(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. This is "theCube". We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at a live event, hybrid event, two sets. We had two remote studios prior to the event, over 100 interviews. Really excited to have George Elissaios here. He's the director of product management for EC2 Edge, really interesting topic at AWS. George, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, everybody's talking about Edge, IoT, EC2. What's the scope of your portfolio, your responsibility? >> Yeah, well, our vision here at AWS is to really bring the power of the AWS platform wherever customers need it. AWS wherever our customers want it is our long-term vision. And we have a bunch of products in this space that help us do that and help us enable our customers whatever their use case is. So we have things like Wavelength. I know we talked about Wavelength before here in "theCube", where we bring full AWS service at the edge of the 5G network, so with 5G edge computing in partnership with telcos worldwide, our partnership with Verizon in the US has been flourishing. We're up to, I think, 15 or more Wavelength zones right now in many of the major cities in the US, but also in Japan and Korea, and in Europe with Vodafone. So that's one of the portfolio kind of offerings. And that helps you as a customer of AWS if you want to have the best latency to mobile devices, whether they are sensors, or mobile phones, or what have you. But we're also feeling out that Edge portfolio with local zones. Earlier today in Werner's keynote, we announced that we're going to launch another 30 local zones in 20 new countries, everywhere from South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, obviously. So a lot of expansion there. Very excited about that. And that is kind of a similar offering, but it basically brings you closer to customers in metropolitan areas over the internet. >> So, Wavelength's a big feature. George, I want to get just to touch on it because I think latency comes up a lot in Edge conversations, low latency issues, whether it's cars, factories. You guys gave a demo yesterday to the press corps in the press room, I was there, where you had someone in San Francisco from the Opera and someone in person here in Vegas, and you had 13 milliseconds going back and forth demoing, real time- >> Collaboration. >> The benefit of low latency in remote. It wasn't next door. It was San Francisco. This is kind of the purpose of what Edge is about. Can you explain what that means, that demo, why it was important, and what you were trying to show, and how does it mean for the Edge? >> So there is multiple use cases. One of them is human collaboration, right? Like, we spent the last two years of our lives over conferences and kind of like the teleconferences, and trying to talk over each other and unmute ourselves desperately. But existing solutions kind of work, generally, for most of the things that we do, but when it comes to music collaboration where milliseconds matter, it's a lot harder with existing solutions to get artists to collaborate when they're hundreds of miles away. Last night, we saw a really inspiring demo, I think, of how two top tier musicians, one located in San Francisco and one located in Vegas, can collaborate in opera, which is one of the most precise art forms in the music world. There are no beats in opera to kind of synchronize, so you really need to play off each other, right? So we provided a latency between them of less than 30 milliseconds, which translates, if you're thinking about audio or if you're thinking about the speed of sound, that's like being in the same stage. And that was very inspiring. But there's also a lot of use cases that are machine to machine communications, where even lower latencies matter, and we can think of latencies down to one millisecond, like single digit milliseconds when it comes to, for example, vehicles or robots, and things like that. So we're, with our products, we're enabling customers to drive down that latency, but also the jitter, which is the variation of latency. Especially in human communications, that is almost more important than latency itself. Your mind can adapt to latency, and you can start predicting what's going to happen, but if I'm keep changing that for you, that becomes even harder. >> Well, this is what I want to get to because you got outcomes and applications like this opera example. That's an application, I guess. So working backwards from the application, that's one thing, but now people are really starting to trying to figure out, "What is the Edge?" So I have to ask you, what is AWS's Edge? Is it Outpost, Wavelength? What do people buy to make the Edge work? >> Well, for us, is providing a breadth of services that our customers can either use holistically or combine multiple of those. So a really good example, for example, is DISH Wireless. I'm sure you know we're building with DISH the first in the world mobile network, 5G mobile network fully on cloud, right? So these combines Outposts and combines local zones in order to distribute the 5G network across nationwide. And different parts of their applications live in different edges, right? The local zone, the Outputs, and the region itself. So we have our customers... You know, I talked about how local zones is going to be, you know, in total, 45 cities in the world, right? We're already in 15 in the U.S. We're going to do another 30. But customers might still come, and say, "Oh, why are you not," you know, "in "in Costa Rica?" Well, we'll have Outposts in Costa Rica. So you could build your own offering there, or you could build on top of Outputs