.info/dc20, (upbeat music) >> Hi, my name is Andy Clemenko. I'm a Senior Solutions Engineer at StackRox. Thanks for joining us today for my talk on labels, labels, labels. Obviously, you can reach me at all the socials. Before we get started, I like to point you to my GitHub repo, you can go to andyc.info/dc20, and it'll take you to my GitHub page where I've got all of this documentation, I've got the Keynote file there. YAMLs, I've got Dockerfiles, Compose files, all that good stuff. If you want to follow along, great, if not go back and review later, kind of fun. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a former DOD contractor. This is my seventh DockerCon. I've spoken, I had the pleasure to speak at a few of them, one even in Europe. I was even a Docker employee for quite a number of years, providing solutions to the federal government and customers around containers and all things Docker. So I've been doing this a little while. One of the things that I always found interesting was the lack of understanding around labels. So why labels, right? Well, as a former DOD contractor, I had built out a large registry. And the question I constantly got was, where did this image come from? How did you get it? What's in it? Where did it come from? How did it get here? And one of the things we did to kind of alleviate some of those questions was we established a baseline set of labels. Labels really are designed to provide as much metadata around the image as possible. I ask everyone in attendance, when was the last time you pulled an image and had 100% confidence, you knew what was inside it, where it was built, how it was built, when it was built, you probably didn't, right? The last thing we obviously want is a container fire, like our image on the screen. And one kind of interesting way we can kind of prevent that is through the use of labels. We can use labels to address security, address some of the simplicity on how to run these images. So think of it, kind of like self documenting, Think of it also as an audit trail, image provenance, things like that. These are some interesting concepts that we can definitely mandate as we move forward. What is a label, right? Specifically what is the Schema? It's just a key-value. All right? It's any key and pretty much any value. What if we could dump in all kinds of information? What if we could encode things and store it in there? And I've got a fun little demo to show you about that. Let's start off with some of the simple keys, right? Author, date, description, version. Some of the basic information around the image. That would be pretty useful, right? What about specific labels for CI? What about a, where's the version control? Where's the source, right? Whether it's Git, whether it's GitLab, whether it's GitHub, whether it's Gitosis, right? Even SPN, who cares? Where are the source files that built, where's the Docker file that built this image? What's the commit number? That might be interesting in terms of tracking the resulting image to a person or to a commit, hopefully then to a person. How is it built? What if you wanted to play with it and do a git clone of the repo and then build the Docker file on your own? Having a label specifically dedicated on how to build this image might be interesting for development work. Where it was built, and obviously what build number, right? These kind of all, not only talk about continuous integration, CI but also start to talk about security. Specifically what server built it. The version control number, the version number, the commit number, again, how it was built. What's the specific build number? What was that job number in, say, Jenkins or GitLab? What if we could take it a step further? What if we could actually apply policy enforcement in the build pipeline, looking specifically for some of these specific labels? I've got a good example of, in my demo of a policy enforcement. So let's look at some sample labels. Now originally, this idea came out of label-schema.org. And then it was a modified to opencontainers, org.opencontainers.image. There is a link in my GitHub page that links to the full reference. But these are some of the labels that I like to use, just as kind of like a standardization. So obviously, Author's, an email address, so now the image is attributable to a person, that's always kind of good for security and reliability. Where's the source? Where's the version control that has the source, the Docker file and all the assets? How it was built, build number, build server the commit, we talked about, when it was created, a simple description. A fun one I like adding in is the healthZendpoint. Now obviously, the health check directive should be in the Docker file. But if you've got other systems that want to ping your applications, why not declare it and make it queryable? Image version, obviously, that's simple declarative And then a title. And then I've got the two fun ones. Remember, I talked about what if we could encode some fun things? Hypothetically, what if we could encode the Compose file of how to build the stack in the first image itself? And conversely the Kubernetes? Well, actually, you can and I have a demo to show you how to kind of take advantage of that. So how do we create labels? And really creating labels as a function of build time okay? You can't really add labels to an image after the fact. The way you do add labels is either through the Docker file, which I'm a big fan of, because it's declarative. It's in version control. It's kind of irrefutable, especially if you're tracking that commit number in a label. You can extend it from being a static kind of declaration to more a dynamic with build arguments. And I can show you, I'll show you in a little while how you can use a build argument at build time to pass in that variable. And then obviously, if you did it by hand, you could do a docker build--label key equals value. I'm not a big fan of the third one, I love the first one and obviously the second one. Being dynamic we can take advantage of some of the variables coming out of version control. Or I should say, some of the variables coming out of our CI system. And that way, it self documents effectively at build time, which is kind of cool. How do we view labels? Well, there's two major ways to view labels. The first one is obviously a docker pull and docker inspect. You can pull the image locally, you can inspect it, you can obviously, it's going to output as JSON. So you going to use something like JQ to crack it open and look at the individual labels. Another one which I found recently was Skopeo from Red Hat. This allows you to actually query the registry server. So you don't even have to pull the image initially. This can be really useful if you're on a really small development workstation, and you're trying to talk to a Kubernetes cluster and wanting to deploy apps kind of in a very simple manner. Okay? And this was that use case, right? Using Kubernetes, the Kubernetes demo. One of the interesting things about this is that you can base64 encode almost anything, push it in as text into a label and then base64 decode it, and then use it. So in this case, in my demo, I'll show you how we can actually use a kubectl apply piped from the base64 decode from the label itself from skopeo talking to the registry. And what's interesting about this kind of technique is you don't need to store Helm charts. You don't need to learn another language for your declarative automation, right? You don't need all this extra levels of abstraction inherently, if you use it as a label with a kubectl apply, It's just built in. It's kind of like the kiss approach to a certain extent. It does require some encoding when you actually build the image, but to me, it doesn't seem that hard. Okay, let's take a look at a demo. And what I'm going to do for my demo, before we actually get started is here's my repo. Here's a, let me actually go to the actual full repo. So here's the repo, right? And I've got my Jenkins pipeline 'cause I'm using Jenkins for this demo. And in my demo flask, I've got the Docker file. I've got my compose and my Kubernetes YAML. So let's take a look at the Docker file, right? So it's a simple Alpine image. The org statements are the build time arguments that are passed in. Label, so again, I'm using the org.opencontainers.image.blank, for most of them. There's a typo there. Let's see if you can find it, I'll show you it later. My source, build date, build number, commit. Build number and get commit are derived from the Jenkins itself, which is nice. I can just take advantage of existing URLs. I don't have to create anything crazy. And again, I've got my actual Docker build command. Now this is just a label on how to build it. And then here's my simple Python, APK upgrade, remove the package manager, kind of some security stuff, health check getting Python through, okay? Let's take a look at the Jenkins pipeline real quick. So here is my Jenkins pipeline and I have four major stages, four stages, I have built. And here in build, what I do is I actually do the Git clone. And then I do my docker build. From there, I actually tell the Jenkins StackRox plugin. So that's what I'm using for my security scanning. So go ahead and scan, basically, I'm staging it to scan the image. I'm pushing it to Hub, okay? Where I can see the, basically I'm pushing the image up to Hub so such that my StackRox security scanner can go ahead and scan the image. I'm kicking off the scan itself. And then if everything's successful, I'm pushing it to prod. Now what I'm doing is I'm just using the same image with two tags, pre-prod and prod. This is not exactly ideal, in your environment, you probably want to use separate registries and non-prod and a production registry, but for demonstration purposes, I think this is okay. So let's go over to my Jenkins and I've got a deliberate failure. And I'll show you why there's a reason for that. And let's go down. Let's look at my, so I have a StackRox report. Let's look at my report. And it says image required, required image label alert, right? Request that the maintainer, add the required label to the image, so we're missing a label, okay? One of the things we can do is let's flip over, and let's look at Skopeo. Right? I'm going to do this just the easy way. So instead of looking at org.zdocker, opencontainers.image.authors. Okay, see here it says build signature? That was the typo, we didn't actually pass in. So if we go back to our repo, we didn't pass in the the build time argument, we just passed in the word. So let's fix that real quick. That's the Docker file. Let's go ahead and put our dollar sign in their. First day with the fingers you going to love it. And let's go ahead and commit that. Okay? So now that that's committed, we can go back to Jenkins, and we can actually do another build. And there's number 12. And as you can see, I've been playing with this for a little bit today. And while that's running, come on, we can go ahead and look at the Console output. Okay, so there's our image. And again, look at all the build arguments that we're passing into the build statement. So we're passing in the date and the date gets derived on the command line. With the build arguments, there's the base64 encoded of the Compose file. Here's the base64 encoding of the Kubernetes YAML. We do the build. And then let's go down to the bottom layer exists and successful. So here's where we can see no system policy violations profound marking stack regimes security plugin, build step as successful, okay? So we're actually able to do policy enforcement that that image exists, that that label sorry, exists in the image. And again, we can look at the security report and there's no policy violations and no vulnerabilities. So that's pretty good for security, right? We can now enforce and mandate use of certain labels within our images. And let's flip back over to Skopeo, and let's go ahead and look at it. So we're looking at the prod version again. And there's it is in my email address. And that validated that that was valid for that policy. So that's kind of cool. Now, let's take it a step further. What if, let's go ahead and take a look at all of the image, all the labels for a second, let me remove the dash org, make it pretty. Okay? So we have all of our image labels. Again, author's build, commit number, look at the commit number. It was built today build number 12. We saw that right? Delete, build 12. So that's kind of cool dynamic labels. Name, healthz, right? But what we're looking for is we're going to look at the org.zdockerketers label. So let's go look at the label real quick. Okay, well that doesn't really help us because it's encoded but let's base64 dash D, let's decode it. And I need to put the dash r in there 'cause it doesn't like, there we go. So there's my Kubernetes YAML. So why can't we simply kubectl apply dash f? Let's just apply it from standard end. So now we've actually used that label. From the image that we've queried with skopeo, from a remote registry to deploy locally to our Kubernetes cluster. So let's go ahead and look everything's up and running, perfect. So what does that look like, right? So luckily, I'm using traefik for Ingress 'cause I love it. And I've got an object in my Kubernetes YAML called flask.doctor.life. That's my Ingress object for traefik. I can go to flask.docker.life. And I can hit refresh. Obviously, I'm not a very good web designer 'cause the background image in the text. We can go ahead and refresh it a couple times we've got Redis storing a hit counter. We can see that our server name is roundrobing. Okay? That's kind of cool. So let's kind of recap a little bit about my demo environment. So my demo environment, I'm using DigitalOcean, Ubuntu 19.10 Vms. I'm using K3s instead of full Kubernetes either full Rancher, full Open Shift or Docker Enterprise. I think K3s has some really interesting advantages on the development side and it's kind of intended for IoT but it works really well and it deploys super easy. I'm using traefik for Ingress. I love traefik. I may or may not be a traefik ambassador. I'm using Jenkins for CI. And I'm using StackRox for image scanning and policy enforcement. One of the things to think about though, especially in terms of labels is none of this demo stack is required. You can be in any cloud, you can be in CentOs, you can be in any Kubernetes. You can even be in swarm, if you wanted to, or Docker compose. Any Ingress, any CI system, Jenkins, circle, GitLab, it doesn't matter. And pretty much any scanning. One of the things that I think is kind of nice about at least StackRox is that we do a lot more than just image scanning, right? With the policy enforcement things like that. I guess that's kind of a shameless plug. But again, any of this stack is completely replaceable, with any comparative product in that category. So I'd like to, again, point you guys to the andyc.infodc20, that's take you right to the GitHub repo. You can reach out to me at any of the socials @clemenko or andy@stackrox.com. And thank you for attending. I hope you learned something fun about labels. And hopefully you guys can standardize labels in your organization and really kind of take your images and the image provenance to a new level. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019. This is theCUBE's 7th year covering Amazon re:Invent. It's their 8th year of the conference. I want to just shout out to Intel for their sponsorship for these two amazing sets. Without their support we wouldn't be able to bring our mission of great content to you. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. We're here with the chief of AWS, the chief executive officer Andy Jassy. Tech athlete in and of himself three hour Keynotes. Welcome to theCUBE again, great to see you. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me guys. >> Congratulations on a great show a lot of great buzz. >> Andy: Thank you. >> A lot of good stuff. Your Keynote was phenomenal. You get right into it, you giddy up right into it as you say, three hours, thirty announcements. You guys do a lot, but what I liked, the new addition, the last year and this year is the band; house band. They're pretty good. >> Andy: They're good right? >> They hit the queen notes, so that keeps it balanced. So we're going to work on getting a band for theCUBE. >> Awesome. >> So if I have to ask you, what's your walk up song, what would it be? >> There's so many choices, it depends on what kind of mood I'm in. But, uh, maybe Times Like These by the Foo Fighters. >> John: Alright. >> These are unusual times right now. >> Foo Fighters playing at the Amazon Intersect Show. >> Yes they are. >> Good plug Andy. >> Headlining. >> Very clever >> Always getting a good plug in there. >> My very favorite band. Well congratulations on the Intersect you got a lot going on. Intersect is a music festival, I'll get to that in a second But, I think the big news for me is two things, obviously we had a one-on-one exclusive interview and you laid out, essentially what looks like was going to be your Keynote, and it was. Transformation- >> Andy: Thank you for the practice. (Laughter) >> John: I'm glad to practice, use me anytime. >> Yeah. >> And I like to appreciate the comments on Jedi on the record, that was great. But I think the transformation story's a very real one, but the NFL news you guys just announced, to me, was so much fun and relevant. You had the Commissioner of NFL on stage with you talking about a strategic partnership. That is as top down, aggressive goal as you could get to have Rodger Goodell fly to a tech conference to sit with you and then bring his team talk about the deal. >> Well, ya know, we've been partners with the NFL for a while with the Next Gen Stats that they use on all their telecasts and one of the things I really like about Roger is that he's very curious and very interested in technology and the first couple times I spoke with him he asked me so many questions about ways the NFL might be able to use the Cloud and digital transformation to transform their various experiences and he's always said if you have a creative idea or something you think that could change the world for us, just call me he said or text me or email me and I'll call you back within 24 hours. And so, we've spent the better part of the last year talking about a lot of really interesting, strategic ways that they can evolve their experience both for fans, as well as their players and the Player Health and Safety Initiative, it's so important in sports and particularly important with the NFL given the nature of the sport and they've always had a focus on it, but what you can do with computer vision and machine learning algorithms and then building a digital athlete which is really like a digital twin of each athlete so you understand, what does it look like when they're healthy and compare that when it looks like they may not be healthy and be able to simulate all kinds of different combinations of player hits and angles and different plays so that you could try to predict injuries and predict the right equipment you need before there's a problem can be really transformational so we're super excited about it. >> Did you guys come up with the idea or was it a collaboration between them? >> It was really a collaboration. I mean they, look, they are very focused on players safety and health and it's a big deal for their- you know, they have two main constituents the players and fans and they care deeply about the players and it's a-it's a hard problem in a sport like Football, I mean, you watch it. >> Yeah, and I got to say it does point out the use cases of what you guys are promoting heavily at the show here of the SageMaker Studio, which was a big part of your Keynote, where they have all this data. >> Andy: Right. >> And they're data hoarders, they hoard data but the manual process of going through the data was a killer problem. This is consistent with a lot of