(bright music) >> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at our Palo Alto studio today. And we're kind of taking advantage of this opportunity to reach out to the community, as we're going through this COVID crisis, to talk to leaders, get their tips and tricks and advice. As you know, everyone is going through this thing together. It's really a unique situation that everybody has a COVID story, where were you in March of 2020. So we're excited to have our next guest. He's Corey Williams. He's the VP of strategy and marketing for Idaptive. Cory, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, I was just thinking the last time that we saw, was late February, it was February 25th. At the RSA conference, 40,000 people I think was the last big show, that I attended for sure, and kind of snuck in, before everything got shut down. It's just amazing, you know, kind of how quick this light switch moment happened to really force first, everybody home, and then you know, kind of all these collateral impacts of that in terms of digital transformation. >> Yeah, it is amazing. I remember that RSA show very well, shaking dozens of people's hands, eating from a buffet, sitting in a crowded room. It's amazing how quickly things have transformed, and how our mindset about, just about everything, but especially what we do for a living and how we interact with each other, had just changed overnight. >> Yeah and it's fascinating too, because when the stay at home, what started to come out, you know, nobody really had time to plan. And you know, and I would argue even if you had, I don't know, six months to plan, nine months to plan, a year to plan, for kind of this cutover, it would still have been a difficult situation. So just to be, you know, kind of thrown in and it's ready said go. Here we are, really unique challenge for people, but also for the infrastructure providers, also for the technology providers, in the space that you operate in, which is security, very different challenge and it wasn't, you know, we're going to plan and get everybody's VPN is all hooked up and configured and tested. It's like, don't come to the office tomorrow. >> Yeah and it literally happened that quickly. It wasn't a matter of being able to plan this, like a normal transition. But it was literally, today we're working in the office, tomorrow, please don't come in, we'll let you know when it's going to change. And I think it really did catch a lot of companies off guard, even those that were used to supporting a remote workforce at least in part. >> Yeah, because it's interesting people been talking about new way to work and work from home and this for a very long time. But you know, this was an incredible forcing function. So let's talk about you know, kind of what you do for the people that aren't familiar with Idaptive. Give us kind of the quick, the quick overview. >> Sure, Idaptive is what's called an identity and access management company. What we do is we make it easier for end users to get access to all their applications, and for organizations to provide that access in more secure manner. As you know, all these cloud applications and devices that we need to have access to, are typically just secured by a password and they all have different passwords, and those passwords often get reused and shared among different employees, and it creates a big problem, for not only for the security of the company, but even for the IT Helpdesk who's got to support account lockouts and password resets and so, Idaptive is one of the leaders in this space. >> As you talk about the password reset and I didn't think really kind of from the IT support side if you don't have a teenager hopefully close by in the room you know, that creates all kinds of challenges, but it's real and the password situation was bad before. Now as you said we've got all kinds of internal applications, you've got all types of access control to your inside stuff, you have all your cloud applications. A lot of times you said passwords are stored in queues or they're stored in caches, or they're stored in your Chrome browser. You guys have written extensively about passwords and getting kind of past passwords to better ways to authenticate people, whenever you can actually written quite a bit recently on blog posts. Talk about your kind of strategy and how you help customers kind of rethink access. >> Yeah, there's sort of two main strategies that I've been writing about. And then our company has been talking to our customers about. The first one we call Next-Gen Access, which is essentially a combination or layers of technology like Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, provisioning, and analytics provide some user behavior and risk. All of that is intended to provide a more secure experience where we can put additional factors besides just a password, in front of the user, but only do it, when the risk is high, so that we can preserve the user experience. And so that we call a Next-gen access approach. But ultimately, the reason you want to do that is to arrive at a zero trust state of mind. That sort of approach allows you to say that, hey, I've verified every user, that is on my network. I know the device they're using is something that I trust and is in good shape. And I've limited their access to just what they need in order to do their job. >> Now, do you find that most people in this situation are still accessing via a VPN or some secure network or as most of it, you know, it's public internet access, and you're relying really on the applications and the access and the protocols and the two factor to make sure people can only get what they're supposed to get? >> Yeah, I think you kind of bring up a good point. The vast majority of businesses are what I've referred to hybrid enterprises, they still have on-premise applications, they still have their own applications that they build. But they also are in the process of adopting cloud applications like Office 365. And you know, all of the different kind of productivity apps, that are very popular. And so most companies are stuck in this situation where they can't simply be completely virtual company overnight. They still have to provide access to on-premise systems and applications in order to do their business. And so many of them just had the option of saying, okay, here's VPN access for everyone. But as as we know, VPN access is a very blunt instrument. First of all you have it has to be able to scale to a lot of users. Second of all, it gives you access to the whole network from a remote location, both of which are situations that are difficult, especially when you have to turn it on overnight. >> You're right. So you and one of the articles that I saw in getting ready for this, has some really specific as straightforward advice to people, to help them enable their remote workers. I wonder if you could go through some of those key points with us? >> Sure, I think, you know, when you think about remote access or having a remote workforce, you think about a few different things. One is be able to provide them easy kind of friction, free discovery of their applications and providing access. So, having something like a portal of all the applications that you're supposed to have access to whether they're on-premise or in the cloud, and have one click access to those protected in a way that is common to all those applications, using something like a second factor of authentication. That provides some of the immediate convenience of getting people up and productive, even if they're outside the network at home. The second thing we think about is, how do we give access to those on-premise applications? You can use VPN, it's quick, I can tell you that our customers are telling us two things. One is they didn't prepare for that much capacity. So their VPN connections don't scale. So they're having to ration the use of it, which limits the productivity. But also, they