while you distribute the rest of your workload in existing AWS offering. So to answer your question, John, there is no single answer. I think that it is per use case and per workload that customers are going to combine or choose which one of- >> Okay, so let's go through local zones. Explain what a local zone is real quick. I know we covered it a bit last year with the virtual event, but local zones are now part of the nomenclature of the AWS language. >> Yes. >> And we know what a region is, right? So regions are regions. What's a local zone? >> When your region's saying new availability zones, and then we're just (chuckles)- >> You got availability zones. Now you got local zones. Take us through the topology, if you will, of how to think about this. >> Right, so a local zone is a fully-managed AWS infrastructure deployment. So it's owned and managed and operated by AWS. And because of that, it offers you the same elasticity, and security, and all of the goodies of the cloud, but it's positioned closer to your end customers or to your own deployment. So it's positioned in the local urban, metropolitan or industrial center closer to you. So if you think about the U.S., for example, we have a few regions, like, in the East Coast and in the West Coast, but now, we're basically extending these regions, and we're bringing more and more services to 15 cities. So if you are in Miami, there is a local zone there. If you are in LA, there is two locals zones actually in LA. That enables customers to run two different types of workloads. One is these distributed clouds or distributed Edge kind of workload that we've been hearing more and more about. Think of gaming, for example, right? Like, we have customers that are, like Supercell, that need to be closer to the gamers, wherever they are. So they're going to be using a bunch of local zones to deploy. And also, we have these hyper-local use cases, where we're talking, for example, about Netflix that are enabling in LA their creative artists to connect locally and get like as low as single millisecond latencies. So local zone is like an availability zone, but it's closer to you. It offers the same scalability, the same elasticity, the same security and the same services as the AWS cloud. And it connects back to the regions to offer you the full breadth of the platform. >> So just to clarify, so the Edge strategy essentially is to bring the cloud, AWS, the primitives, the APIs, to where the customers are in instances where they either can't move or won't move their resources into the cloud, or there's no connectivity? >> Right, we have a bunch of use cases where customers either need to be there because of regulation or because of some data gravity, so data is being generated in a specific place and you need to locally process it, or we'll have customers in this distributed use case. But I think that you're pointing out a very important thing, which is a common factor across all of these offerings. It's it is the cloud. It's not like a copycat of the cloud. It's the same API. It's the same services that you already know and use, et cetera. So extending the cloud rather than copying it around is our vision, and getting those customers who, well, connectivity obviously needs to be there. We were offering AWS Private 5G. We talked about it yesterday. >> Now, a premise that we've had is that a lot of Edge use cases will be driven by AI inferencing. And so... First of all, is that a reasonable premise, that's growing, we think, very quickly, and it has huge potential. What does the compute, if that's the correct premise, what does the compute look like for that type of workload? >> That is a great premise, and that's why we think that the model that we're offering is so powerful, because you have the Edge and the cloud fully cooperating and being connected together. You know, the Edge is a resource that's more limited than the full cloud in the AWS region. So when you're doing inferencing, what you really want to do is you want to train your models back up in the region where you get more scalability and the best prices. You know, you have the full scale of AWS. But for the latency-sensitive parts of your applications, you want to push those to the Edge. So when you're doing the actual inferencing, not the training of the models- >> Real time. Yeah. >> Real time, you push that to the Edge, whether that's if your connectivity is 5G, you can push that into a Wavelength zone. If your connectivity is wired, you can push it into a local zone. If you really need it to be in your data center, you can push it in your Outposts. So you see how our kind of like building out for all of those use cases. >> But in those instances, I'm interested in what the compute looks like, 'cause I presume it's got to be low power, low cost, super high performance. I mean, all of those things that are good for data-driven workloads. >> Right, the power, if we think here, is the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. So the same EC2 instance types, the EBS volumes, the S3 for storage, or RDS for your databases and EMR clusters. You can use the same service. And the compute is the same powerful all the way down from the hardware up to the service. >> And is the promise to customers that eventually those... It's not all of those services, right? I mean, you go to Outposts today, it continues to grow. >> Continuing to grow, yeah. Right, so but conceptually, as many services you could possibly push to the Edge, you intend to do so? >> We are pushing services according to customer requests, but also there is a nuance here. The nuance is that you push down the services that are truly latency-sensitive. You