the enterprises that are out there, they have more data than they even know. So this seems to be a big part of the strategy. How do you get the customers to actually wake up to the fact that they got all this data and how do you tie that together? >> I think in almost every company they know they have a lot of data. And there are always pockets of people who want to do something with it. But, when you're going to make these really big leaps forward; these transformations, the things like Volkswagen is doing where they're reinventing their factories and their manufacturing process or the NFL where they're going to radically transform how they do players uh, health and safety. It starts top down and if the senior leader isn't convicted about wanting to take that leap forward and trying something different and organizing the data differently and organizing the team differently and using machine learning and getting help from us and building algorithms and building some muscle inside the company it just doesn't happen because it's not in the normal machinery of what most companies do. And so it always, almost always, starts top down. Sometimes it can be the Commissioner or CEO sometimes it can be the CIO but it has to be senior level conviction or it doesn't get off the ground. >> And the business model impact has to be real. For NFL, they know concussions, hurting their youth pipe-lining, this is a huge issue for them. This is their business model. >> They lose even more players to lower extremity injuries. And so just the notion of trying to be able to predict injuries and, you know, the impact it can have on rules and the impact it can have on the equipment they use, it's a huge game changer when they look at the next 10 to 20 years. >> Alright, love geeking out on the NFL but Andy, you know- >> No more NFL talk? >> Off camera how about we talk? >> Nobody talks about the Giants being 2 and 10. >> Stu: We're both Patriots fans here. >> People bring up the undefeated season. >> So Andy- >> Everybody's a Patriot's fan now. (Laughter) >> It's fascinating to watch uh, you and your three hour uh, Keynote, uh Werner in his you know, architectural discussion, really showed how AWS is really extending its reach, you know, it's not just a place. For a few years people have been talking about you know, Cloud is an operational model its not a destination or a location but, I felt it really was laid out is you talked about Breadth and Depth and Werner really talked about you know, Architectural differentiation. People talk about Cloud, but there are very-there are a lot of differences between the vision for where things are going. Help us understand why, I mean, Amazon's vision is still a bit different from what other people talk about where this whole Cloud expansion, journey, put ever what tag or label you want on it but you know, the control plane and the technology that you're building and where you see that going. >> Well I think that, we've talked about this a couple times we have two macro types of customers. We have those that really want to get at the low level building blocks and stitch them together creatively however they see fit to create whatever's in their-in their heads. And then we have the second segment of customers that say look, I'm willing to give up some of that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way there much faster. In an abstraction that's different from those low level building blocks. And both segments of builders we want to serve and serve well and so we've built very significant offerings in both areas. I think when you look at microservices um, you know, some of it has to do with the fact that we have this very strongly held belief born out of several years of Amazon where you know, the first 7 or 8 years of Amazon's consumer business we basically jumbled together all of the parts of our technology in moving really quickly and when we wanted to move quickly where you had to impact multiple internal development teams it was so long because it was this big ball, this big monolithic piece. And we got religion about that in trying to move faster in the consumer business and having to tease those pieces apart. And it really was a lot of impetus behind conceiving AWS where it was these low level, very flexible building blocks that6 don't try and make all the decisions for customers they get to make them themselves. And some of the microservices that you saw Werner talking about just, you know, for instance, what we-what we did with Nitro or even what we did with Firecracker those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to uh, tease apart the different components. And even things that look like low level building blocks over time, you build more and more features and all of the sudden you realize they have a lot of things that are combined together that you wished weren't that slow you down and so, Nitro was a completely re imagining of our Hypervisor and Virtualization layer to allow us, both to let customers have better performance but also to let us move faster and have a better security story for our customers. >> I got to ask you the question around transformation because I think that all points, all the data points, you got all the references, Goldman Sachs on stage at the Keynote, Cerner, I mean healthcare just is an amazing example because I mean, that's demonstrating real value there there's no excuse. I talked to someone who wouldn't be named last night, in and around the area said, the CIA has a cost bar like this a cost-a budget like this but the demand for mission based apps is going up exponentially, so there's need for the Cloud. And so, you see more and more of that. What is your top down, aggressive goals to fill that solution base because you're also a very transformational thinker; what is your-what is your aggressive top down goals for your organization because you're serving a market with trillions of dollars of spend that's shifting, that's on the table. >> Yeah. >> A lot of competition now sees it too, they're going to go after it. But at the end of the day you have customers that have a demand for things, apps. >> Andy: Yeah. >> And not a lot of budget increase at the same time. This is a huge dynamic. >> Yeah. >> John: What's your goals? >> You know I think that at a high level our top down aggressive goals are that we want every single customer who uses our platform to have an outstanding customer experience. And we want that outstanding customer experience in part is that their operational performance and their security are outstanding, but also that it allows them to build, uh, build projects and initiatives that change their customer experience and allow them to be a sustainable successful business over a long period of time. And then, we also really want to be the technology infrastructure platform under all the applications that people build. And we're realistic, we know that you know, the market segments we address with infrastructure, software, hardware, and data center services globally are trillions of dollars in the long term and it won't only be us, but we have that goal of wanting to serve every application and that requires not just the security operational premise but also a lot of functionality and a lot of capability. We have by far the most amount of capability out there and yet I would tell you, we have 3 to 5 years of items on our roadmap that customers want us to add. And that's just what we know today. >> And Andy, underneath the covers you've been going through some transformation. When we talked a couple of years ago, about how serverless is impacting things I've heard that that's actually, in many ways, glue behind the two pizza teams to work between organizations. Talk about how the internal transformations are happening. How that impacts your discussions with customers that are going through that transformation. >> Well, I mean, there's a lot of- a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know? And that we're learning ourselves. It's kind of how we started thinking about microservices, serverless too, we saw the need, you know, we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up, compute, all those tasks would take like, 3 or 4 hundred milliseconds then we'd spin it back down and yet, we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was- we just said this is wasteful and, that's part of how we came up with Lambda and you know, when we were thinking about Lambda people understandably said, well if we build Lambda and we build this serverless adventure in computing a lot of people were keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us. But we, we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is, if it's something that's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something. And I think if you look at the history of technology you always build things and people say well, that's going to cannibalize this and people are going to spend less money, what really ends up happening is they spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that they ultimately, long term, end up being more significant customers. >> I mean, you are like beating the drum all the time. Customers, what they say, we encompass the roadmap, I got that you guys have that playbook down, that's been really successful for you. >> Andy: Yeah. >> Two years ago you told me machine learning was really important to you because your customers told you. What's the next traunch of importance for customers? What's on top of mind now, as you, look at- >> Andy: Yeah. >> This re:Invent kind of coming to a close, Replay's tonight, you had conversations, you're a tech athlete, you're running around, doing speeches, talking to customers. What's that next hill from if it's machine learning today- >> There's so much I mean, (weird background noise) >> It's not a soup question (Laughter) And I think we're still in the very early days of machine learning it's not like most companies have mastered it yet even though they're using it much more then they did in the past. But, you know, I think machine learning for sure I think the Edge for sure, I think that um, we're optimistic about Quantum Computing even though I think it'll be a few years before it's really broadly useful. We're very um, enthusiastic about robotics. I think the amount of functions that are going to be done by these- >> Yeah. >> robotic applications are much more expansive than people realize. It doesn't mean humans won't have jobs, they're just going to work on things that are more value added. We're believers in augmented virtual reality, we're big believers in what's going to happen with Voice. And I'm also uh, I think sometimes people get bored you know, I think you're even bored with machine learning already >> Not yet. >> People get bored with the things you've heard about but, I think just what we've done with the Chips you know, in terms of giving people 40% better price performance in the latest generation of X86 processors. It's pretty unbelievable in the difference in what people are going to be able to do. Or just look at big data I mean, big data, we haven't gotten through big data where people have totally solved it. The amount of data that companies want to store, process, analyze, is exponentially larger than it was a few years ago and it will, I think, exponentially increase again in the next few years. You need different tools and services. >> Well I think we're not bored with machine learning we're excited to get started because we have all this data from the video and you guys got SageMaker. >> Andy: Yeah. >> We call it the stairway to machine learning heaven. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You start with the data, move up, knock- >> You guys are very sophisticated with what you do with technology and machine learning and there's so much I mean, we're just kind of, again, in such early innings. And I think that, it was so- before SageMaker, it was so hard for everyday developers and data scientists to build models but the combination of SageMaker and what's happened with thousands of companies standardizing on it the last two years, plus now SageMaker studio, giant leap forward. >> Well, we hope to use the data to transform our experience with our audience. And we're on Amazon Cloud so we really appreciate that. >> Andy: Yeah. >> And appreciate your support- >> Andy: Yeah, of course. >> John: With Amazon and get that machine learning going a little faster for us, that would be better. >> If you have requests I'm interested, yeah. >> So Andy, you talked about that you've got the customers that are builders and the customers that need simplification. Traditionally when you get into the, you know, the heart of the majority of adoption of something you really need to simplify that environment. But when I think about the successful enterprise of the future, they need to be builders. how'l I normally would've said enterprise want to pay for solutions because they don't have the skill set but, if they're going to succeed in this new economy they need to go through that transformation >> Andy: Yeah. >> That you talk to, so, I mean, are we in just a total new era when we look back will this be different than some of these previous waves? >> It's a really good question Stu, and I don't think there's a simple answer to it. I think that a lot of enterprises in some ways, I think wish that they could just skip the low level building blocks and only operate at that higher level abstraction. That's why people were so excited by things like, SageMaker, or CodeGuru, or Kendra, or Contact Lens, these are all services that allow them to just send us data and then run it on our models and get back the answers. But I think one of the big trends that we see with enterprises is that they are taking more and more of their development in house and they are wanting to operate more and more like startups. I think that they admire what companies like AirBnB and Pintrest and Slack and Robinhood and a whole bunch of those companies, Stripe, have done and so when, you know, I think you go through these phases and eras where there are waves of success at different companies and then others want to follow that success and replicate it. And so, we see more and more enterprises saying we need to take back a lot of that development in house. And as they do that, and as they add more developers those developers in most cases like to deal with the building blocks. And they have a lot of ideas on how they can creatively stich them together. >> Yeah, on that point, I want to just quickly ask you on Amazon versus other Clouds because you made a comment to me in our interview about how hard it is to provide a service to other people. And it's hard to have a service that you're using yourself and turn that around and the most quoted line of my story was, the compression algorithm- there's no compression algorithm for experience. Which to me, is the diseconomies of scale for taking shortcuts. >> Andy: Yeah. And so I think this is a really interesting point, just add some color commentary because I think this is a fundamental difference between AWS and others because you guys have a trajectory over the years of serving, at scale, customers wherever they are, whatever they want to do, now you got microservices. >> Yeah. >> John: It's even more complex. That's hard. >> Yeah. >> John: Talk about that. >> I think there are a few elements to that notion of there's no compression algorithm for experience and I think the first thing to know about AWS which is different is, we just come from a different heritage and a different background. We ran a business for a long time that was our sole business that was a consumer retail business that was very low margin. And so, we had to operate at very large scale given how many people were using us but also, we had to run infrastructure services deep in the stack, compute storage and database, and reliable scalable data centers at very low cost and margins. And so, when you look at our business it actually, today, I mean its, its a higher margin business in our retail business, its a lower margin business in software companies but at real scale, it's a high volume, relatively low margin business. And the way that you have to operate to be successful with those businesses and the things you have to think about and that DNA come from the type of operators we have to be in our consumer retail business. And there's nobody else in our space that does that. So, you know, the way that we think about costs, the way we think about innovation in the data center, um, and I also think the way that we operate services and how long we've been operating services as a company its a very different mindset than operating package software. Then you look at when uh, you think about some of the uh, issues in very large scale Cloud, you can't learn some of those lessons until you get to different elbows of the curve and scale. And so what I was telling you is, its really different to run your own platform for your own users where you get to tell them exactly how its going to be done. But that's not the way the real world works. I mean, we have millions of external customers who use us from every imaginable country and location whenever they want, without any warning, for lots of different use cases, and they have lots of design patterns and we don't get to tell them what to do. And so operating a Cloud like that, at a scale that's several times larger than the next few providers combined is a very different endeavor and a very different operating rigor. >> Well you got to keep raising the bar you guys do a great job, really impressed again. Another tsunami of announcements. In fact, you had to spill the beans earlier with Quantum the day before the event. Tight schedule. I got to ask you about the musical festival because, I think this is a very cool innovation. It's the inaugural Intersect conference. >> Yes. >> John: Which is not part of Replay, >> Yes. >> John: Which is the concert tonight. Its a whole new thing, big music act, you're a big music buff, your daughter's an artist. Why did you do this? What's the purpose? What's your goal? >> Yeah, it's an experiment. I think that what's happened is that re:Invent has gotten so big, we have 65 thousand people here, that to do the party, which we do every year, its like a 35-40 thousand person concert now. Which means you have to have a location that has multiple stages and, you know, we thought about it last year and when we were watching it and we said, we're kind of throwing, like, a 4 hour music festival right now. There's multiple stages, and its quite expensive to set up that set for a party and we said well, maybe we don't have to spend all that money for 4 hours and then rip it apart because actually the rent to keep those locations for another two days is much smaller than the cost of actually building multiple stages and so we thought we would try it this year. We're very passionate about music as a business and I think we-I think our customers feel like we've thrown a pretty good music party the last few years and we thought we would try it at a larger scale as an experiment. And if you look at the economics- >> At the headliners real quick. >> The Foo Fighters are headlining on Saturday night, Anderson Paak and the Free Nationals, Brandi Carlile, Shawn Mullins, um, Willy Porter, its a good set. Friday night its Beck and Kacey Musgraves so it's a really great set of um, about thirty artists and we're hopeful that if we can build a great experience that people will want to attend that we can do it at scale and it might be something that both pays for itself and maybe, helps pay for re:Invent too overtime and you know, I think that we're also thinking about it as not just a music concert and festival the reason we named it Intersect is that we want an intersection of music genres and people and ethnicities and age groups and art and technology all there together and this will be the first year we try it, its an experiment and we're really excited about it. >> Well I'm gone, congratulations on all your success and I want to thank you we've been 7 years here at re:Invent we've been documenting the history. You got two sets now, one set upstairs. So appreciate you. >> theCUBE is part of re:Invent, you know, you guys really are apart of the event and we really appreciate your coming here and I know people appreciate the content you create as well. >> And we just launched CUBE365 on Amazon Marketplace built on AWS so thanks for letting us- >> Very cool >> John: Build on the platform. appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me guys, I appreciate it. >> Andy Jassy the CEO of AWS here inside theCUBE, it's our 7th year covering and documenting the thunderous innovation that Amazon's doing they're really doing amazing work building out the new technologies here in the Cloud computing world. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, be right back with more after this short break. (Outro music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio, and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First of all, coming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe CaraDonna. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies, with Dell Technologies, and joining him, someone he knows quite well, is Rich Sanzi, who's Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. >> Great to be here, Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing, and working with the ecosystem. Maybe set the table for us, what's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the ? >> Well, we're here to talk about our OneFS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our OneFS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud, and together, I think, what we did is define a new standard for scalable file in public cloud, where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities, and we enable real hybrid cloud, and open up new use cases for our customers. >> Excellent, thanks Joe for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage, as I hinted at. You worked with Joe before, and tell us about your role inside of Google. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago, responsible for storage, and storage for all of Google, in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. We've been growing rapidly, and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the Compute side, and so I'm responsible for Compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of OneFS on Google Cloud. >> Yeah, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something, 'cause when you look at cloud, for many years it was cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying everything before it. And especially, you look at Compute, or storage specifically, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, where my application lives. Does it just live one place? Are my applications going a little bit hybrid there? I look back, you know the disclosure, I worked at EMP for years. You know that storage is complicated and diverse, that's why we have file, block, and object. We have lots of different types of solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, "Okay, 90% of the people can use this one thing "for everything." So Rich, let's start with you. Cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers, and the hyperscale solution blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Do you agree with some of that? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical, and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that a cloud vendor, working with customers who bring their workloads in the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best-in-class types of storage that people are using. You're absolutely right, we're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this, is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. >> Excellent, so-- >> Yeah, and I'll just add-- >> Please, go ahead Joe. >> Yeah, I mean, our customers, for a long time, have been asking, our Isilon customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OpEx model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that's what we set out to solve for. >> Excellent, so Joe you mentioned that the Isilon piece. You know, we've watched what has happened with that. You know, Isilon has always been software at the core and highly scalable, so we'd like you both, Joe you teed it up there, but Rich, why is this important for Google Cloud customers, and how's it different from, maybe, how they were doing things in the past? >> Well, I think one of the things that I think I'm really excited about, is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud, and not make a ton of changes on their server side. So it really allows them to preserve their investment, and their applications, and the way that they think about storage, and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is a, let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud, rather than make it a hurdle, and that's my view. >> Yeah, and Joe, help frame this for us a bit. You know, we watched Dell Technologies recently had the Power Store announcement. A lot of discussion about cloud native architectures, moving to micro-services. Google's one of the earliest and most prominent examples of innerized architectures out there. So, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about modernization of their applications, and the journey that they're going on? >> Yeah, well, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need file semantics, as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that, in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, what our customer's looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots, or the multi-protocol data access for NFS, or SMB, or even HDFS. And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their Isilon systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud so they can actually operate on that data, and then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and that high durability, that storage arrays deliver. So, it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers, that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of a high performance compute. >> Excellent, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google, so Rich, talk a little bit about scalability, performance, what these types of evolutions mean, and what you're hearing from customers. >> Certainly from a scale perspective, things like objects and object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes, to really make use of. Customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications to cloud, and not have to make a ton of changes to it. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full-fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise, and then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance, and very high fidelity, low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HBC space, and related high performance computing space in the cloud. >> Great, and Joe, is all this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? >> Well, I expect the demand to be great, right? The kind of workloads we're talking about here cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's like sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering, or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale, and EDA. So, I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals, and we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance, all the way down to even archival. >> So, maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? >> Yeah, yes, it is GA. (laughs) >> Okay, excellent. >> Beta is behind 'em. >> Appreciate that, and how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing. How much of this is what's available from Google, what's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go-to-market work together? >> Yeah, well it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google Portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google Portal, and the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our OneFS file service, or any of Google's native services. >> Excellent, Rich, we'd love to hear, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year, I was at the Google Next event, really saw strong demand from the partner community. They're looking to work with Google, many have worked with Google for many years. What kind of feedback have you been getting and how this fits into the overall solution? >> So, from a partner perspective, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners, is to bring their services onto our platform, and to integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering, and that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google Portal, things like that are core tenets for us for helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So, sort of one of the P-zero requirements, from my perspective, for our product offering here, was that in fact it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform, and that it would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. >> Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem, is, how do they put it? They say, "Google kind of puts you through the ringer. "By the time you get through that, "it is going to work." And of course, we know, Google's doing that to make sure that there are good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets them. All right, Joe-- >> Yes, and-- >> (laughs) Go ahead, yeah. >> I was going to say, you know, delivering these services, and delivering them reliably, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service, and so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, 'cause who knows where the issues could be. Are they in the data center, or are they in the network, or are they on the customer side? We feel responsibility to front (audio distorts). >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Joe, I guess, final thing for you. Talk about the Dell Technologies Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. >> Yeah, sure, before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, capacity's one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And ESG did a performance study on the OneFS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the biozone benchmark, which fired up over 1000 cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at 2 petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service, and their results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game changing numbers, right? It's numbers like that that enable compute-intensive, high performance workloads in Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And our file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing. In order to hit those kind of performance numbers, your head goes to compute and the file system, but there's also a network in there, and to hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two terabyte per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease, and without hiccup. So it's together that we're solving for the compute, network, and storage equation, and that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out, the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google Portal, really simplifying user experience. So, they can provision and manage the systems directly from the Portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great, and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. >> Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on GA of this, and definitely look forward to hearing the customer journeys as they go on. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. >> Yeah, your welcome, Joe. Thank you, as well. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that we're participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

la from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and in care along with its ecosystem partners hey welcome back everyone cubes live coverage of eight of us reinvent 2019 this is the cube seventh year covering Amazon reinvent it's their eighth year of the conference and want to just shout out to Intel for their sponsorship for these two amazing sets without their support we would be able to bring our mission of great content to you I'm John Force to many men we're here with the chief of AWS the chief executive officer Andy chassis tech athlete and himself three our keynotes welcome to the cube again great to see you great to be here thanks for having me guys congratulations on a great show a lot of great buzz thank you a lot of good stuff your keynote was phenomenal you get right into you giddy up right into as you say three hours 30 announcements you guys do a lot but what I liked the new addition in the last year and this year is the band house man yeah they're pretty good they hit the Queen note so that keeps it balanced so we're going to work on getting a band for the cube awesome so if I have to ask you what's your walk-up song what would it be there's so many choices depends what kind of mood I'm in but maybe times like these by the Foo Fighters these are unusual times right now Foo Fighters playing at the Amazon intersect show they are Gandy well congratulations on the intersect you got a lot going on intersect is the music festival I'll get that in a second but I think the big news for me is two things obviously we had a one-on-one exclusive interview and you laid out essentially what looks like was gonna be your keynote it was transformation key for the practice I'm glad to practice use me anytime yeah and I like to appreciate the comments on Jedi on the record that was great but I think the transformation story is a very real one but the NFL news you guys just announced to me was so much fun and relevant you had the Commissioner of NFL on stage with you talking about a strategic partnership that is as top-down aggressive goals you could get yeah I have Roger Goodell fly to a tech conference to sit with you and then bring his team talk about the deal well you know we've been partners with the NFL for a while with the next-gen stats are they using all their telecasts and one of the things I really like about Roger is that he's very curious and very interested in technology in the first couple times I spoke with him he asked me so many questions about ways the NFL might be able to use the cloud and digital transformation to transform their various experiences and he's always said if you have a creative idea or something you think that could change the world for us just call me is it or text me or email me and I'll call you back within 24 hours and so we've spent the better part of the last year talking about a lot of really interesting strategic ways that they can evolve their experience both for fans as well as their players and the player health and safe safety initiative it's so important in sports and particularly important with the NFL given the nature of the sport and they've always had a focus on it but what you can do with computer vision and machine learning algorithms and then building a digital athlete which is really like a digital twin of each athlete so you understand what does it look like when they're healthy what and compare that when it looks like they may not be healthy and be able to simulate all kinds of different combinations of player hits and angles and different plays so that you can try to predict injuries and predict the right equipment you need before there's a problem can be really transformational so it was super excited about it did you guys come up with the idea it was the collaboration between there's really a collaboration I mean they look they are very focused on player's safety and health and it's it's a big deal for their you know they have two main constituents that the players and fans and they care deeply about the players and it's a it's a hard problem in a sport like football but you watch it yeah I gotta say it does point out the use cases of what you guys are promoting heavily at the show here of the stage maker studio which is a big part of your keynote where they have all this data right and they're dated hoarders they've the hoard data but they're the manual process of going through the data it was a killer problem this is consistent with a lot of the enterprises that are out there they have more data than they even know so this seems to be a big part of the strategy how do you get the customers to actually a wake up to the fact that they got data and how do you tie that together I think in almost every company they know they have a lot of data and there are always pockets of people who want to do something with it but when you're gonna make these really big leaps forward these transformations so things like Volkswagen is doing with they're reinventing their factories in their manufacturing process or the NFL where they're gonna radically transform how they do players health and safety it starts top-down and if they if the senior leader isn't convicted about wanting to take that leap forward and trying something different and organizing the data differently and organizing the team differently and using machine learning and getting help from us and building algorithms and building some muscle inside the company it just doesn't happen because it's not in the normal machinery of what most companies do and so it all wait almost always starts top-down sometimes it can be the commissioner or the CEO sometimes it can be the CIO but it has to be senior level conviction or it does get off the ground and the business model impact has to be real for NFL they know concussions hurting their youth pipelining this is a huge issue for them is their business model they they lose even more players to lower extremity injuries and so just the notion of trying to be able to predict injuries and you know the impact it can have on rules the impact it can have on the equipment they use it's a huge game changer when they look at the next 10 to 20 years all right love geeking out on the NFL but no more do you know off camera a 10 man is here defeated season so everybody's a Patriots fan now it's fascinating to watch you and your three-hour keynote Vernor in his you know architectural discussion really showed how AWS is really extending its reach you know it's not just a place for a few years people have been talking about you know cloud as an operation operational model it's not a destination or a location but I felt that really was laid out is you talked about breadth and depth and Verna really talked about you know architectural differentiation people talk about cloud but there are very there are a lot of differences between the vision for where things are going help us understand and why I mean Amazon's vision is still a bit different from what other people talk about where this whole cloud expansion journey but put over what tagger label you want on it but you know the control plane and the technology that you're building and where you see that going well I think that we've talked about this a couple times we we have two macro types of customers we have those that really want to get at the load level building blocks and stitch them together creatively and however they see fit to create whatever is in there in their heads and then we have this second segment of customers who say look I'm willing to give up some of that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way they're much faster in an abstraction that's different from those low level building blocks in both segments of builders we want to serve and serve well and so we built very significant offerings in both areas I think when you look at micro services you know some of it has to do with the fact that we have this very strongly held belief born out of several years at Amazon