haven't necessarily rolled out multi-factor authentication to all of these users who don't typically use VPN. And so they are forced with either having to dial down, the security level, or to scramble and try to find a way to secure that access. So in my writings, we've been talking about providing alternatives to a VPN, something like an application gateway, which would can give you access to just the apps you need, without having to have full network access, and having those apps just be published through the gateway. >> So there's really some kind of creative ways to restructure the access beyond just simply having better access more secure access and as you said VPN and multi-factor cause in fact, you might not be able to implement those things just in the timely manner which you have, as we said, this was a light switch moment. >> Yeah I think definitely the it's something to think about in these emergency light switch moments, what is the easiest way and there's three parties involved. You've got the security folks who are concerned about maintaining a level of continuity with the access to their data. But you also have the end user and they have to do their job. It has to be easy enough for them to be able to do, without having to have a lot of special training. And let's not forget the IT Helpdesk, either. They are getting overwhelmed with requests for about basic technology use and about getting access to the basic resources. The last thing you want to do is pile on a whole bunch of new lockouts. And, you know, barriers have been put in front of users, that can overwhelm them. So you kind of have to think about all three parties, when you're developing a solution for remote workforce. >> All right, and I presume the bad guys are not taking holiday, seeing this opportunity as again, we're constantly talking about this increasing attack surface. It just got a whole lot bigger for the bad guys. >> It certainly did. I mean, if you think about the attack surface, it used to be that if they could get past your network barrier, then they were in. And so he was very concentrated around securing the network. As you start adopting more mobile and cloud applications, now your attack surface becomes all the resources are out in the cloud. Now, when you take all of your workers and disperse them to home, each one of their own systems and networks becomes an extension of that attack surface. And so anything you can do to narrow and lessen the attack surface by making sure you have good user verification, device validation, and other layers of intelligence to help you monitor that access. It reduces the scope to everyone on Earth, from any device on Earth, to just the people that you you trust and if identified, and that's why we talked to our our customers about is putting these layers in that can balance that security, but also provide a more friction free user experience and that's the real trick. >> All right, so I'm just curious to get your take you've been in the business for a long time. And kind of the state of passwords, you know, is this just something we're stuck with forever? Do you see in the not too distant future? Or medium future? Passwords going away? I mean, we've got biometric stuff now, you can touch your phone, you can read your iris, but those things can be spoofed as well. Where do you see, you know, kind of the passwords evolving and what's going to take its place? >> You know, it's a little bit like the clothes in the back of my closet, you can never quite get rid of everything. And I think passwords are will always be with us in some form, because they're baked into technology that's been around forever. As a side note, you've probably heard about these IRS checks going out. And there being problems in some states because these stimulus checks are dependent on systems that were built 50 years ago. And so technology kind of lives forever in some form. So we can't necessarily get rid of passwords, but there are two things we can do, one is we can never depend on passwords alone to secure access, we can layer on, multi-factor authentication and artificial intelligence to determine risk level and put an additional set of factors in front of the user. But we can also develop new applications and technologies, with more of what is being known as a password list experience, which is sort of an ideal thing. And we have some experience with modern technology like facial recognition on our iPhone or a fingerprint on our PC. Those types of experiences can be built in and before COVID happened, I'd say that one of the big trends of 2020 was this idea of password list access. And we have actually recently announced some of our own password capabilities, but it was a hot trending topic. And I think will continue to be because not only is it a more secure experience, but it's also much easier for end users and they would prefer to have a one click access rather than having to remember a complex string that they have changed in 90 days. >> I was going to say, do you think it's an accelerant? Or in terms of having this alternative access method? Or is it a pullback because people are hunkering down, but it sounds on those two attributes, that it's a better thing. >> I think definitely in >> The more secure that seems pretty straightforward. >> Yes, I think definitely, in the medium and long term, this will accelerate the trend. In the short term, yes. Everything is being focused on just enabling those remote users. There was a actually a recent survey done by Mayfield, with their collection of CSOs and CTOs, asking them what the top priorities were in the short term. And of course, the number one priority for IT leaders is enabling that remote workforce. But number two in the short term is actually security enabling that says not only enabling users to work from home productively, but making sure that security is keeping track. So I don't think they've lost sight even in the short term, although I think they're focused on very tactical goals related to scaling out the solutions and supporting their end users. In the medium term and in the long term, this is going to have lasting effects. We know that the remote workforce trend was accelerated and there's no turning back. Companies are going to be more remote, they're going to be more comfortable with remote models. And so having better stronger, better experiences and stronger authentication experiences will be part of how we do things going forward. >> Well, Cory, in everywhere we go, security has to get baked into everything. So it's no longer a bolt in is, as you well know, and so it's not surprising that that's right in there with supporting those remote people cause they got access to the keys to the kingdom. You just can't let that get out there. So give you the final word once we come out of COVID and in terms of, you know, looking directly at what that's driving in terms of priorities. What are some of the other priorities that you hope to get back to, once we kind of get through this period? >> Well, I mean, I think clearly, we're seeing the effect on certain industries like travel and hospitality and others, we certainly and we tell,, we certainly hope that those businesses are able to come back strong. So those are some of the things we're looking forward to. But we know a lot of our customers are really wanting to not just respond to the current activities that are happening, but they want to build their businesses. They want to build better user experiences, they want to put out new digital experiences. We know from the survey as well, from Mayfield that increasing acceleration towards adopting cloud, and towards the digital transformation of user and business processes is going to be key. And so that's what we see the future is not just in providing security to prevent the bad guy, but to enable these new digital experiences and to accelerate these trends like move to cloud, identity and access management is