don't need to push everything down to the Edge when you're talking about latency- >> Like, what's an example of what you wouldn't push down? >> So management tools, right? So when you're doing monitoring and management, yeah, you don't need these to be at the Edge. You can do that, and you can scale that. Or, you know, batch processing, it doesn't have to be at the Edge because it's, by definition, not online, not like a latency service. So we're keeping those, like AWS Batch, for example, that's in the region because, you know, that's where customers really use it. But things like EC2, EBS, EMR, we're pushing those to the Edge because those are more- >> We got two minutes left. I want to get the Outposts kind of update. I remember when Outposts launched. It was really a seminal moment for re:Invent. Hybrid. "Oh, Andy Jassy said hybrid." Yeah. "I'll never say hybrid." But now hybrid's kind of translated into all cloud operations. Now you got local zones. A lot's changed from Amazon Web Services standpoint since Outposts launched. Local zones, things are happening. 5G, DISH. Now what's the status of Outposts? Are you guys happy with it? What has it morphed into? Is it still the same game? What is Outposts today, vis-a-vis what people may think it is or isn't? >> Yeah, we've been focusing in what we're talking about, building out a number of services that customers request, but also being in more and more places. So I think we're in more than 60, now, countries with Outposts. We've seen very good adoption. We've seen very good feedback. You know, half of my EBCs have been on Outposts, but this year, I think that one of the most exciting announcements were the Outposts servers. So the smaller form factors that enable an additional use cases, like for example, retail or even building your 5G networks. You know, one of our partners, Mavenir, is moving their 5G core, so the smarts of the network that does all the routing, on Outposts servers, and we can distribute those all over the place. So, we're keeping on the innovation. We're keeping on the expansion. And we've been getting very good customer feedback- >> So all steam ahead, full steam ahead? >> Full steam ahead plus 10%. (John laughs) >> All right, guys. Thank you so much, George. Really appreciate it. We're seeing the cloud expand. The definition is growing, kind of like the universe, John. Dave Vellante for John John Furrier. You're watching "theCube" at AWS re:Invent, the leader in high tech coverage globally. We'll be right back.

>>Good morning. It's the cube live from Las Vegas. This is day four of our coverage at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We have had since Monday two live sets two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. This is a 10th annual reinvent. We're talking about the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome Ashley Kramer, the chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense to the program. Welcome Ashley, thanks for having me today. So you own marketing and product. Tell me a little bit about your role. Obviously that's done. >>It's a big role. It has a big role, but I think as the analytics ecosystem has evolved, it makes sense to bring the product you're building the platform you're building and the messaging that you're taking to market together in one. And so I've been in size since almost two years, and I am responsible for both the messaging and the building of the product. >>Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about the next generation of business intelligence. Define Gen-Z one, two and where we are with three. >>Yeah. So when we think about the generations of analytics and we think about how the world is evolved, we're here clearly at a cloud conference, data apps, and the way people work has evolved over time. And I think analytics hasn't quite kept up and I'll explain what I mean about that. The first generation of analytics was really about, you know, that we're talking by the way, late nineties, early two thousands, big on-premise servers of data, things that would make people here sort of cringe, right? And the way to extract value was to put an analytics server right next to it, go wait in line, ask her it, Hey, I need a report. And then wait a few weeks. That report gets delivered. It's the wrong data. It's now stale. You've got to go get back in line, enter gen two, which by the way, I was a part of in my career at Tableau. >>And what we said was let's put data at everybody's fingertips. Let's allow people via desktop tool to drag and drop and build the perfect, beautiful dashboard. And then we can deploy it to everybody and we will break down that barrier to it. And that was successful. But the one thing that we didn't understand was not, everybody's an analyst, not everybody's data literate and dashboards could be very, very intimidating to the everyday worker. And so now we're on the cusp of what we call gen three and sysynced is well-positioned to really nail this market, which is make data invisible, make analytics invisible, and bring it to where people are. And that's what we consider gen three. And I of course can talk about that for hours. So I'd love to talk more about it. >>So are the lines blurred between what people think of as artificial intelligence and BI, because you're talking about, um, you know, making this invisible or transparent, you know, frictionless access, um, are you talking recommendations or just a presentation of raw information? How are those two topics, interleaved >>Talking both. And so what's, what's really beautiful about this is the dashboard doesn't have to go away, but you have to break it apart and you have to make