where you know the first seven or eight years of Amazon's consumer business we basically jumbled together all of the parts of our technology and moving really quickly and when we wanted to move quickly where you had to impact multiple internal development teams it was so long because it was this big ball this big monolithic piece and we got religion about that and trying to move faster in the consumer business and having to tease those pieces apart and it really was a lot of the impetus behind conceiving AWS where it was these low-level very flexible building blocks that don't try and make all the decisions for customers they get to make them themselves and some of the micro services that you saw Verner talking about just you know for instance what we what we did with nitro or even what we do with firecracker those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to to tease apart the different components and even things that look like low-level building blocks over time you build more and more features and all of a sudden you realize they have a lot of things that are they were combined together that you wished weren't that slowed you down and so nitro was a completely reimagining of our hypervisor and virtualization layer to allow us both to let customers have better performance but also to let us move faster and have a better security story for our customers I got to ask you the question around transformation because I think it all points to that all the data points you got all the references goldman-sachs on stage at the keynote Cerner and the healthcare just an amazing example because I mean this demonstrating real value there there's no excuse I talked to someone who wouldn't be named last night and then around the area said the CIA has a cost bar like this cost up on a budget like this but the demand for mission based apps is going up exponentially so there's need for the cloud and so seeing more and more of that what is your top-down aggressive goals to fill that solution base because you're also very transformational thinker what is your what is your aggressive top-down goals for your organization because you're serving a market with trillions of dollars of span that's shifting that's on the table a lot of competition now sees it too they're gonna go after it but at the end of the day you have customers that have that demand for things apps yeah and not a lot of budget increase at the same time this is a huge dynamic what's your goals you know I think that at a high level are top-down aggressive goals so that we want every single customer who uses our platform to have an outstanding customer experience and we want that outstanding customer experience in part is that their operational performance and their security are outstanding but also that it allows them to build and it build projects and initiatives that change their customer experience and allow them to be a sustainable successful business over a long period of time and then we also really want to be the technology infrastructure platform under all the applications that people build and they were realistic we know that that you know the market segments we address with infrastructure software hardware and data center services globally are trillions of dollars in the long term it won't only be us but we have that goal of wanting to serve every application and that requires not just the security operational performance but also a lot of functionality a lot of capability we have by far the most amount of capability out there and yet I would tell you we have three to five years of items on our roadmap that customers want us to add and that's just what we know today well and any underneath the covers you've been going through some transformation when we talked a couple years ago about how serverless is impacting things I've heard that that's actually in many ways glue behind the two pizza teams to work between organizations talk about how the internal transformations are happening how that impacts your discussions with customers that are going through that transformation well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and that you know when we were thinking about lambda people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build the serverless event-driven computing a lot of people who are keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of Technology you always build things and people say well that's gonna cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that the ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customers I mean you are like beating the drum all the time customers what they say we implement the roadmap I got that you guys have that playbook down that's been really successful for you yeah two years ago you told me machine learning was really important to you because your customers told what's the next tranche of importance for customers what's on top of mine now as you look at this reinvent kind of coming to a close replays tonight you had conversations your your tech a fleet you're running around doing speeches talking to customers what's that next hill from from my fist machine learning today there's so much I mean that's not it's not a soup question you know I think we're still in this in the very early days of machine learning it's not like most companies have mastered yet even though they're using it much more than they did in the past but you know I think machine learning for sure I think the edge for sure I think that we're optimistic about quantum computing even though I think it'll be a few years before it's really broadly useful we're very enthusiastic about robotics I think the amount of functions are going to be done by these robotic applications are much more expansive than people realize it doesn't mean humans won't have jobs they're just going to work on things that are more value-added I thought we're believers in augmented and virtual reality we're big believers and what's going to happen with voice and I'm also I think sometimes people get bored you know I think you're even bored with machine learning maybe already but yet people get bored with the things you've heard about but I think just what we've done with the chips you know in terms of giving people 40% better price performance in the latest generation of x86 processors it's pretty unbelievable and the difference in what people are going to be able to do or just look at big data I mean big date we haven't gotten through big data where people have totally solved it the amount of data that companies want to store process and analyze is exponentially larger than it was a few years ago and it will I think exponentially increase again in the next few years you need different tools the service I think we're not we're not for with machine learning we're excited to get started because we have all this data from the video and you guys got sage maker yeah we call it a stairway to machine learning heaven we start with the data move up what now guys are very sophisticated with what you do with technology and machine learning and there's so much I mean we're just kind of again in this early innings and I think that it was soaked before sage maker was so hard for everyday developers and data scientists to build models but the combination of sage maker and what's happened with thousands of companies standardizing on it the last two years Plus now sage maker studio giant leap forward we hope to use the data to transform our experience with our audience and we're on Amazon Cloud I really appreciate that and appreciate your support if we're with Amazon and Instant get that machine learning going a little faster for us a big that'll be better if you have requests so any I'm you talked about that you've got the customers that are builders and the customers that need simplification traditionally when you get into the you know the heart of the majority of adoption of something you really need to simplify that environment but when I think about the successful enterprise of the future they need to be builders yeah so has the model flipped if you know I normally would said enterprise want to pay for solutions because they don't have the skill set but if they're gonna succeed in this new economy they need to go through that transformation that yeah so I mean are we in just a total new era when we look back will this be different than some of these previous waves it's a it's a really good question Stu and I I don't think there's a simple answer to it I think that a lot of enterprises in some ways I think wish that they could just skip the low level building blocks and and only operate at that higher level abstraction it's why people were so excited by things like sage maker or code guru or Kendra or contact lens these are all services that allow them to just send us data and then run it on our models and get back the answers but I think one of the big trends that we see with enterprises is that they are taking more and more of their development in-house and they are wanting to operate more and more like startups I think that they admire what companies like Airbnb and Pinterest and slack and and you know Robin Hood and a whole bunch of those companies stripe have done and so when you know I think you go through these phases and errors where there are waves of success at different companies and then others want to follow that success and and replicate and so we see more and more enterprises saying we need to take back a lot of that development in-house and as they do that and as they add more developers those developers in most cases like to deal with the building blocks and they have a lot of ideas on how they can create us to creatively stitch them together on that point I want to just quickly ask you on Amazon versus other clouds because you made a comment to me in our interview about how hard it is to provide a service that to other people and it's hard to have a service that you're using yourself and turn that around and the most quoted line in my story was the compression algorithm there's no compression outliving for experience which to me is the diseconomies of scale for taking shortcuts yeah and so I think this is a really interesting point just add some color comments or I think this is a fundamental difference between AWS and others because you guys have a trajectory over the years of serving at scale customers wherever they are whatever they want to do now you got micro services it's even more complex that's hard yeah how about that I think there are a few elements to that notion of there's no compression algorithm I think the first thing to know about AWS which is different is we just come from a different heritage in a different background we sweep ran a business for a long time that was our sole business that was a consumer retail business that was very low margin and so we had to operate a very large scale given how many people were using us but also we had to run infrastructure services deep in the stack compute storage and database in reliable scalable data centers at very low costs and margins and so when you look at our our business it actually today I mean it's it's a higher margin business in our retail business the lower margin business and software companies but at real scale it's a it's a high-volume relatively low margin business and the way that you have to operate to be successful with those businesses and the things you have to think about and that DNA come from the type of operators that we have to be in our consumer retail business and there's nobody else in our space that does that you know the way that we think about cost the way we think about innovation and the data center and and I also think the way that we operate services and how long we've been operating services of the company it's a very different mindset than operating package software then you look at when you think about some of the issues and very large scale cloud you can't learn some of those lessons until you get two different elbows of the curve and scale and so what I was telling you is it's really different to run your own platform for your own users where you get to tell them exactly how it's going to be done but that's nothing really the way the real world works I mean we have millions of external customers who use us from every imaginable country and location whenever they want without any warning for lots of different use cases and they have lots of design patterns and we don't get to tell them what to do and so operating a cloud like that at a scale that's several times larger the next few providers combined is a very different endeavor and a very different operating rigor well you got to keep raising the bar you guys do a great job really impress again another tsunami of announcements in fact you had to spill the beans early with quantum the day before the event tight schedule I gotta ask you about the music festival because I think there's a really cool innovation it's the inaugural intersex conference yeah it's not part of replay which is the concert tonight right it's a whole new thing big music act you're a big music buff your daughter's an artist why did you do this what's the purpose what's your goal yeah it's an experiment I think that what's happened is that reinvent has gotten so big with 65,000 people here that to do the party which we do every year it's like a thirty five forty thousand person concert now which means you have to have a location that has multiple stages and you know we thought about it last year when we were watching it and we said we're kind of throwing like a four hour music festival right now there's multiple stages and it's quite expensive to set up that set for our partying we said well maybe we don't have to spend all that money for four hours in the rip it apart because actually the rent to keep those locations for another two days is much smaller than the cost of actually building multiple stages and so we we would try it this year we're very passionate about music as a business and I think we are I think our customers feel like we throw in a pretty good music party the last few years and we thought we were trying at a larger scale as an experiment and if you look at the economics the headliners real quick the Foo Fighters are headlining on Saturday night Anderson Park and the free Nashville free Nationals Brandi Carlile Shawn Mullins Willie Porter it's a good set Friday night it's back in Kacey Musgraves so it's it's a really great set of about 30 artists and we're hopeful that if we can build a great experience that people want to attend that we can do it it's scale and it might be something that you know both pays for itself and maybe helps pay for reinvent to overtime and you know I think that we're also thinking about it as not just a music concert and festival the reason we named it intersect is that we want an intersection of music genres and people and ethnicities and age groups and art and Technology all there together and this will be the first year we try it it's an experiment and we're really excited about I'm gone congratulations all your success and I want to thank you we've been seven years here at reinvent we've been documenting the history two sets now once-dead upstairs so appreciate a cube is part of reinvent you know you guys really are a part of the event and we really appreciate your coming here and I know people appreciate the content you create as well and we just launched cube 365 on Amazon Marketplace built on AWS so thanks for letting us cool build on the platform appreciate it thanks for having me guys Jesse the CEO of AWS here inside the cube it's our seventh year covering and documenting they're just the thunderous innovation that Amazon is doing they're really doing amazing work building out the new technologies here in the cloud computing world I'm John Force too many men be right back with more after this short break [Music]

>>Lai from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon, cube viewers. We are here at Microsoft ignite at the orange County convention center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Edward Thompson. He is the product manager at get hub. Thank you so much for coming on the queue. So the get hub acquisition closed this time last year, uh, for our viewers who are maybe unfamiliar with get hub, explain what get hub is and then also tell us a little bit how it's going since the, >>yeah, I'd be happy to. So yeah, get hub is like the home for software development. If you're a, if you're a software developer, uh, you know, get hub rehost, you know, most of the open source repositories in the world. Um, you know, just to give you some stats. So at this time, last year, about the time the acquisition happened, um, we announced ad get hub universe, which is our annual developer conference, uh, that we had 30 million developers on GitHub and a hundred million repositories. So that's, that's a huge number of developers. I haven't seen the latest numbers. We'll announce the newest, uh, at get hub university this year, which is coming up next week. Uh, but the last number I saw was 40 million developers. So that's a growth of, you know, 10 million developers in just a year. Unbelievable. And that, that also means the 25% of our developers on get hub have joined within the last year. So that's just absolutely incredible. Um, and so yeah, I get hope. Is, is, is that, is that place for development? >>Yeah, it's really interesting when I look at some acquisitions that Microsoft has made back in 2016, they spent $26 billion for LinkedIn, which is most people's resume. And if you look last year it was seven and a half billion dollars for my friends in the software world. Get hub is their resume. That's right. Oh, when you talk about how you do things online, so you've got an interesting perspective on this because you've worked for Microsoft and get hub a couple of times. So give us a little bit about, you know, the relationship when you joined Microsoft 10 years ago, you know, open source developers, developers, developers weren't exactly on everyone's lips. So it gives a little bit of viewpoint through the various incarnations. >>So as you said, I joined Microsoft about 10 years ago. I came in through a little acquisition. Uh, we were just a very small software company, but we were building enterprise cross platform developer tools and we were about five engineers. And when you're building for, you know, Mac OS, Linux, Sonos, all these different platforms you use with so many people with so few rather, so few developers, you really need to take as much off the shelf as possible. You can't build all that yourself, you know. So if, if you needed a logging library, we would just go and use some open source products. We're not going to spend our time working on that when we could be building customer value in step. So when Microsoft acquired that company, they looked at, you know, they did their due diligence, they looked at the source code and they saw all this open source and they, I mean it was almost a deal breaker. >>They really lost their mind. Um, they were not geared up to deal with open source, to use open source, certainly not to contribute to open source. Uh, and so that's the Microsoft that I first saw. And, and to get from there to here is, is incredible. You know, over time. Um, we worked closely with some open source tools. We worked closely with get hub at Microsoft and that was really one of the early sort of unions between Microsoft and get hub was starting to work together on, on some open source software. And so we kind of started to know each other. We started to understand each other's companies and each other's cultures. And we started to, I don't know, I dare say like each other. Like I still count some of those early get hub employees that I met, uh, as some of my closest friends. Uh, and so at some point, uh, they became such close friends that I went to go work with them and get hub and then of course the Microsoft acquisition