fundamental to all of those efforts. And we see that as being a very positive thing. And hopefully this will end up serving as a catalyst to spurred and acceleration of those adoptions. >> Well, I think there's no doubt about it. I mean, we're not going to go back and the longer this thing goes on, the more new habits are formed, and people aren't just going to want to go back to the old ways. So I think there's no doubt about it. And I really appreciate you sharing your insights. Again, Cory has written a ton of stuff. There's blogs all over the place, do a quick search on Cory Williams with an E, and you'll find some of his blog posts and thanks for taking a few minutes with us here today, Cory. >> You bet, thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Corey, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios. Stay safe out there, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome once again to Action Item. (funky electronic music) Every week, Wikibon gathers together the research team to discuss seminal issues that are facing the IT industry. And this week is no different. In the next couple of weeks, somewhere near 100,000 people are gonna be heading to Las Vegas for the Amazon, or AWS re:Invent show from all over the world. And this week, what we wanna do is we wanna provide a preview of what we think folks are gonna be talking about. And I'm joined here in our lovely Palo Alto studio, theCUBE studio, by Rob Hof, who is the editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. David Floyer, who's in analyst at Wikibon. George Gilbert, who's an analyst Wikibon. And John Furrier, who's a CUBE host and co-CEO. On the phone we have Neil Raden, an analyst at Wikibon, and also Dave Vellante, who's co-CEO with John Furrier, an analyst at Wikibon as well. So guys, let's jump right into it. David Floyer, I wanna hit you first. AWS has done a masterful job of making the whole concept of infrastructure as a service real. Nobody should downplay how hard that was and how amazing their success has been. But they're moving beyond infrastructure as a service. What do we expect for how far up Amazon is likely to go up the stack this year at re:Invent? >> Well, I can say what I'm hoping for. I agree with your premise that they have to go beyond IAS. The overall market for cloud is much bigger than just IAS, with SaaS and other clouds as well, both on-premise and off-premise. So I would start with what enterprise CIOs are wanting, and they are wanting to see a multi-cloud strategy, both on-premise and multiple clouds. SaaS clouds, other clouds. So I'm looking for AWS to provide additional services to make that easier. in particular, services, I thought of private clouds for enterprises. I'm looking for distributed capabilities, particularly in the storage area so they can link different clouds together. I want to see edge data management capabilities. I'd love to see that because the edge itself, especially the low-latency stuff, the real-time stuff, that needs specialist services, and I'd like to see them integrate that much better than just Snowball. I want to see more details about AI I'd love to see what they're doing in that. There's tremendous potential for AI in operational and to improve security, to improve availability, recovery. That is an area where I think they could be a leader of the IT industry. >> So let me stop you there, and George I wanna turn to you. So AWS in AI how do we anticipate that's gonna play out at re:Invent this year? >> I can see three things in decreasing order of likelihood. The first one is, they have to do a better job of tooling, both for, sort of, developers who want to dabble in, well get their arms around AI, but who aren't real data scientists. And then also hardcore tools for data scientists that have been well served by, recently, Microsoft and IBM, among others. So this is this Iron Man Initiative that we've heard about. For the hardcore tools, something from Domino Data Labs that looks like they're gonna partner with them. It's like a data-science workbench, so for the collaborative data preparation, modeling, deployment. That whole life cycle. And then for the developer-ready tooling, I expect to see they'll be working with a company called DataRobot, which has a really nifty tool where you put in a whole bunch of training data, and it trains, could be a couple dozen models that it thinks that might fit, and it'll show you the best fits. It'll show you the features in the models that are most impactful. In other words, it provides a lot of transparency. >> So it's kind of like models for models. >> Yes, and it provides transparency. Now that's the highest likelihood. And we have names on who we think the likely suspects are. The next step down, I would put applying machine learning to application performance management and IT operations. >> So that's the whole AI for ITOM that David Floyer just mentioned. >> Yeah. >> Now, presumably, this is gonna have to extend beyond just AI for Amazon or AWS-related ITOM. Our expectation's that we're gonna see a greater distribution of, or Amazon take more of a leadership in establishing a framework that cuts across multi-cloud. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Absolutely. A massive opportunity for them to provide the basics on their own platform. That's obviously the starting point. They'll have the best instrumentation for all of the components they have there. But they will need to integrate that in with their own databases, with other people's databases. The more that they can link all the units together and get real instrumentation from an application point of view of the whole of the infrastructure, the more value AI can contribute. >> John Foyer, the whole concept of the last few years of AWS is that all roads eventually end up at AWS. However, there's been a real challenge associated with getting this migration momentum to really start to mature. Now we saw some interesting moves that they made with VMware over the last couple of years, and it's been quite successful. And some would argue it might even have given another round of life to VMware. Are there some things we expect to see AWS do this time that are gonna reenergize the ecosystem to start bringing more customers higher up the stack to AWS? >> Yeah, but I think I look at it, quickly, as VMware was a groundbreaking even for both companies, VMware and AWS. We talked about that at that research event we had with them. The issue that is happening is that AWS has had a run in the marketplace. They've been the leader in cloud. Every year, it's been a slew of announcements. This year's no different. They're gonna have more and more announcements. In fact, they had to release some announcements early, before the show, because they have, again, more and more announcements. So they have the under-the-hood stuff going on that David Floyer and George were pointing out. So the classic build strategy is to continue to be competitive by having more services layered on top of each other, upgrading those services. That's a competitive strategy frame that's under the hood. On the business side, you're seeing more competition this year than ever before. Amazon now is highly contested, certainly in the marketplace with competitors. Okay, you're seeing FUD, the uncertainty and doubt from other people, how they're bundling. But it's clear. The cloud visibility is clear to customers. The numbers are coming in, multiple years of financial performance. But now the ecosystem plays, really, the interesting one. I think the VMware move is gonna be a tell sign for other companies that haven't won that top-three position. >> Example? >> I will say SAP. >> Oh really? You think SAP is gonna have a major play this year where we might see some more stuff about AWS and SAP? >> I'm hearing rumblings that SAP is gonna be expanding their relationship. I don't have the facts yet on the ground, but from what I'm sensing, this is consistent