it less intimidating, more approachable, more understandable, which is where AI comes in natural language generation, natural language querying maybe for some people, maybe for a doctor, they want to see the data presented in plain text, plain English. Great. Let them do that. And so AI is a big, big piece of this gen three. When we think about where BI and analytics is evolving to. So >>Like it, from a customization perspective, you're going to be able to allow people in healthcare, finance, marketing, sales, operations products, be able to have data at their fingertips when they need it. Because one of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have it's required. But to your point, if it's intimidating or if it's inaccessible, or if it's too complicated, it's not useful. >>That's right. And what we also learned during the pandemic is people are busy and they don't have time to change what they're doing. They don't have time to leave their everyday workflow and process to go look for something. They don't have time to look for an unnatural experience and try to interpret what it says. So customization is a huge piece of this, make it look and feel the way that a healthcare worker needs it to look and feel, make it look and feel the way that, you know, a construction worker makes it as part of their everyday job. And that's a core piece of gen three as well. >>What are some of the things that you guys are doing with AWS? Obviously, AWS, very, very customer focused. They always talk about working backwards from the customer, really this customer obsession. What are some of the things that you guys are working on together that your joint customers will benefit from? >>Fun fact, I was Amazonian as part of my career. So I grew up with Amazon in the early days of AWS. And we are very close partners with them from two really big perspectives. The first is the data's moving there, all of the data, particularly things like red shift. And that is a perfect place for size sense to sit right on top of that data, query it live, bring that and extract it to people in the way that they need it to consume. It really make data-driven decisions. The second piece is, um, and we saw a great keynote yesterday by Swami, which is the AI piece of the story, the comprehend, the Lexio, you know, really bringing to people, the data and the information and the way they need, and that all plugs into the size sense experience. And we can be that visual front end layer on top of all of those services. >>So where you sit because of your purview, looking at product marketing, and then let's, let's make, let's make the third point in the triangle, the customer always what, from your perspective, because you're thinking in terms of product customer requirements, and then you're thinking about how do you get the message across to make sure people understand what you're doing? What does a delighted customer sound like to you? What makes you smile? When someone says, Hey, Ashley, we have this customer who absolutely loves us. And these are the things they love about us. What does, what does that sound like? >>Really a very, very simple thing to answer because through my career too often, and I've read products at all of the companies I've worked for, you sell these big deals and you help them be successful with one use case. And you come back a year later in three people in the organization are actually using that solution to make data-driven decisions. So my perfect customer is, you know, we take them by the hand, we help them deploy that we come back a year later and the entire organization, all of their customers are using the solution because we've made it more approachable, more personalized and less intimidating. >>So what's the opposite of shelf ware. That's what you just described >>The opposite of shelfware and that breaks down every stat you see out there, there's a really widely known one that, um, less than 30% of organizations are actually successful with their analytics solutions. And my theory, my thesis and the research that we've done is that's exactly why it's too intimidating. It's too clunky and it's too disjointed. >>So talk to me, I, one of the things I think is the best validation of brand can get is the voice of the customer. I agree with you that it's, it's exciting when you, cause there's, there's so many, there's so many tools and you just mentioned the stat, um, in terms of adoption, but share with us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what you're talking about. That gen three BI customizable, personable, what customer comes to mind are customers. You have. >>So one of my favorites is a company called outreach and what outreach outreach caters to is sales. It's, you know, early sales, sales enablement, helping people understand which customers should I go target. And should I go sell to, these are not analysts using the platform. And when outreach came to us, they said, we want data and analytics to drive our experience for all of our customers. But these are young salespeople. They can't just be looking at dashboards. And so what we've done with them is we were actually the AI engine that drives the experience. And as that BDR, ADR SDR gets in there, they're actually using analytics to figure out who to call what account is hot, what to do next, and right. They're actioning right in the experience. And they have no clue that they're will using data. And that's okay. And they're optimized. They're more efficient at their job because science is powering that experience. >>So they could be in Salesforce and accessing this, like under the covers, not even knowing it, they have no idea >>Exactly >>What