and so on. But I really think that that, you know, the, the transformation in Microsoft between, uh, the 10 years ago, Microsoft that really didn't get open source and today is, is just incredible. >>Well, let me just sit in that, in that culture and maybe culture clash a little bit the first time around because Microsoft developers have their own culture and their own uniform and their own way of interacting with each other. The, the, the hours that they work, which is very different from Microsoft, which is a pretty middle-aged Volvo driving kind of organization. So how, how does that work and, and what is, what has it been like the second time around the Microsoft as a middle aged Volvo driver? I think you can, you can >>wear a hoodie in and drive a Volvo. Um, no, I think it's been, I think it's been really great. The interesting thing about Microsoft is that it's not, you know, with so many people, it's not just like a homogenous big company. Um, we do have, you know, the developer tools division is a little bit different than offices, a little bit different than windows. And so they all have their own sort of unique cultures and, and now get hub slots in as its own unique culture. And we can, you know, we can talk to each other and we can understand each other, but we don't necessarily have to be all the same, you know, we can get hub team does kind of work some, some of us do work kind of weird hours. And, and I think that somehow that that works, especially with, you know, new tools coming to, um, coming to the marketplace, uh, you know, chat applications, we can be a lot less synchronous. We can be a lot more online and leave a message for each other. You know, we get out, we use get hub issues and pull requests to collaborate on almost everything, whether it's legal, uh, or, you know, our, our PR department. And it's not just developers. So we're trying to take these, these tools and, and sort of apply them to allow us to have the culture that we want at get hub. And I think Microsoft's doing the same thing as well. >>So speaking of new tools and you're, you're speaking here at ignite, you're about to announce the new repository with lots of new capabilities, enabling users to deploy at to any cloud. So tell us a little bit about, about the, this new tool. >>Yeah, so, uh, we announced, we call it get hub actions. We announced it last year at, at get hub universe. Our, uh, again, our, our annual developer conference. And our goal with GitHub actions was to allow people to take, you know, we've got 100 million repositories on get hub. We wanted our users to, to take those repositories and automate common tasks. Let me, let me give you a concrete example. Um, a lot of times somebody will open an issue on a, on a good hub repository, you know, uh, Hey, this doesn't work. I've got a bug report, you know, and they'll fill out an issue. And often either they didn't understand things or, um, the issue resolved itself, you know, who knows. We call that, uh, an issue that goes stale. And so you can build a workflow around that repository that will look for these stale issues and it will, uh, you know, just close them automatically. >>That gets rid of the mental tacks for somebody who, for a, for a developer who owns this repository to allow this, you know, this workload to just do it automatically. And so that's an example of a, a get hub actions workflow. Um, some people, uh, don't like swearing in their repository and you know, so if somebody were to open a bug report, you know, they might be angry. And so you could actually have a get hub workflow that looks for certain words and then replies and says, Hey, that's, here's our code of conduct. That's not the way we roll here. And actually a lot of people find that that feedback coming from a robot, uh, is a lot easier to take than a feedback coming from a human cause. They might want to meet with a person, can't argue with a robot. Well, not successfully. >>I think I have argued with the chat bot in my day. But anyway, >>yeah. So that's what we did a year ago and we opened it up into the beta program and we really quickly got feedback that, that people liked it and people were doing some really innovative things. But the one thing that people really wanted to automate was their bills. They wanted it to be able to build their code and deploy it. And we were just not set up for that. We, we, we didn't build, get hub actions as that platform in 2018 so we kind of had to pause our beta program. You know, I, they, they, they say that no, uh, no good plan survives first contact with the customer. So we had to, we had to hit pause on that. Uh, and we retooled. Um, we, we just sort of, I don't know, iterated on it, I guess. Uh, and we basically built a new platform that supported all of that repository automation capability that we had planned for in the first place. But also allowed for continuous integration build and deployments. So, um, we brought Macko S we brought Linux and windows runners, uh, that we host, uh, in our cloud, um, that people can use to build their software and then deploy it. And again, yeah, we want to be absolutely a tool agnostic. So any, any operating system, any, uh, language and cloud agnostic, we want to let anybody deploy anywhere, whether it's to a public cloud or on premises. >>Yeah. Uh, so, and with this, the second year we've done our program at this show and we really feel it's gone through a transformation. You know, this is a multi decade in a windows office. Uh, the business applications, uh, you know, cloud seeped in, developers are all over the place here. The day two keynote was all about app dev. Um, I'd love to get a little compare and contrast as to, you know, what you see here at Microsoft ignite versus, and I guess what I would call a pure dev show next week. Get hub universe happening in San Francisco. >>It's true. Get up universe is pretty much a pure dev show. Um, we, we have fewer booths, we have smaller booths. Uh, but, uh, and, and honestly, we have fewer sort of, um, I don't know, enterprise sorta. It, it pro crowd is what we used to call them. Um, but we do of course have a lot of dev ops. So, you know, we get up university has a lot of developers, but, uh, we're seeing a lot of dev ops, so there's a lot of meeting in the middle because, you know, I started out my career as assistant man actually. So I remember just, you know, doing everything manually. Um, but that's not the way we do things anymore. We automate all of our, uh, automate, uh, deployments. We automate all of our builds. You know, I don't want to sit there and type something into a console cause I'm going to get it wrong. Um, you know, I've accidentally deleted config files on production servers and that's, that's no good. So I think that they're, uh, get up universe is very different. A to ignite, it's much smaller, it's more intimate, but at the same time, there's a lot of, uh, overlap, especially around dev ops. >>Yeah. Uh, Satya Nadella yesterday in the keynote talked about the citizen developer as a big push for Microsoft. He said 61% of job openings for developers are outside the tech sector. Um, w what do you see in that space? Uh, the different developer roles these days? >>Uh, I think it's, it's absolutely fascinating. When I, uh, when I started my career, you know, you were, you were a developer and you, and you wrote code probably at a development company. Um, but now like everybody is automating tools, everybody's adopting machine learning. Um, when I look around at some of my friends in finance, uh, it's not about, it's not about anything but tech anymore. That's th they're, they're putting technology into absolutely everything that they do to succeed. Uh, and I think that, I think that it's amazing. Um, uh, like I said earlier, uh, 25% of developers on get hub have joined within the last year. So it's clear that it's just exploding. Um, everybody is doing, uh, software now. Yeah. >>There's something for the citizen developer on get hub though. Or is it too high level? I think >>I don't think it's too high level. I think that, uh, I think that that's a great challenge that we need to really step up to. Yeah. So Edward, >>the other big themes we heard here is talking about trust. So, you know, we talked about how Microsoft is different today than it wasn't in past, but I'm curious what good hub seen because you know, in social media when the acquisition first happened, it was, wait, I love GoodHub hub, I love all those people, but Hey, get lab. Hey, some of these other things I'm, you know, I'm fleeing for the woods. And every time I've seen an open source company get bought by a public company, there's always that online backlash. What are you seeing? How has the community reacted over the last year? >>I understand that skepticism. Uh, you know, I would be skeptical of any, uh, sort of change really. I, you know, the, the whole notion of who moved my cheese. But I think that the only way that we can, we can counter that is just to prove ourselves. And I think that we have, I think that Microsoft has allowed get hub to operate independently. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of people expect it to all of a sudden everything to change. And I don't think everything did change. I think that, uh, get hub now has more resources than it used to to be able to tackle bigger and more challenging problems. I think that get hub, uh, now can hire more and, and, and deploy to more places. And so I really just think that we're just going to keep doing exactly what we've been doing just better. So I think it's great. >>So universe happening next week teed up a little bit for us. What are some of the most exciting things that you're looking forward to? What kinds of conversations that will you be having? Presentations? >>So the big one for me is, is actions. I've, I, I've been just completely heads down working on, on get hub actions. So I'm really excited to be able to put that out there and, and you know, finally give it to everybody. Cause you know, we've been in beta now. Uh, like I said, we've been in beta for a year, which sounds like a ridiculous amount of time. Uh, but you know, it, it did involve a lot of retooling and rethinking and, and iteration with our, our beta testers. Um, and so the biggest thing for me is, is talking to people about actions and showing what they can do with actions. I'm super excited about that, but we've got a lot of other interesting stuff. You know, we've done a lot in the last year since our last universe. We've done a lot in the security space. Um, we've done, uh, we've both built tools and we've acquired some. Um, and so we'll be talking about those, uh, get hood package registry, which goes along really well with get hub actions. Uh, I'm super excited about that too. But yeah, I mean my, my calendar is, is, is just booked. Um, it's great. So many people like want to want to sit down and talk that I'm, I'm super excited about it. >>Excellent. Well great note to end on Edgar Thompson. Thank you so much for coming on the queue. We appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. First two minutes, stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage from Microsoft ignite.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Vellante.\ We're going to talk about unified communications and its role in digital transformations. Ray Krug is here. He's a solutions architect at NETSCOUT. Ray, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hi Dave, good to be here. >> So talk a little bit about NETSCOUT. You guys are into a lot of different things, but give us the overview. >> Yeah, NETSCOUT, what they're primarily focused on is providing the visibility to assure digital business initiatives, to provide availability assurance, performance assurance, as well as security assurance as well and we do this using our smart data and smart analytics platform. We kind of do this for, okay, got a huge customer base, we do this for over 90% of the Fortune 500, 95% of the carrier service providers, so we scale to these large enterprises, sophisticated service providers, providing the visibility they need to assure their services. >> So as a solution architect what specifically is your role? >> Probably worthwhile giving a bit of history because I know we're talking about unified communications. So I have been with NETSCOUT now for about eight years it's been and I came from an acquisition. The acquisition was from a British company, a spin-out of British telecom called Psytechnics and we specialized, this is eight years, well 10 years ago, in analyzing the IP network for voice and video traffic and actually being able to understand how we can take impoundments in the network and how that translates to impoundments in voice quality over a voiceover IP. So that was the original data transformation project, the so-called digital transformation from TDM networks to IP. So yeah, we took those analytics and basically figured out how to do that. >> So deep understanding of actually what's going on in the network? >> Yeah absolutely, and what was exciting, and back to NETSCOUT, is when they acquired Psytechnics, they took this technology and put that into their pro-technology, they did that within three or four months. Our technology was in their probe monitoring the voice, both voiceover IP networks, and then what was interesting, within 12 months, all our workflows that we created for insured performance of voiceover IP networks got embedded into the NETSCOUT portfolio of products. And since then, eight years, winding on forward, we've been embedding more and more technology into our InGenuis One platform to give you better and better voice, video, and unified communication analytics. >> I love that story, Ray, because the vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their original objectives, they take too long to integrate so some companies are good at it, some not so good at it, so it must've been pleasing to see that happen, and see your baby actually scale like that. All right, lets talk about big picture. What are the big trends that you see sort of driving unified communications today? >> Yeah, unified communications is getting more and more complex, and perhaps on one accord, sophisticated, but you kind of think, okay, most common used case for us is to be a contact center because at the end of the day, contact center, the customers are demanding more and more ways to interact with the business, traditionally it was voice but now they want web, web chats, video, whatever it might be, so contact centers a big consumer of unified communications. And then there's the different technology trends like, of course, Microsoft Skype for business, evolving into Microsoft Teams, or Cisco Jabber, unified communications and all that sort of thing. A whole bunch of other topics going on, again, part of digital transformation initiatives, SIP trunking, we're still seeing that going on. So I was talking about TDM to IP, so that was back in my day in Psytechnics, now it's taking those and transferring IP to SIP trunking to save costs, that's the main thing, but it is a change and it is more, not instrumentation, but more appliances on a network, like session border controllers in order to add your SIP trunking, and of course there's also other technology, migration to the cloud as well, which ends up, from our perspective what we're seeing is in very hybrid environments. So now you've got a lot of on-prem stuff and some cloud stuff, it's all going to work together in order to make voice, video, unified communications successful. >> Isn't another sort of challenge, I'll call it give the people what they want, you talk about contact centers being a primary source, people want to communicate in different ways. Young people maybe want to use chat, some people like me want to pick up and talk to a human. Is that part of the challenge, is bringing all those together to service all these different constituents? >> Yeah, absolutely, because at the end of the day, it's a contact center, you want to make sure you provide an engaging experience to your customers, however that might be. Omnichannel or whatever word you want to do it. The longer and happier the customer is dealing with your business, perhaps the more money they'll spend with your business, perhaps the better brand awareness they have of your business as well. >> So double click into some of the challenges of actually bringing this stuff together, making it work, is it cost, you mentioned complexity before, is it understanding the analytics, who's using what, predicting, double click on that. >> That's a big topic, but we talked about new features and immersive experience from unified communications, so that's all brilliant. The trouble is, high quality is key. You got to make sure that it's successful, so any migration project, you need to be successful to make sure that you've succeeded. Okay, so that's number one. Quality is key, but also in terms of cost, sometimes these initiatives about cost savings, so SIP trunking is a good example of that. I want to make my service the same as it was before, have some sort of future upgrade capability, but kind of make it cheaper, that's what SIP trunking does for you as well. So those are some of the reasons for doing it, but then that introduces more components in your infrastructure to make all that stuff work and it's not just about voice and video, it's all about the other backend servers as well to make it all happen whether that's mail or chat or presence or whatever it might be. Lots of components now that have to work together, stuff that you control but also stuff that you don't control like SIP trunks is a good example, or gateways out to the PSTs, things that you don't control, and that makes it kind of really tricky to deal with. There's a bunch of other stuff as well that's important, network convergence, you've got all these applications converging onto that one network infrastructure, how do you manage that? >> Quick tangent. So you mentioned SIP trunking, explain what that is for our audience so they don't have to google it. (Ray laughs) >> Yeah, so SIP trunking, basically, if you think about gatewaying out to the PSTN in terms of making your plain old telephone calls, dialing a number and sending out, SIP trunking does that all from an IP perspective. So the idea is, you don't necessarily do a conversion to TDM, traditional phone systems, it all goes IP. So basically, you then send everything out, IP, over the network, it gets to the other end, and the whole purpose of that, it's a service that you buy from your service provider and it's cheap. >> Okay, you talked about these challenges. Generally, how does the industry approach solving these problems and specifically how does NETSCOUT solve them? >> Great question. So traditionally, let's sort of rewind a little bit, I talked about a lot of components that need to work together to make your unified communications experience. Lots of servers, lots of network infrastructure, firewalls, session boarder controllers and all that. Traditionally, what you do is monitor each of those devices. Take a look at their CPU utilization, or take a look at how the servers are performing, and often, very little is taken into account about the network and how that's behaving, because again, I've said it's a converged network. So you end up with a picture saying, all my servers are working fine, but then you end up with the problem, but users are complaining because they can't dial, users are complaining because the quality is bad. So that's kind of the problem with trying to bring all those together using the different metrics and coming up with some sort of conclusion. >> And then it's finger pointing, right? >> Oh yeah, classic. >> Which mole to whack. >> Yeah, in constant use cases, war rooms, okay, all my lights are green for every person in that war room but the people are still complaining, absolutely. >> Okay, so talk more about how NETSCOUT