with what they've been doing. We've seen them at Google cloud platform. We talked to them specifically about how they're dealing with cloud. And their strategy is clear. They wanna be on Azure, Google, and Amazon. They wanna provide that database functionality and their client base in from HANA, and roll that in. So it's clear that SAP wants to be multi-cloud. >> Well we've seen Oracle over the past couple of years, or our research has suggested, I would say, that there's been kind of two broad strategies. The application-oriented strategy that goes down to IAAS aggressively. That'd be Oracle and Microsoft. And then the IAAS strategy that's trying to move up through an ecosystem play, which is more AWS. David Floyer and I have been writing a lot of that research. So it sounds like AWS is really gonna start doubling down in an ecosystem and making strategic bets on software providers who can bring those large enterprise install bases with them. >> Yeah, and the thing that you pointed out is migration. That's a huge issue. Now you can get technical, and say, what does that mean? But Andy Jassy has been clear, and the whole Amazon Web Services Team has been clear from day one. They're customer centric. They listen to the customers. So if they're doing more migration this year, and we'll see, I think they will be, I think that's a good tell sign and good prediction. That means the customers want to use Amazon more. And VMware was the same way. Their customers were saying, hey, we're ops guys, we want to have a cloud strategy. And it was such a great move for VMware. I think that's gonna lift the fog, if you will, pun intended, between what cloud computing is and other alternatives. And I think companies are gonna be clear that I can party with Amazon Web Services and still run my business in a way that's gonna help customers. I think that's the number one thing that I'm looking for is, what is the customers looking for in multi-cloud? Or if it's server-less or other things. >> Well, or yeah I agree. Lemme run this by you guys. It sounds as though multi-cloud increasingly is going to be associated with an application set. So, for example, it's very difficult to migrate a database manager from one place to another, as a snowflake. The cost to the customer is extremely high. The cost to the migration team is extremely high, lotta risk. But if you can get an application provider to step up and start migrating elements of the database interface, then you dramatically reduce the overall cost of what that migration might look like. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what AWS, what I'm expecting them to focus on is more integration with more SaaS vendors, making it a better place-- >> Paul: Or just software vendors. >> Or software vendors. Well, SaaS vendors in particular, but software vendors in particular-- >> Well SAP's not a SaaS player, right? Well, they are a little bit, but most of their installations are still SAP on Oracle and moving them over, then my ass is gonna require a significant amount of SAP help. >> And one of the things I would love to see them have is a proper tier-one database as a service. That's something that's hugely missing at the moment, and using HANA, for example, on SAP, it's a tier-one database in a particular area, but that would be a good move and help a lot of enterprises to move stuff into AWS. >> Is that gonna be sufficient, though, given how dominant Oracle is in that-- >> No, they need something general purpose which can compete with Oracle or come to some agreement with Oracle. Who knows what's gonna happen in the future? >> Yeah, I don't know. >> Yeah we're all kinda ignoring here. It will be interesting to see. But at the end of the day, look, Oracle has an incentive also to render more of what it has, as a service at some level. And it's gonna be very difficult to say, we're gonna render this as a service to a customer, but Amazon can't play. Or AWS can't play. That's gonna be a real challenge for them. >> The Oracle thing is interesting and I bring this up because Oracle has been struggling as a company with cloud native messaging. In other words, they're putting out, they have a lot of open source, we know what they have for tooling. But they own IT. I mean if you dug up Oracle, they got the database as David pointed out, tier one. But they know the IT guys, they've been doing business in IT for years as a legacy vendor. Now they're transforming, and they are trying hard to be the cloud native path, and they're not making it. They're not getting the credit, and I don't know if that's a cultural issue with Oracle. But Amazon has that positioning from a developer cloud DNA. Now winning real enterprise deals. So the question that I'm looking for is, can Amazon continue to knock down these enterprise deals in lieu of these incumbent or legacy players in IT. So if IT continues to transform more towards cloud native, docker containers, or containers in Kubernetes, these kinds of micro services, I would give the advantage to Amazon over Oracle even though that Oracle has the database because ultimately the developers are driving the behavior. >> Oh again I don't think any of us would disagree with that. >> Yeah so the trouble though is the cost of migrating the applications and the data. That is huge. The systems of record are there for a reason. So there are two fundamental strategies for Oracle. If they can get their developers to add the AI, add the systems of intelligence. Make them systems of intelligence, then they can win in that strategy. Or the alternative is that they move it to AWS and do that movement in AWS. That's a much more risky strategy. >> Right but I think our kind of concluding point here is that ultimately if AWS can get big application players to participate and assist and invest in and move customers along with some of these big application migrations, it's good for AWS. And to your point John, it's probably good for the customers too. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I don't think it's mutually exclusive as David makes a point about migrating for Oracle. I don't see a lot of migration coming off of Oracle. I look at overall database growth is the issue. Right so Oracle will have that position, but it's kind of like when we argued about the internet growth back in 1997. Just internet users growing was so great that rising tide flows. So I believe that the database growth is going to happen so fast that Amazon is not necessarily targeting Oracle's market share, they're going after the overall database market, which might be a smaller tier two kind of configuration or new architectures that are developing. So I think it's interesting dynamic and Oracle certainly could play there and lock in the database, but-- >> Here's what I would say, I would say that they're going after the new workload world, and a lot of that new workload is gonna involve database as it always has. Not like there's anything that the notion that we have solved or that database is 90% penetrated for the applications that are gonna be dominant matter in 2025 is ridiculous. There's a lot of new database that's gonna be sold. I think you're absolutely right. Rob Hof what's the general scuttlebutt that you're hearing. You know you as editor of SiliconANGLE, editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. What is the journalist world buzzing about for re:Invent this year? >> Well I guess you know my questions is because of the challenges that we're facing like we just talked about with migrating, the difficulty in migrating some of these applications. We also see very fast growing rivals like Google. Still small, but growing fast. And then there's China. That's a big one where is there a natural limit there that they're gonna have? So you put these things together, and I guess we see Amazon Web Services still growing at 42% a year or whatever it's great. But is it gonna start to go down because of all these challenges? >> 'Cause some of the constraints may start to assert themselves. >> Rob: Exactly, exactly. >> So-- >> Rob: That's what I'm looking at. >> Kind of the journalism world is kinda saying, are there some speed bumps up ahead for AWS? >> Exactly, and we saw one just a couple, well just this week with China for example. They sold off $300 million worth of data centers, equipment and such to their partner in China Beijing Sinnet. And they say this is a way to comply with Chinese law. Now we're going to start expanding, but expanding while you're selling off $300 million worth of equipment, you know, it begs a question. So I'm curious how they're going to get past that. >> That does raise an interesting question, and I think I might go back to some of the AI on ITOM, AI on IT operations management. Is that do you need control of the physical assets in China to nonetheless sell great service. >> Rob: And that's a big question. >> For accessing assets in China. >> Rob: Right. >> And my guess is that if they're successful with AI for ITOM and some of these other initiatives we're talking about. It in fact may be very possible for them to offer a great service in China, but not actually own the physical assets. And that's, it's an interesting question for some of the Chinese law issues. Dave Vellante, anything you want to jump in on, and add to the conversation? For example, if we look at some of the ecosystem and some of the new technologies, and some of the new investments being made around new technologies. What are some of your thoughts about some of the new stuff that we might hear about at AWS this year? >> Dave: Well so, a couple things. Just a comment on some of the things you guys were saying about Oracle and migration. To me it comes down to three things, growth, which is clearly there, you've talked about 40% plus growth. Momentum, you know the flywheel effect that Amazon has been talking about for years. And something that really hasn't been discussed as much which is economics, and this is something that we've talked about a lot and Amazon is bringing a software like marginal economics model to infrastructure services. And as it potentially slows down its growth, it needs to find new areas, and it will expand its tan by gobbling up parts of the ecosystem. So, you know there's so much white space, but partners got to be careful about where they're adding value because ultimately Amazon is gonna target those much in the same way, in my view anyway that Microsoft and Intel have in the past. And so I think you've got to tread very carefully there, and watch where Amazon is going. And they're going into the big areas of AI, trying to do more stuff with the Edge. And anywhere there's automation they are going to grab that piece of value in the value chain. >> So one of the things that we've been, we've talked about two main things. We've talked about a lot of investments, lot of expectations about AI and how AI is gonna show up in a variety of different ways at re:Invent. And we've talked about how they're likely to make some of these migration initiatives even that much more tangible than they have been. So by putting some real operational clarity as to how they intend to bring enterprises into AWS. We haven't talked about IoT. Dave just mentioned it. What's happening with the Edge, how is the Edge going to work? Now historically what we've seen is we've seen a lot of promises that the Edge was all going to end up in the cloud from a data standpoint, and that's where everything was gonna be processed. We started seeing the first indications that that's not necessarily how AWS is gonna move last year with Snowball and server-less computing, and some of those initiatives. We have anticipated a real honest to goodness true private cloud, AWS stack with a partnership. Hasn't happened yet. David Floyer what are we looking for this year? Are we gonna see that this year or are we gonna see more kind of circumnavigating the issue and doing the best that they can? >> Yeah, well my prediction last year was that they would come out with some sort of data service that you could install on your on-premise machine as a starting point for this communication across a multi cloud environment. I'm still expecting that, whether it happens this year or early next year. I think they have to. The pressure from enterprises, and they are a customer driven organization. The pressure from enterprises is going to mandate that they have some sort of solution on-premise. It's a requirement in many countries, especially in Europe. They're gonna have to do that I think without doubt. So they can do it in multiple ways, they can do it as they've done with the US government by putting in particular data centers, whole data centers within the US government. Or they can do it with small services, or they can have a, take the Microsoft approach of having an AWS service on site as well. I think with pressure from Microsoft, the pressure from Europe in particular is going to make this an essential requirement of their whole strategy. >> I remember a number of years going back a couple decades when Dell made big moves because to win the business of a very large manufacturer that had 50,000 work stations. Mainly engineers were turning over every year. To get that business Dell literally put a distribution point right next to that manufacturer. And we expect to see something similar here I would presume when we start talking about this. >> Yeah I mean I would make a comment on the IoT. First of all I agree with what David said, and I like his prediction, but I'm kind of taking a contrarian view on this, and I'm watching a few things at Amazon. Amazon always takes an approach of getting into new markets either with a big idea, and small teams to figure it out or building blocks, and they listen to the customer. So IoT is interesting because IoT's hard, it's important, it's really a fundamental important infrastructure, architecture that's not going away. I mean it has to be nailed down, it's obvious. Just like blockchain kinda is obvious when you talk about decentralization. So it'll be interesting to see what Amazon does on those two fronts. But what's interesting to note is Amazon always becomes their first customer. In their retail business, AWS was powering retail. With Whole Foods, and the stuff they're doing on the physical side, it'll be very interesting to see what their IoT strategy is from a technology standpoint with what they're doing internally. We get food delivered to our house from Amazon Fresh, and they got Whole Foods and all the retail. So it'll be interesting to see that. >> They're buying a lot of real estate. And I thought about this as well John. They're buying a lot of real estate, and how much processing can they put in there. And the only limit is that I don't think Whole Foods would qualify as particularly secure locations (laughing) when we start talking about this. But I think you're absolutely right. >> That only brings the question, how will they roll out IoT. Because he's like okay roll out an appliance that's more of an infrastructure thing. Is that their first move. So the question that I'm looking for is just kind of read the tea leaves and saying, what is really their doing. So they have the tech, and it's gonna be interesting to see, I mean it's more of a high level kind of business conversation, but IoT is a really big challenging area. I mean we're hearing that all over the place from CIOs like what's the architecture, what's the playbook? And it's different per company. So it's challenging. >> Although one of the reasons why it looks different per company is because it is so uncertain as to how it's gonna play out. There's not a lot of knowledge to fuse. My guess is that in 10 years we're gonna look back and see that there was a lot more commonality and patterns of work that were in IoT that many people expected. So I'll tell you one of the things that I saw last year that