approaches this. >> So, the name gives it away, really. We always focus on what's going on in the network, wherever that network may be, so we're taking a look at that, we call it Y data, it's packet data, and we're able to translate that. Whatever's going over the wires, whether it be an application going over the wires or whether it be unified communications going over the wire like voiceover IP, RTP, or signaling, SIP as an example of those. So we're able to get that picture of how everything is communicating with each other, and we're being able to raise that level. So packets are notoriously hard to interpret, but we've cracked it, we've got a sort of technology, it's a patented technology called ASI, adaptive service intelligence, we call it smart data, but it's converting that Y data into meaningful keeper points metrics. So you name it, you name the application, we've got performance metrics. So whether that be voice, voice quality, mean opinion score, we're taking that from the Y data. Whether it be application performance from a database that might be running, or a mail server that might be running, we have performance. Whether it's this signaling that goes on to get data and all that, we have performance metrics about that. So we're using the same data set, the Y data, bringing it up to our analytics, our ASI layer, and then we have an understanding of what component's failing. Is it the voice that's failing? Is it this part of the network that's failing? And then, for voice, there's a whole topic on how we understand that, remembering my background and the analytics behind that. >> So, your secret sauce is you've got this deep probe into the network, you've got this ASI, this patented technology, and you've got an architecture to leverage that capability, and that is really your big differentiator from a technical perspective? Is that right? >> Well, from a technical perspective, absolutely. And from an obvious perspective, we solve, in the easiest way, the most complex problems. It's kind of where it's coming, 'cause these are tricky problems to do, they sometimes go unseen for ages, but because we've got that overall visibility, we get to that root cause very quickly. >> Okay, let's talk about the business impact. Maybe you can give us some examples, customer examples, and how it affected their business? >> Yeah, so that's important. A couple of things, let's imagine you're contact center, a service company, so I've got one in mind, and the one that I have in mind, six contact centers, they take up to about 100,000 calls in a day. So it's important. They're a service company so people phone them up to have their service. If you can't make contact with your service company, maybe the impact of that is, okay, that service is rubbish, I'm going to go to a competitor, as an example. Or you don't get your service that you require. So there's huge implications. In this example, we've found that calls were dropping, as an example, so people are connecting with their agent, calls are dropping, okay, hopeless. It's really problematic. And it's interesting that you pointed out about war rooms and finger pointing, and that's exactly what happened. What they'd done, they'd engaged in a SIP trunking project to deploy SIP trunking they were going to save a million dollars a month by implementing this SIP trunk. So that's huge, okay yet, when they deployed this, they were having a bad experience, so that's critical, so they needed to achieve that successful migration, so they had tours but nothing that could spot what was going on with these calls dropping. So along come NETSCOUT, we deployed our probe, and very quickly, it's just amazing, very quickly we were to able to analyze the reason for the call dropping. Turned out it was a firewall issue, complex network so it's kind of difficult to know where the traffic is routing. We were able to figure that out, give it the evidence to say the signaling, the SIP, was dropping, and we were able to pinpoint that and they got that fixed very quickly. >> Which meant that they were able to realize that million dollar a month savings. >> Precisely, yes exactly. Let alone that any business that might've been affected by the fact that people couldn't call in. >> Any other examples you can share? >> Yeah, I've got a really great one, probably closer to a lot of people's hearts, and relates to a hospital, and they were going through a digital migration project. It's as simple as changing their phone handsets from one vendor to another in some respect, about 2,000 phones that they were replacing, so it's kind of interesting. So I've now got a nice new shiny phone on my desk, when I pick up the phone I get very bad quality and stuff like that, and just blame the phone and all that sort of thing. Sometimes that's change, people don't like change, they like all the buttons on their old phone, and sometimes it's real, but in a way, the business impact for that one is, if I'm a customer, a patient, I'm phoning up my doctor for some records, and the phone quality is bad, then I'm not going to have that much confidence that the doctor's going to be able to cope with my ailment that I might have. So it's really important to have quality, and when it's about your health, then it's really important that it's there. >> Awesome. Let's end on some advice that you would give to customers. So you got people trying to do digital transformations, they're trying to pull all these different communication systems together, trying to understand where the exposures are, the performance issues. What advice would you give to people that are struggling with these problems, where should they start, and what should their journey look like? >> In some respects, I think visibility is key, both before pre-migration, during migration and afterwards. So in my example before, having visibility of the performance of the phones before, in this migration issue, and then as I go through the migration, being able to just check that when they deployed the new phones, everything's working. And then of course, once, if there were any problems, so in my example, it was QOS problem. QOS, quality of service, so that's a networking problem and it goes back to, because we're in the network, we're looking at the network, as much as that's the most complex problem to solve, and it's everywhere, QOS problems are everywhere, it's the simplest thing for us to fix. So monitoring during migration, seeing what the behavior of the phones are, during that process, correcting everything quickly, so that the migration project is successful, and then post-migration, business as usual, monitoring, so if there are any problems you can quickly react to it. >> Got it, okay, so you're going to through a business case, you're going to make this part of your digital transformation, you're going to bring together all the stakeholders but I think your point is, if you don't have visibility on what's going on in the network, there are going to be some blind spots that you potentially run into. If you have visibility in the network, you're going to be able to remediate those, and the example you gave of the services company, you're going to be able to achieve your expectations and your ROI results and have confidence that you're going to be around for the next project. So Ray, thanks very much for coming on and sharing with us. And thank you for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. (bright synth music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Welcome to the special. Keep conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios of the Cube. We're a special guest Rowan Trollope of CEO of Five9, formerly of Cisco formerly CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Great to see you, John. So let's talk about >> the future. The Contact Center. You got a new role. CEO Five9. Looks like a great opportunity. Tell us about it. >> Well, the Contact Center is really where it's at right now in the UC space on in the collaboration space. And frankly, in the digitization trend for most companies, they're realizing that the experience that they give to their customers has got to transform. You know, customers are telling them that if they don't fix the experience they deliver, they're going to leave. The business is that they're doing business with him. So I think that's, you know, it's It's really emerging as this really hot space and interesting space in a place where businesses recognize they have to spend money and do a much better job. >> One of the things that we talked about the past, certainly that you're always on the wave of cloud data. You've always had that vision in our previous conversations. Five9 Now in this contact center, kind of an old legacy old way of doing things. Voice over i p. You know, managing customer relationships. Whether it's support or outbound seems to be changed with cloud computing in the role of data. And now, machine learning and eyes really been an accelerant. Yet what's your vision over the next five years as this starts to transform and people re imagine what that's going to look like for their businesses? Because certainly customer relationships are changing. People have multiple devices here on any platform, there, there horizontally, moving around different websites, different places different on the undergo. A lot of change happening. What's your vision? There >> is a lot of change happening, and it's changed. But that's primarily driven by consumer behavior and sort of enabled by technology. So the biggest factor, in my opinion, that's affecting businesses, that you have the age of this empowered consumer. You know, ten years ago, for example, my wife stuff is you're bugging the crap out of me about fixing cleaning up my garage and so at the time, the way that I did that as I ran down to Home Depot, I looked at what they had on the shelf. I picked a, you know, a shelving system, and I brought it home, and I set it up ten years later, and this is just about a year ago. We have moved since then and, you know, the garages yet again, a mess. And I've been giving getting a hard time about it. So she's finally I said, Okay, okay, I'll organize the garage. And so what do I do this time? I go out and I get on my phone and I search for garage organizing systems, and I get lots of different forms and people talking about things and reading customer reviews and so on and so forth. I do a whole bunch of research, actually call a couple of the companies that made three different calls just to get some details about their product that I couldn't get online and ultimately ordered one. And it shows up at my house. So ten years ago, you have sort of, you know, not very empowered consumer. I took what was on the shelf. That's what I got. Ten years later, you have zero trips to retail brick and mortar. You have a very empowered consumer. Me. It has lots of options, lots of choices and three calls to a contact center that happened in the span of ten years, powered by the Internet, >> power by my mobile phone, powered >> by connectivity and so on and so forth. So any business, who's in, you know, every business essentially is dealing with this challenge and my expectation in terms of who I'm gonna do. Businesses with heavily influenced by the quality of their website, the quality of the experience that they had the quality of their community, that user reviews, they were coming back and, you know, some of them. Some of the commentary, Like, I got this thing it was missing. Some stuff I couldn't get hold of them was super hard to deal with. I'm not going to do business with that company. So what? You know, part of that transformation over the last ten, twenty, thirty years has been the empowered consumer gets to make a choice, and they don't have to do business if you don't have a great experience. So that's moving the contact center industry from being a sort of an extension of the phone system that we really don't want to think about very often into some that's really, really important for businesses, and I was seeing that left and right coming from my previous job. >> It's interesting. It's an opportunity to its challenge on one hand, for company dealing with the old way to do it, it becomes an opportunity when the user expectations and experiences impacted. That's a buying decision or relationship. Emotional decision. What is this opportunity mean for companies? Because now this now flips to the potential sellers of services and products. They have now an opportunity to take advantage of this new dynamic where users are in charge of being empowered. What's the opportunity for companies? >> So so it's two things. One, if you're a disruptive company coming out, you know any or starting up a new company and you're going after this. You can look at the user experience as part of your differentiation value proposition. I'm not only going to have a great product, but I'm gonna wrap that in the great experience. And that's the expectation today that any new company company will take a company like Square, for example, Yes, they have a beautiful little card swipe reader, and they have a, you know, nice industrial design. But that's not just what you get. You get a team behind that coming from, you know, the company that provides great support and a great experience. And when you sign up for square, the first thing you get is an email from their CEO sort of welcoming you to the community, and you see that with a lot of modern companies. Tesla's another great example where you see a really tremendous experience being around what is fundamentally a great product. Uh, and that's not something that you would see with the the incumbents. I think if you're a disrupter or new company, or you're looking at transforming an industry, then the opportunity is think about the holistic customer experience. If you're an incumbent or you've been in the business for a while and you're facing one of these sort of digital disruptors, if you want to call them that, then your opportunity is to re imagine your customer experience end to end and put some time and effort into it. You know, the reality is still, and I was in the call center thirty years ago, almost. The customers at the call centre. In most businesses, most incumbent businesses today is a call is a cost center because it's something that you sort of essentially have to deal with once this product has been sold. And it's not a place that most executives in most businesses want to go. In fact, in many cases it's been sent to other countries. Your contact center is You don't even know where it is. It's in the Philippines or it's and you know, some other country or it's in India or it's it's in a state, you know, less expensive state, which is all fine. But it's not fine that executives and companies don't want to go and see where the frontline of their business is, which is the place where they that experience meets the customer. So if you're an incumbent, you really have to think about, you know, you have to think about putting your contact center as a priority for your business and re imagining the experience and look, go walk a day in their shoes and experience what it's like. >> One of the things that we've been reporting on over the years and and you know you've been following the Cube and it's looking angle is the talk of CX or custom experience been going on for many, many years, somewhat aspirational outside of the corner cases of companies that actually specialize in, you know, differentiating on customer satisfaction and user experience. And that's obvious than you check the box there. But as as the market changes its now attainable, we're seeing that the rial actionable execution for companies to modernize what was once a call. Soon, as you pointed out, >> how do they >> do that? What's what's happening? Certainly, cloud computing helps data, and I are kind of at the table. How does a company that wants to modernize and have a real advantage and change their business business approach? What do they do? What's the What's the plan? You guys seem to be position for that. What do I do? What's the playbook? >> Go to Five9.com. No. The reality is that the first thing you have to do is really believe that this is an important aspect of delivering your business to your end consumer and and look at what's making up your competitors offer not just their product, but their offer and and sort of internalize and get the idea that OK, yes, this turns out it is important and I care about it. I'm going to go spend time on it because, look, the reality is we know how to deliver any business. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to deliver great customer service. You know, what customers want is actually really simple. When I call you answer the phone. Don't send me through some rigmarole of IVRs and other technology hurdles. Don't hide your phone number when I want to get a hold of you make it easy for me to contact you. And when I contact you, what I want, I want someone who understands me. Who knows the problem that I have, Who's an expert who can help me and who has empathy, you know who can really connect with me and relate with me. And if there's a problem, it's not just about I'm going to solve the problem. But it's like we understand and we're sorry, you know, and we're going to make this better for you, and we're going to follow up with you, so that's a big part of what you have to-turns out doing that is not hard. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to do it. Now. There are lots of technology companies that are out there today that make that easy. And the history of the Contact Center, essentially over the last twenty five years, has been essentially kind of stuck in the, you know, in a phone closet, somewheres with some technology that has actually hindered what smart people knew. We knew how to do this. We knew how to deliver a great experience. The problem was, you had like this legacy technology, and you had to call somebody in the data center somewhere else, and they were like, That's going to be hard. It's going to cost millions of dollars and our system doesn't support that. And so there is a technology sort of shackles that were on customer service experts and executives in businesses was like, Wow, that sounds like it's going to be expensive. It's going to take a long time now. We're in a world with the cloud where within a few clicks and a few minutes, You can deploy a contact center >> so we go to >> our side or other sites, and you can instantly have, you know, very, very quickly have a contact center that is modern that is flexible, that is, you know, has all the latest features and functionality. And so technology is no longer the hindrance that has been taken off the table. Our company was born in the cloud. There's other companies out there people can use. The bottom line is this is not really a technology problem anymore. >> So people have multiple devices and a lot of different channels of how people engaged. That's expectation on the Cust company side variety of sets of resource is that could be deployed at any given time. So you kind of have this now integrated kind of philosophy with cloud. How What does Cloud and Data? And now Aye, aye, due to the context. And how's the contact center change? Yeah. Does it look like >> that? Yes. Of the real, most important thing that has happened with the cloud computing wave is, you know, first that it made technology easy to consume. You know, it used to be really hard and expensive like we just talked about just to get technology. And then once you've got it, you were stuck with it and didn't change ever. Okay, we're kind of beyond that now with the cloud and that those were the table stakes. But something else happened when we started moving technology to the cloud that was more important. That and that was that we started collecting data, and as we started to collect data >> that >> became really interesting because of one other thing that happened, which was the revolution that happened in machine learning, and it started about ten years ago with some very, you know, big scientific breakthroughs on deep learning, more specifically, and what that deep learning approach needed was lots and lots and lots of data in order to work. It was a great scientific breakthrough, but it kind of stalled a little bit at the beginning because you didn't. There wasn't a lot of data out there that could actually you could get the benefits. Well, as companies have more, more been moving to the cloud. What that's creating his centers of data and not just data for your company, because lots of businesses don't have enough data actually to power machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are famously data hungry. You know that there's a famous saying from, you know, a bunch of folks in the AI industry. But it's that more data is better data. You know, the more you have, the better you are. In fact, you can also say that you know if you have more data, it's better than having a great algorithm right. The more data will always win. So what the cloud has unlocked is massive amounts of data, and that data is important to actually get at the root cause of the problem of bad customer service and support, which is with that data and the breakthroughs in machine learning. And that data in our industry is customer conversations. What your customers are actually telling you, either by text or by voice or by email that information is really interesting and can be married with machine learning technology to provide automation. It's >> interesting you mentioned customer. I think that's, I think, a key point. And you know, as we look at the data world, people look at certainly from a tech perspective that supply technology to data great that could assist then things. But we tell what customers and you're in business to serve customers. That's probably most valuable data. So as you said earlier, people hide the phone Or is it that they want to shy away from engaging with customers to not support them or hope they go away? They might be indifferent of serving them. You're saying the reverse Be proactive, engaged the customer, get that data so you can iterated on that. So I get that I think that Israel innovation in terms of the direction but as you did with customers is also the human side of it. Yeah, customers want to know that there's someone on the other side. You brought your garage organizing system because that component, how is the role of humans and machines impacting this new transformation from customer center to custom contact Sent it to essentially customer center. Yeah, what is the What is that piece of human? Super important? >> Yeah, we don't see technology replacing all the humans, actually, because and this goes back to my experience in the in the contact center many years ago. And, you know, many years ago. And my observation was and I, in fact, my first job I said, you know, in between two different agents and one of them was named Dave and one was named Ken. And Ken was really warm and effusive, and he got, I remember, he used to get gifts on his desk from customers. They would send him flowers and chocolates and, you know, like their products and so on. And he could tell a customer to shut up in a nice way, and they would love him after it. I mean, it was amazing that he could do this. It was all about empathy. He didn't. He didn't actually know all the answers to all of the questions. But he created these, like, incredible fans amongst the customers. The guy to my right, Dave, he was super smart. He just had, like, as much empathy as a rock. And he could answer all the questions really fast. Okay, And I So I use that cause I would learn things from him, but customers didn't like him. And the answer, you know, what I saw in those two folks, was that you can't do one or the other. You need both And what computers, are and what machine learning specifically. But now that we're getting all this data through the cloud is is able to do is we're able to predict the answers to what customers. You know what the questions from customers will to predict those things really quickly. So that's a sort of a mastery, so machines can help with mastery. They can help with being able to answer every question instantly or know the best thing to say at it to a customer at any given time. But what machines can't do is empathy. Humans are the ones that have to bring the heart. So what we're working on at Five9 is using machines to help agents. Human agents give them mastery, and we're letting the humans then focus on what they do really well, which is bringing the heart to the customer. And that creates a a bond between a brand and a customer that is like, unbreakable. >> I think you're onto something big here because we look a digital, the impact of digital technologies And you could look at variety examples mainstream media to technology companies to any kind of industry of vertical. There's a lot lack of emotional I Q or emotional quotient, and this seems to be what people are looking at you. I'm just looking further than some of the polarization in with digital in terms of media coverage, politics or whatnot. You started to see this focus on how to bring Mohr empathy and Mohr emotional like, yeah, two systems. And I think users are responding to that. Can you comment on your reaction to that? >> Yeah, part of this starts with confusion that the contact that is rampant in the contact centre industry, which is that people don't really want to talk anymore. And, you know, this has been observed because of the fact that, you know, we have new generations entering the work force like millennials. You know, we'll have our kids out there who would prefer to text us than talkto us often. But the reality is, and we surveyed this that actually even millennials still prefer voice as the primary form of communication and and that what has happened, that is the mistake. What is the error that people made? The error that people made is assuming that no, if it were actually conflating a bad voice experience with the fact that voice is bad and that's just not true, and it's observable. Not too. We've gone and actually proven this. So So what we've sort of realised is that what you need to fix is the bad voice experience. What is that? It's like, Wait, going into an Ivy are Okay, That's frustrating. You know what's >> a G are real quick to >> find the interactive voice response. So it's the push one for this push to for that. Everybody hates everyone hates, you know, every company uses it, and it's like a stain on humanity. We need to get rid of those things because they're just awful. So you go into this tree and all that, Okay, so get rid of it. By the way, everybody, you know, five years ago said, Oh, we can fix that problem with bots. Oh, and that actually is almost worse. You know, I've been trying to use bots for the last three months. I've been doing my own little test on this and communicating, you know, using only using text and whenever I hit a But it's like the last thing I want to do is talk to a computer. I want to get to a human. So my first question now is Are you human, which is my version of push zero to get through the I v. R. Gets again to an agent. Okay, so you know, there's been a confusion about this, and when you go back to what you had said earlier, this notion that users that, you know, the empathy is what has tend to be lost. Well, turns out it's much harder to make a emotional connection on text. Then it is with voice, and people just in general are not as good at communicating that emotional content on text because they're not very good writers generally, and they don't have time, Whereas they're excellent at doing that with their voice. You know, I'm not happy verses. I'm not happy, you know, there's a huge range of emotion that commune can be communicated with the human voice, which is extremely powerful. So if we can fix the bad voice experience, take away all that crap so that when you get someone they know, you know they know who you are. It's a you know, if they understand you, they can get to the root cause of your problem very quickly. Then it turns out that the human voice is extremely useful and and we're in now entering into an era where we can use the computer to talk to humans in unique and interesting ways now that I believe is actually still a little bit further out because of a variety of reasons. But in the meantime, computers and a I can help agents master their craft and let them focus on the embassy side of >> things. So in terms of Five9, the core problem that you're solving is what. >> So we provide a flexible, easy to configure, easy to deploy, cloud based contact center. OK, and it's it's it's it's minutes or hours before you can have this technology deployed. You don't need to have a phone system. So you look at a call center that sort of from the old days, and it's like lots of phones on desks in our world. You sweep those away. You have a computer in a Web browser. You plug in a headset, your agent could be sitting anywhere in the world. They get a beautiful web UI that's deeply integrated into Sales Force or Zen desk or service. Now >> our Oracle or >> any CRM system that you have, and we give you this really, really tightly integrated end to end experience. And we just make all of that easy and it handles any kind of contact, whether it's voice or text or email, it all goes through our system. It's all in the cloud. It's really easy and it's affordable. >> And the data management is pretty straight forward. Is that going to be flexible and agile enough to use with other things as people start having different touchpoints? >> Absolutely. In fact, with our system, all your calls are recorded into the cloud, as are all of your contacts. All of that is stored securely in our servers and is accessible to you. You can. There's a whole range of APS in the contact center. You can plug in on >> top of our platform >> and including things like variant Collab Rios. You know this whole area of workforce optimization and and so on, so lots and lots of technologies are actually built on Five9. So when you, by our technology, really banged up technology platform with ah rich ecosystem of APS that plug in on top of it and where we sit really in that value chain, you know, is the core platform that delivers that delivers the data and the pipes, and we sort of provide the intelligence. Also, that runs on top of that data, and that's where we're heading >> and that's your core innovation. Pretty much get that cloud based in it up fast. Get the focus on >> that part of it, and I'd say the second part of it that's sort of product on platform. The second part is really the offer. So it turns out that if you go to most companies, the things that make their customer experience poor that they want to fix, ah, solvable through capabilities that are already available in the platforms that they generally already have. What they're missing is a partner who can help them make that happen because it turns out it's not easy. You know, we've got a very flexible platform. It's been built over more than a decade, so it's like, really rich and in features. But the question and more and more what we see our customers wanting from us is a complete offer, and that includes professional services on site support, you know, people to help you, you know, handhold walk you through that process so well, kind of go the extra mile for our customers and give them in end end solution to their problem, not just a piece of technology. Now, if just technology is what you wanted, Our technology works for businesses with two support center reps. So it's, you know, weeks scale >> all the >> way down to folks. But we also have context are running that have for thousand reps. So we run that entire that entire spectrum for the small customers. They want something easy pre configured off the shelf. Just go. Okay, There's nobody coming on site for those customers. You have four thousand reps, We've got people on site. We darken the skies with our support people and our our engineers and everyone else actually provide a complete solution to our customers. >> That's great. We'll congratulate. I think having that innovation and having the cloud approach gets it up fast, gets the value delivered. And then as they grow, you can flex it, flex with flex the size, the organization not limited. So I want to get Teo. You're doing a panel discussion. Enterprise connect coming up in Orlando That's where we first met. This has been a show that's been talking to the enterprise customers who are been evolving from voice over i. P. Integrated communications, unified communications. Though that world of voice, data and systems to now and open cloud based data A. I So should be exciting. Yeah, panel want to get I don't want to give it away, but what are you talking about? The title is why customer engagements leading the Enterprise communications conversation Give us a quick teaser. What? >> I'm going to be focused on what's coming next, and one of the big reasons that drove me to this company that's attracted some top talent in the industry is that many of us see that the era of the cloud has actually opened these golden doors to a new land, which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that we see that solving some of the root cause problems that we talked about earlier, bad customer service and experience that have essentially been talked about for a long time but haven't been solved. That finally, the technology is actually caught up to the problem. And so our big play at Five9 is to become the world's best self learning intelligent contact center platform. And we see that the Contact Center has--is shifting from being less a contact center and more a center of customer data and that that is the key insight that that is the key and said that we had is that wow, this is a lot of really interesting data, you know? Turns out what your customers say to you. It's really, really important. And today, in almost all contact centers, almost everywhere that data goes nowhere. It goes away because it's not very useful. Most of the most of what customers they're telling you is actually voice traffic, and that sits in wave files. If you recorded at all, which many customers don't and then they're not very useful, so they get thrown away. We figured out that that information is ridiculously valuable, but it's only become valuable recently because of advances in machine learning that allow us to do speech to text reliably as good as humans. Okay, speech to text has been around for a while. It's just been really crappy. Now it's really good. And now that it's gotten really good and affordable. Every customer can take advantage of it. So because all of our customers have all of their data stored on our cloud and all calls get recorded, we can now start to translate those voice wave files into text and provide that as insight back to the customer. We signed a partnership with Google to leverage their technology to help us make sense of all of those spoken conversations and then, ultimately all of the text. So we believe the next generation of the Contact Center is going to be less about a contact center and more about a center of customer data, which can be used to drive automation and insight back into the business. That's the big transformation for the next decade in the Contact Center. >> taking the Contact center making gets a customer center. This is kind of compatible with >> Hostage Data Center. That's runner of customer data. >> I mean, it's it's really kind of in line with how dev ops change cloud computing, where you had Devon ops coming together and you're taking that concept, that ethos to the context center, You know? Look, >> um, >> I'm not sure that it's exactly like Deb ops, but I guess you could draw that correlation. I think what you do see in businesses that there's new functions >> popping up all >> the time. A recent function that's popped up his customer, uh, customer success and what his customers success. It's all about reaching out to your customer to help make them successful in the insight that led to customers successes. When you have a services business, if you engage with your customer proactively, you actually can make more money and drive higher value both for the customer and for the business. And you know, I relate this back to my first experience in business, and I remember and I was in support and we're on the twelfth floor. We had a >> whole floor of people, >> and I remember our boss came down one day and they said something really interesting. They said Every time you guys pick up the phone, we lose money. I mean, if you can believe that is that it is now. It sounds crazy, but that's what happened in America. I felt kind of bad about that was like, Wow, I don't want to answer the phone, but it's ringing all the time. So what am I going to do? Well, the answer was we hired someone, not me. But the team hired someone to hide the phone number, which is sort of logical if you're told that when you pick up the phone, you're going to lose money. What do you want to get less phone calls? Well, how are you going to do that? Well, the company's customers can't find about Guess what tons of customers did this other thing we did? Was we employment in an i. V. R. Let's try and give themselves service. So they really the motivation >> of hiding the customer experience that we were running away from the customer experience, >> that iron Iwas and this is in hindsight. I see this that right on the floor above me was it wasn't the thirteenth. It was the fourteenth floor. It was a sales floor and they were doing everything they could tow proactively reach out and contact customers who didn't want to really hear from here from the sales people. So you had this situation. We had a floor of people, my floor, which were sort of running away from customers and a floor of people they were trying to run towards customers and like we're both missing them. It was insane. And what's now transpired in businesses that people get this and go? Wow. If I can deliver a great experience, it actually increases loyalty. It increases the amount of services that my customer will get. They get more value, I get more value. We want to run way, want to run towards customers. We want to reduce the distance between a business and their customer to zero. We want that to be like this kind of connection. We want our businesses, you know, their customers, toe love them. And the way that you get that love actually often comes through the contact Center. So it's becoming much more >> strategic, connecting in, engaging with customers. We're only going >> to be powered by machine learning like you can't do this. Okay? Just by going, I mean, you could do it by hiring lots and lots of humans, but it's really expensive. OK? Does not scale. So the only answer to this problem, which we know how to solve, is toe leverage technology. And it starts in the cloud. >> Right? Great stuff. We'll see you at Enterprise Connect the Cube will be there and great degree to see you. Thanks for coming and great to see this's The Cube Conversation Special Cube comes here in Palo Alto. Grown trial of CEO of Five9. Solving the contact problem. Bring it in. Modernizing it. Running towards customers Customer engagement and big panel coming up. Enterprise connect. I'm John for here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