particularly impressed me at AWS re:Invent. Was the scale at which the network was being built out. And it raised for me an interesting question. If in fact one of the chief challenges of IoT. There are multiple challenges that every company faces with IoT. One is latency, one is intellectual property control, one is legal ramification like GDPR. Which is one of the reasons why the whole Europe play is gonna be so interesting 'cause GDPR is gonna have a major impact on a global basis, it's not just Europe. Bandwidth however is an area that is not necessarily given, it's partly a function of cost. So what happens if AWS blankets the world with network, and customers to get access to at least some degree of Edge no longer have to worry about a telco. What happens to the telco business at least from a data communication standpoint? Anybody wanna jump in on that one? >> Well yeah I mean I've actually talked to a couple folks like Ericson, and I think AT&T. And they're actually talking about taking their central offices and even the base stations, and sort of outfitting them as mini data centers. >> As pops. >> Yeah. But I think we've been hearing now for about 12 months that, oh maybe Edge is going to take over before we actually even finish getting to the cloud. And I think that's about as sort of ill-considered as the notion that PCs were gonna put mainframes out of business. And the reason I use that as an analogy, at one point IBM was going to put all their mainframe based databases and communication protocol on the PC. That was called OS2 extended edition. And it failed spectacularly because-- >> Peter: For a lot of reasons. >> But the idea is you have a separation of concerns. Presentation on one side in that case, and data management communications on the other. Here in this, in what we're doing here, we're definitely gonna have the low latency inferencing on the Edge and then the question is what data goes back up into the cloud for training and retraining and even simulation. And we've already got, having talked to Microsoft's Azure CTO this week, you know they see it the same way. They see the compute intensive modeling work, and even simulation work done in the cloud, and the sort of automated decisioning on the Edge. >> Alright so I'm gonna make one point and then I want to hit the Action Item around here. The one point I wanna make is I have a feeling that over, and I don't know if it's gonna happen at re:Invent this year but I have a feeling that over the course of the next six to nine months, there's going to be a major initiative on the part of Amazon to start bringing down the cost of data communications, and use their power to start hitting the telcos on a global basis. And what's going to be very very interesting is whether Amazon starts selling services to its network independent of its other cloud services. Because that could have global implications for who wins and who loses. >> Well that's a good point, I just wanna add color on that. Just anecdotally from my perspective you asked a question and I went, haven't talked to anyone. But knowing the telco business, I think they're gonna have that VMware moment. Because they've been struggling with over the top for so long. The rapid pace of innovation going on, that I don't think Amazon is gonna go after the telcos, I think it's just an evolutionary steamroller effect. >> It's an inevitability. >> It's an inevitability that the steamroller's coming. >> So users, don't sign longterm data communications deals right now. >> Why wouldn't you do a deal with Amazon if you're a telco, you get relevance, you have stability, lock in your cash flows, cut your deal, and stay alive. >> You know it's an interesting thought. Alright so let's hit the Action Item around here. So really quickly, as a preface for this, the way we wanna do this is guys, is that John Furrier is gonna have a couple hour one on one with Andy Jassy sometime in the next few days. And so if you were to, well tell us a little about that first John. >> Well every re:Invent we've been doing re:Invent for multiple years, I think it's our sixth year, we do all the events, and we cover it as the media partner as you know. And I'm gonna have a one on one sit down every year prior to re:Invent to get his view, exclusive interview, for two hours. Talk about the future. We broke the first Amazon story years ago on the building blocks, and how they overcame, and now they're winning. So it's a time for me to sit down and get his insight and continue to tell the story, and document the growth of this amazing success story. And so I'm gonna ask him specific questions and I wanted, love to know what he's thinking. >> Alright guys so I want each of you to pretend that you are, so representing your community, what would your community, what's the one question your community would like answered by Andy Jassy. George let's start with you. >> So my question would be, are you gonna take IT operations management, machine learn enable it, and then as part of offering a hybrid cloud solution, do you extend that capability on-prem, and maybe to even other vendor clouds. >> Peter: That's a good one, David Floyer. >> I've got two if I may. >> The more the merrier. >> I'll say them very quickly. The first one, John, is you've, the you being AWS, developed a great international network, with fantastic performance. How is AWS going to avoid conflicts with the EU, China, Japan, and particularly about their resistance about using any US based nodes. And from in-country telecommunication vendors. So that's my first, and the second is, again on AI, what's going to be the focus of AWS in applying the value of AI. Where are you gonna focus first and to give value to your customers? >> Rob Hof do you wanna ask a question? >> Yeah I'd like to, one thing I didn't raise in terms of the challenges is, Amazon overall is expanding so fast into all kinds of areas. Whole Foods we saw this. I'd ask Jassy, how do you contend with reality that a lot of these companies that you're now bumping up against as an overall company. Now don't necessarily want to depend on AWS for their critical infrastructure because they're competitors. How do you deal with that? >> Great question, David Vellante. >> David: Yeah my question is would be, as an ecosystem partner, what advice would you give? 'Cause I'm really nervous that as you grow and you use the mantra of, well we do what customers want, that you are gonna eat into my innovation. So what advice would you give to your ecosystem partners about places that they can play, and a framework that they should think about where they should invest and add value without the fear of you consuming their value proposition. >> So it's kind of the ecosystem analog to the customer question that Rob asked. So the one that I would have for you John is, the promise is all about scale, and they've talked a lot about how software at scale has to turn into hardware. What will Amazon be in five years? Are they gonna be a hardware player on a global basis? Following his China question, are they gonna be a software management player on a global basis and are not gonna worry as much about who owns the underlying hardware? Because that opens up a lot of questions about maybe there is going to be a true private cloud option an AWS will just try to run on everything, and really be the multi cloud administrator across the board. The Cisco as opposed to the IBM in the internet transformation. Alright so let me summarize very quickly. Thank you very much all of you guys once again for joining us in our Action Item. So this week we talked about AWS re:Invent. We've done this for a couple of years now. theCUBE has gone up and done 30, 35, 40 interviews. We're really expanding our presence at AWS re:Invent this year. So our expectation is that Amazon has been a major player in the industry for quite some time. They have spearheaded the whole concept of infrastructure as a service in a way that, in many respects nobody ever expected. And they've done it so well and so successfully that they are having an enormous impact way beyond just infrastructure in the market place today. Our expectation is that this year at AWS re:Invent, we're gonna hear a lot about three things. Here's what we're looking for. First, is AWS as a provider of advanced artificial intelligence technologies that then get rendered in services for application developers, but also for infrastructure managers. AI for ITOM being for example a very practical way of envisioning how AI gets instantiated within the enterprise. The second one is AWS has had a significant migration as a service initiative underway for quite some time. But as we've argued in Wikibon research, that's very nice, but the reality is nobody wants to bond the database manager. They don't want to promise that the database manager's gonna come over. It's interesting to conceive of AWS starting to work with application players as a way of facilitating the process of bringing database interfaces over to AWS more successfully as an onboarding roadmap for enterprises that want to move some of their enterprise applications into the AWS domain. And we mentioned one in particular, SAP, that has an interesting potential here. The final one is we don't expect to see the kind of comprehensive Edge answers at this year's re:Invent. Instead our expectation is that we're gonna continue to see AWS provide services and capabilities through server-less, through other partnerships that allow AWS to be, or the cloud to be able to extend out to the Edge without necessarily putting out that comprehensive software stack as an appliance being moved through some technology suppliers. But certainly green grass, certainly server-less, lambda, and other technologies are gonna continue to be important. If we finalize overall what we think, one of the biggest plays is, we are especially intrigued by Amazon's continuing build out of what appears to be one of the world's fastest, most comprehensive networks, and their commitment to continue to do that. We think this is gonna have implications far beyond just how AWS addresses the Edge to overall how the industry ends up getting organized. So with that, once again thank you very much for enjoying Action Item, and participating, and we'll talk next week as we review some of the things that we heard at AWS. And we look forward to those further conversations with you. So from Peter Burris, the Wikibon team, SiliconANGLE, thank you very much and this has been Action Item. (funky electronic music)

(soft music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas Navada, it's theCUBE, covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now here are your hosts, Lisa Martin, and Peter Burris. (soft music) >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. We're coming to you live from Las Vegas, we're with Fortinet today, at their Accelerate 2017 event, which brings together end-users, over 700 partners from 93 countries, great buzz today, very excited to be joined by Richard Hannah, who is the VP of information services at Gibson Energy. Richard, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you here, first and foremost, Richard, help us understand, what is VP of information services? >> So maybe first off, I'll just explain Gibson Energy. >> Yes, that was probably my first question. (laughs) >> So Gibson Energy is a Calgary Canada based midstream oil and gas company. But we do have locations throughout North America. In all the major oil base in throughout North America. We're considered a mid-stream oil and gas company, which if you, the categories of the, of the Energy industry is really, upstream would be the companies, that are taking the product under the ground. Downstream would be closer to retail, and we're in the middle, so midstream side, so basically that entails, logistics, so, think trucking, train, some moving of the oil and gas, um, infrastructure, around storage, um >> You're getting into refinery >> Pipelines that kind of stuff, yeah, and then the marketing side, would be, the actual going to the end customers, so our marketing group would be looking for the end customer, like refineries et cetera. So that's kind of what makes up, makes up our company. About two, over 200 locations, pretty complex business. So to your question, Gibson is a 60 year old company never had a kind of a senior IT leader in its history, but through a number of acquisitions, we had doubled in size, kind of coming into, 2013, and so I was hired as their first VP of IT, and basically look after all of the strategy around technology, the operations around technology, security of technology for the company. >> So a lot of companies are now looking at IT as not just handling the operations of known processes and by known processes, I mean accounting, HR et cetera, >> Right. >> But they're actually looking at IT to be a partner in going after opportunities, that may not be so well formed. >> Right. >> That may require analytics or be dependent upon analytics, is Gibson starting to think in those terms? Is that a part of your remit as an executive within Gibson, is to help think that process through? >> Definitely yeah, I think you know, there's obviously the normal day to day keep the lights on, of IT, and there were some, major investments, and transformations if you will, that needed to happen on the technology side, and that's kind of what went on in the, say the 2015 to 2016 range, but now we are actually, you know as you discussed, we're actually now looking at ways of using technology to add value to the company, I think, you know IoT, is a great example of that, we're doing some interesting things with IoT, doing some interesting things with HoloLens, so we're actually starting to, you know, be that true, kind of, strategic enabler for the company. >> Well talk about some of those IoT opportunities, I mean, certainly, in the midstream oil and gas universe, there's a lot of very, very expensive equipment >> Right. >> But it has to be maintained and taken care of. So how is IoT starting to impact the way, the business operates >> [Right. So yeah, as you mentioned, we have, you know, thousands and thousands of devices in the field. >> Peter: Not little tiny things. >> Not little tiny things >> No. >> These are big things. >> Yeah. >> Bigger than a bread box kind of stuff. >> Exactly. So, um, you know, before the concept of IoT, um, any monitoring, or data that you had to get off any of those devices, was largely manual, or didn't exist at all. So a great example of our first, interest in IT was with one of our disposal wells, well sites, in the middle of Alberta, and, basically, you know, it disposes of things that can't be used within the, you know, within the downstream side of the business, so it environmentally safely disposes of dirt and mud and those types of things, water, a lot of water that obviusly comes out of the production side. So that disposal well, think of it as a large heater that, heats up to you known large, you know, temperatures and as part of the disposal process. So prior to IoT, there was no way to really have any data on how that well was functioning, and when was the proper time to actually do preventative maintenance on the well. So we connected the well to you know, using IoT technology, through to the Cloud, and then, and then provide an analytics on the back end, to actually provide information on how that well was actually performing, from a heating standpoint, et cetera. So the operation team can actually, now real time, look at how that well is performing, and then perform maintenance when it's actually time to do it versus just doing it, you know based on gut feel. So save you know, thousands of hours of maintenance, thousands of man time, et cetera, so that's just one example of how we're connecting, you know, some of our devices. We are actually now starting to connect our our