(dramatic music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Another great conversation today, this one's especially interesting to me, we've got Tiffani Bova who's the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist of Salesforce. Just written a book, great book by the way, Growth IQ, I guess it's coming out later in August of 2018. But Tiffani, I want to talk a little bit about something that seems near and dear to your heart, the notion of customer engagement and how that gets turned into business strategy. So, let's start there. What is, in your two and half years at Saleforce, what have you learned about customer engagement and how actionable is it, really? >> Well, you know, Peter, it's a great question 'cause I'd say this, you know, I thought I knew the answer to that question when I stated two and a half years ago and I've had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with customers of ours around the world and now I have a different perspective on what that is. You know, Clayton Christensen wrote that new book, Competing Against Luck and it was all about, sort of, the job that you have to do, right? You're going to go from point A to point B, are you going to catch a taxi or you going to catch an Uber. And what makes the difference if the job is the same, regardless of what you're doing. In my mind, right, it's the experience or the engagement that that particular driver or brand has with the customer that is riding in the back of the car, satisfying the need for the job that needed to be done. And when I started to shift my thinking around it's really this experience layer and this engagement layer of how easy is it, how friction, you could apply it to all kinds of industries now, you know. Whether it's meal delivery, or buying a book or buy, you know, software from someone like Salesforce or consulting or watching this show. It used to be you had to go and watch it live or you'd have to watch it on television, now we have very different ways and means in which you can be engaged. So that has been super exciting to me to see it live and in person as brands are really focusing on this importance of the way in which they engage with, connect with and inspire customers to do things with them as their brand of choice. >> So, as I said, Tiffani, I like the book and there is three or points that really want to draw out. I want to start with the first one though. >> Okay. >> Let's go back to this notion of engagement. >> Yes. >> You make the observation in the book and I also have some, a background, thinking about customer engagement, customer experience but you make a great point in the book that your brand is the promise that you're make to the marketplace. Customer experience is the customer side of the engagement. >> Right. >> It seems as though if there's a significant miss-match between those two, that's the first indication you've got a problem. If your brand promise and what is being experienced are not aligned, that says something, have I got that right? >> Absolutely and what's fascinating about that is many brands feel like they're totally aligned and then in mass, you know, research from all kinds of people whether it's McKenzie or Bain or Gartner or Forester or anybody else, you're seeing this disconnection where the brand thinks it's great and the customer's going, it's not that great. The gap between those two things, unfortunately, even with all the advancements with technology, I feel like it's getting wider, right? Because their still sort of, brands are still sort pushing out what they think is interesting and engaging and customers are going, it's kind of not so much. And so, this really a way and I really dug into it in Growth IQ of how brands can figure out, how do I get closer to that by starting with the customer and working their way back in. I mean, it's a long discussed topic of outside in versus inside out, it's nothing new there but now we have this advancements of technology that actually allow us to know what that outside in is telling us at scale, without having to throw people at the problem. >> Yeah, through data collection and other types of things. >> Absolutely. >> But it all starts with that impedance miss-match. >> Yes. >> And as you said, if businesses don't accept that they have a problem they're not going to change. But that is a measurable, actionable thing. >> Right. >> So, if nothing else, if nobody reads anything else out of the book, just that simple idea that it's not MPV, it's not, you know, other types of measures, your Net Promoter Score or other types of measures but it's, basically, is there that disconnect. So the second thing is is that you've observed how it can be made actionable. Now, you've come up with 10, a recipe, or let's call them 10 ingredients of different ways of thinking about what you might be able to do from a growth standpoint. Now, rather than going through all of them, let's just say that they're there but the thing that's interesting is you've come up with a general framework for how you can imagine putting those things together. You call it context combination sequence, what does that mean? >> It, I think it's, I, when I decided to embark on this journey of writing this book I said, you know, what do I feel has been missing, or what did I notice as a pattern as I was having conversations since I was traveling around and talking to customers. And it wasn't the decision that they make of how they were going to grow that was interesting, it was actually the fact that it was rarely in isolation. It was never a single answer to a very complex problem, it was a combination of a number of things. So, if you're going to launch a new product, like that's going to be your growth strategy, well, are you going to launch it yourself? Are you going to do it with partners? Are you going to launch it direct to consumer online or you going to go into retail? You have to then combine the fact that you want to launch a new product with other things to help you grow. Or if you you're going to say I want to reduce turn, it's not just, well, I'm going to lower a price because that's going to be a reason for people to stay, it's, well wait a second, are the platforms easy to use? Can people open a ticket easily? It's always in combination. >> Do I have visibility into whom I churn? >> And to whom I churn, right? But the first place people fail to start, let's to back to your original question of this gap between what customers expect and what businesses are doing is the context in the market has significantly shifted over the last decade. You could say, well obvious technology advancements but I think far more disruptive than technology is actually the customers themselves demanding more from brands. I want you to be better to the environment. I want you to be better socially. I want you to give me more value for what I'm spending. I want it as a service not as a product. I want it in a monthly bill not a one-time bill. I want to pay usage. Whatever they're saying, the customer has changed the context of the market. And I think that's one of the big triggers in this, so you start with context, what's going on, next is what are you going to combine those efforts with. And then the third thing and equally import is sequence. The order in which you do things actually has implications to the likelihood of success of whatever it is you're doing. If you're going to launch into a new market with a new product, and you don't have the infrastructure for distribution or selling or service in place before you launch the product, probably the wrong order. >> Right. >> Right and so if you need to set up the partnerships and the distribution and support and sales and marketing, support within region or translate things to language or do the things that you need to do to marketing materials or websites before you get there because if you launch, the first impression is gone if it's not a good experience for the customer. >> Yeah, you only have one time to make a first impression. >> You only have one time and it doesn't need to be perfect, but you cannot be just completely off the mark because getting them to come back is more expensive than it would of been had you just taken a pause, gotten it right and launched at the appropriate time. >> And that notion of context is also especially important because you identify something you call timing which is related to sequence in the fact that you have to be very honest about what you can and cannot effect. There are some things you may want to sequencing, you may want to fall the sequence. >> Right. >> But if the market isn't going to respond favorably, tell us a little bit about timing and how context shapes and resets prioritization as it changes as well. >> Yeah so, if you think of somebody like a Netflix, if Netflix had started with streaming and not with DVD mail, you know, in the United States at least, not everybody had bandwidth, it was too expensive, it was in very specific neighborhoods and as bandwidth started to make its way into the households and the cost started to decline, then they could say, well, wait a second, is this the best way to do it or could we potentially stream it and start doing OTT types of services? But they had to wait for the technology as well as the customer to catch up with what was possible. So, had they not done mail and started with streaming, maybe they couldn't of held on long enough. And so, mail was a great way to do, I'm going to capture these customers, I'm going to penetrate this base, get them to order more movies and do more things with me. Now I'm going to introduce streaming. Now I have this base of customers which now may want to transition to a new kind of delivery or experience that they want to have with us. And you might be surprised that they still have hundreds of thousands of mail customer including my mom, she still gets DVDs in the mail. And it's a huge profit engine for them, actually allows them to reinvest in the business to expand the streaming services other places in the world which may never get mail service, right. But in the beachhead of it and just let the customers churn out, never getting rid of it, not marketing it but not getting rid of it. So, had those timings been offered different, they may not have been as successful. So, it really has implications to think about what is the customer looking for, what is the temperature socially, what can technology help me deliver? Putting those things together and going, knowing what I know, I don't need it to be perfect but I'm willing to test it and fail and iterate and keep going as long as I keep that context of the market in mind and then the customer, you know, as sort of my true north of making sure that I'm aligning those things again, like we were talking about. >> So let me see if I can summarize that, so you got to get the context, which is-- >> Yes. >> What's really in the marketplace, customer, regulatory, competitor, all those other thing we think about. >> All those things. >> You think about the combination of recipes or combination of responses and then how you're going to sequence them out. Then that sequencing decision then goes back and says and what do I need to redefine about my understanding of context. >> That's right, that's right. >> So I got that right? >> You've got that right and I would tell you that-- >> So your avoiding boiling the ocean. >> Yeah, and that's what always, sort of, when I was trying to figure out what did I want to say in this book. I did not want it to be a boil of the ocean. I picked 10 paths to growth, none of which I think will be a surprise to anybody. It's a modernization on what Ansoff had done around the Ansoff four, there's that. There are things that now we have at our disposal which we didn't have at our disposal in 1957 when Ansoff came out. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so, you have to obviously introduce new things. So like, just using something like socially conscious enterprise was not something we were talking about 10 years ago. >> Right. >> But it's being used as a growth path now. And so, I wanted to try to give 10 very distinct growth paths so that people didn't feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices they could make. So if I could get it to something that was digestible and then say now, how do I put those things together. So I made natural associations between paths so that people would say, oh, if I'm going to do product and customer diversification, I might need to do partnerships. If I have a churn problem, I may need to optimize sales. Those two things fit together, right? If I'm going to, customer experience is at the foundation of everything. >> Right. >> Right, and so I tried to tell the story that people could say, oh, we're already on this path, should be stay on this path? Is it the right path? Should we be moving? Am I doing everything I could be doing to make this path be more effective? And that's what I was hoping to get out this is that I don't want people to think this is something completely flip the chessboard over and start from scratch. >> Right. >> I want you to pivot ever so slowly and make adjustments in real time so that you're not having to do, this is kind of an evolutionary versus revolutionary kind of transformation. >> Yeah, the strategies that seem to work today, or feature three things and kind of comes from Cluetrain Manifesto, agile, the empirical, they're based on data, they're optimistic, they identify what really can be done and their irritative, they take smaller steps when they do that. >> Yes. >> So, let me return back to kind of the notion of engagement, just for a second. >> Sure. >> One of the reasons why this book has so much prescriptive power is because there is a dramatic shift globally in market power. It used to be the sellers had the market power and therefore the information at your disposal that you used to make a decision largely came from the sellers and now, you're able to move into communities where buyers can come together and identify themselves in each other and use that source of information to help you make decisions. Very, very significant and profound shift and that's in many respects what's driving experience. Historically though, we've talked about sales and marketing alignment. (Tiffani laughing) About how we got to get the right message out, we got to enable sales in the right way. But customers spend most of their time with a brand in the form of a product or service which suggests that he whole notion of customer service and sustaining alignment between expectations and actuality in the customer service function becomes especially important. Have I got that right? >> You nailed it, I mean, I would say also you know, and I'm actually a practitioner before I was at Gartner, so I actually ran a division of Gateway computers, I ran sales and marketing for them. Before that I worked in web hosting company, we were the largest web hoster in the United States, we were actually four times the size of Rackspace. I was the beta client for ALOQUA, I was the beta client for Constant Contact. I was socially selling in 2000. Our shared property is web.com, if you watch golf. And so I was super early, so I'm actually a sales, I sort of say I'm a recovering seller, I bleed sales blood. (Peter laughing) And so when I was running both sales and marketing, I could argue with myself. But when I was just selling, you know, I understand this, you know, marketing giving us leads, sales not doing something with it. Then when I had customer service, you know, those three things together, I think today, is where companies really miss an opportunity. That just getting new customers in the door and it's so much more expensive to recruit new customers and to pay to get them versus just mining the gold you've already got. So, that is something that I'd say over the last two and a half years now that I'm here and I see it at scale that I will have conversations with CMOs and heads of sales and then the head of customer service is not in the room or it's just marketing and sales. So the same way marketing enables sales, they need to enable customer service. >> And, very importantly, the information that is being generated out of customer service-- >> Absolutely. >> Need to enable sales and marketing. >> Absolutely-- >> And in products. >> So I would tell you that in my opinion, the disconnection between what customers expect and businesses are doing actually is a manifestation of the unintentional consequence of the disconnection of teams because of the disconnection of metrics. Sales is very much, like how much did you sell? I mean, I'm over simplifying but how much did you sell. Marketing, how many leads did you, good or bad, how many leads? Customer service, how quickly did you get someone off the phone and how many calls did, tickets did you close today? Those three things pull those three groups in very different directions. So, something like a Net Promoter Score or churn or lifetime values, something can thread those three groups together in a metric so that people know that they're all in this together even though they play different roles. And so, I think the fact that people try to own customer experience worries me because I think the whole company has to be very focused on... >> It's a CEO job. >> But then it's a cultural shift, right? >> Absolutely. >> It's about culture, it's about this customer wants to have me help their problem but I have to get off the phone in two minutes because that's my quota and so do I get off the phone in two minutes or do I help my customer? >> Okay, let me make one quick comment and I'm going to ask you one last question. >> Yeah. >> And the quick comment I'll make is very prominent CEO of a very, very large computing company once said to me, I asked this person, 'cause I thought that they had won large because of marketing. And I said, so, tell me about he role of marketing within your company. And this person said to me, oh, marketing is what I put between engineering and sales so they don't kill each other. (Tiffani laughing) And I think that needs, obviously that orientation needs to change. But the last thing I wanted to talk about is one of the patterns you noted is disruption or disruptive-- >> Yes. >> I don't remember exactly what you called it but it boiled down, it could mean a lot of things, but you specifically focused on and you've already mentioned it, social good. >> Yep. >> As part of a strategy, give us a, you know 30 second, 44 second, why is social good becoming a viable strategy or viable pattern, one of the combinations that's working today? >> Well, I'd say, Salesforce was founded on the 1-1-1 model, which was very much about sort of this doing well by doing good, or doing good by doing good. But I would say this that even if you've watched television commercials over the last year, especially since Super Bowl last year, you'll see brands actually making statements about how they do well for the environment, how they're giving back, how they're hiring veterans, how they're doing things for... You know, Starbucks just announced they're going to- >> How they're willing to fly immigrant children home if they need to. >> Yeah, Starbucks is not doing a Starbucks in DC that will be signing so for hearing impaired. So you see people really making pivots and actually using that as I'm trying to connect with my constituency and my customer base in a new and different way. I love the fact that social consciousness is now getting into Unilever and getting into, you know the 1-1-1 model spread across 3,000 companies now. Or the Tom's model, one for one, buy a shoe, a shoe gets donated. You see it happening with a lot of start ups now where they're trying to start the company that way. Now, if you have a company that didn't start that way, there's not reason why you can't start to find a place where you can inject it going forward. But I'm super excited about that. >> Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Innovation Evangelist Salesforce, talking about the book Growth IQ. Again, great book. >> Thank you. >> Very prescriptive and I mean, I generally hate business books, lot of case studies. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, peter, it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely, so once again, thanks for participating in our CUBE Conversation and until the next one, we'll see you soon. (dramatic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)