weight scale, which is part of our our logistic side of things. So again, prior to connecting those, the weight scale, somebody actually had to go out and take the measurements, write them down, take them back and put them into the operational system. Now, we can do that real time as well. So considerable efficiencies gained at the same time, you mentioned the word transformation before, I think you both did, you also talked about this growth there, so from a Cloud journey perspective, as we think of transformation in that sense, what is what's been the strategy that you've been employing as your generating, bringing more IoT devices online, to support the business, make it more efficient. What has your journey to the Cloud been, especially related to the growth that's happened in such a quick pace? >> Right. So, when I arrived back in 2013, as I mentioned, there was a fair bit of transformation that had to happen, on the IT side, and we're talking, you know, new ERP, new, so a lot on the application side including, new ERP et cetera, but on the infrastructure side, we required, again, a lot of transformations, sorry to keep using that word, but I think it's overused a lot, but it's the best way to describe what was happening. >> Evolution, transformation >> But, everything from our network, to our data centers, to security et cetera. So on the data center side, because of, the number of acquisitions the company went through, we actually, were sitting with seven data centers, and for a company our size, I mean way too many data centers a lot of cost, a lot of, you know, man power, to maintain those data centers, four of them in the US, three of them in Canada. So part of our strategy as a pertain to data center, was to consolidate, and you know I remember the kind of as we spoke about the strategy, was we need to move from somewhere from seven to less than seven, and zero was the right answer. (laughs) So meaning, wanted to get out of the data center business, and wanted to to go to the Cloud as much as possible. So we're now on that journey, we have, by the end of 2017, we'll have one physical data center, and the rest will be in the Cloud with Azure. >> And you're on that journey with Microsoft Azure, which is a big technology, alliance partner with Fortinet. Talk to us about the consolidation of data centers, and where does the security angle enter the picture, is it there from the beginning or is it something that has evolved as you transformed? >> I would say, largely evolved, so as we started architecting our, our cloud strategy with Azure, I mean Azure comes with, you know, a lot of security components, but at the same time we wanted to be in control of our own destiny as it were, as it pertains a security, so we wanted to have access to the firewall side of things, so that's how we got into working with Fortinet. And it was, we had never been a Fortinet customer prior to that, but as we looked at how to we secure Azure and how do we provide access to our network team, as it pertains to our connectivity to the cloud. Fortinet kind of, came out as the clear winner, through our due diligence, and we've been quite impressed with their capabilities, their partnership with Microsoft and Azure and their, you know, their ability that helped us architect a real secure solution as pertains to our cloud connectivity. So over the next couple of years, you're going to see more IoT? >> Definitely, that's 2017, I's say you know, two main strategies for 2017, security and IoT. >> So are you going to be seeing more edge oriented IoT >> Yes. >> So you're going to be, doing a fair amount of processing close to the end because of physics, so one of the things that we say, is we think that there's going to be less data move back to the Cloud, and more Cloud move to the edge. >> Right. >> How are, how do you see the relationship between, midstream oil and gas, being, processing at the edge, doing, running models at the edge, and making sure that the data that's in flight, which can be very strategic and very valuable, a lot of different dimensions remains secure. >> So you know as I mentioned at the outset, very complex company, and moving a lot you know, a lot of might, you know, what we call, oil and gas, and the other products that go with that. And I think, so if, as we look at IT, similar, right, very complex, network, very complex system that we have in place. And so, analytics is becoming, you know, quite important, to our whole running of the business, and obviously IT being the enabler of analytics, so, that is, you know, that's really what's moving us towards, and to do that, sorry, and to do that with, devices in the field, thinking your network is becoming very complex. So, not just wired devices any longer, wireless is a huge part of our network now, and keeping those things secure, and the fact that we're actually connecting to things that run, you know, the crown jewel, so to speak, makes it even more imperative that we have, you know, very, focus on security, and obviously great partners like Fortinet to help us keep those assets secure. >> From a security perspective, just curious from your standpoint, are you kind of the, the leader of that digital army, within Gibson or with your other peers on that c-suite to facilitate not only this journey to cloud, and I really liked how you about it Peter with the cloud moving out to the end points, what's your role in sort of, and how is it measured, facilitating security from, from that, eventually one data center out to those mobile IoT devices in the field. >> Right. So, I mean you know, as I mentioned, security is kind of one of our top strategies, unfortunately, I guess it has to be. But it's not hard to sell the importance of security, with, you know, the other senior leaders of the team. I think, the you know, the incidence that are happening in the world and the media, attention on security, makes it, makes >> Even in Canada. >> Even in Canada, yeah. (laughs) Makes it, you know, apparent that, that is kind of one of the questions that everybody's asking, >> Right. >> And in our business energy business as well, I mean, health, you know HSS and eHealth, security is paramount to what we do, you know, physically in the field, so security, from a digital standpoint is, I guess an easy sell. To your question, it's very top-of-mind everybody and IT kind of holds that banner as it, as it pertains to um, you know, the security of our digital assets. >> In some, in some senses, you might be able to say that some of the recent breaches, and we know that now they happen daily, but some of the ones that have been, in the media that you mentioned, could in some cases, in your role, maybe even be an advocate or an advantage for, you were saying it's kind of an easy sell, we understand the importance here. We want to get out ahead of it. Understanding, at some point, we're probably go into, get to the point of really being able to limit damage, that it's not a challenge in terms of the buy-in from your executive management. >> Right, and you know, the risk I think for us is disruption, um, and you see, you know, there's incidences around the globe, where, whether it's, you know, other utilities have been disrupted, you know, through breaches, so you know, that is our focus is, how do we ensure that our day to day operations are not disrupted by you know something that could have happened to from a, you know, from a digital security standpoint. >> Got it. Well it sounds like you have a quite a big 2017 ahead, continued success in the big data center, from seven to eventually zero with Microsoft Azure, that you're going to do. We thank you Richard Hannah, VP of information services, at Gibson Energy, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Alright, thank you for having me. >> And on behalf of Peter Burris my co-host, and myself Lisa Martin, thank you so much for watching theCUBE, stick around and we'll be right back. (upbeat music)