they're empowered with BI AI to be able to make decisions. >>And they're becoming better at their jobs because they're using data and they're not learning a new skill set because they don't have time. There's no time. >>That's a great point. One of the other points that we've heard a lot, the last three days is every company has to become a data company. One thing to say it whole other can of worms, right? To actually enable it. Because to your point earlier, you have access to data it's confusing or it's stale. There's a competitor right here. Ready to take over. Talk to me about how your customer conversations have changed, especially in the last 22 months about how do we become data really? Data-driven, >>That's, that's interesting because if you would've asked me two, three years ago, I would have given you this big pitch on, well, we need to go in and help them build this culture of data and analytics, right? We're going to go in and help them. That has changed. What we need to do now is accept that building. That whole culture is too hard to do. It requires people to go beyond their job and really learn a new skill set. So what we do is we make every company, a data company by not necessarily making them really realize that they're using analytics and data. We're making it personalized. We're removing the nuances that come with building the state of literacy culture. So yes, you still need to build the culture around it and have the support, but you need it to be less intimidating and you need it to just be part of the everyday workflow, the everyday process, the everyday experience, regardless of job title. There's another interesting stat that there's over 1 billion knowledge workers out there that are underserved. That's the barrier we need to break down. Next analysts are happy. Data scientists are happy. They have what they need. How do we get what they're doing to those 1 billion plus underserved knowledge workers. >>So when you're in customer conversations and they're like, Ashley, help us figure this out. >>You say, we go in and we show, you know, we, we figure out what their business case is. And they very often say, okay, let's start with a big, huge dashboard. Step them back and say, what are you really trying to solve? Okay. You want that doctor to be more efficient? You want to triage more properly, maybe right there within your system, within your medical system. We're just going to pop, you know, we're going to pull data out of red shift and we're just going to pop some insights there. Some recommendations, as you mentioned earlier, some plain text, we'll give you a search experience so you can search, you know, what beds are open and it will bring it back to you the way that you understand how to work, you don't have to change. >>And that's critical because one of the things that we talk about all the time is change management, cultural change. It's really hard to do, especially given the dynamics of the environment that we're in. People are still scattered, working from anywhere. That's going to persist for a while. We need to meet them where they are >>Absolutely a hundred percent nailed it. And I'm going to steal that in my marketing material. Thank you. I'm a marketer trademarks. Um, but absolutely meet them where they are. And you know, everybody wants to evolve. Everybody wants to upscale and you can help them, but don't expect it to happen overnight. And don't expect they're going to take it on as a second job because their core job function is the most critical. >>It's interesting from a marketer's perspective. Um, it's always great to have people running around wearing size sense, hoodies on the customer site what's even better is having them using the product. And maybe they don't even know as long as key stakeholders in the organization knows so that you can drive, you know, drive into the market. But is there anything disheartening about sort of being toiling in obscurity at times? >>It is the hardest part of the CMO hat that I wear is you both are very likely using size sense in something that you're doing and you have no idea. And that is a brand's nightmare. So yes, checking my pockets. In fact, we are giving away Fanny packs. And as soon as I'm done, I will be over here with two Fanny packs for you. Apparently that's the new thing. That's what the kids are doing. Um, but it is very hard. It's um, we have to do more because lots of people are using size sense and actually lots of people at this conference right now, a lot of these vendors have size sense embedded, and they don't necessarily know they're using it. It's a double-edged sword though, >>Because you're saying, you know, the whole point is making analytics invisible. So, but it is, but I'll take the Fanny pack. >>I'll be out. Don't worry about that. Don't you worry? >>So here we are wrapping up 10th annual at reinvent. You were an Amazonian. So you've been to many of these, obviously the first one in two years, there's nothing like the conversations that are going on behind it. There's nothing like an in-person interview to have a really a conversation about the technology. What are some of the things that have you heard at the conference that excite you going into 2022? >>My excitement going in is the focus that everybody's putting just beyond what's next beyond data like the AI, right? The AI perspective of everything, the way that AWS is evolving their data story, lots of serverless spoken by Adam in the first day. And I think there's really, really big things coming. You see the three big clouds competing and making each other better and better. You see vendors like size sense working cross-cloud because everybody has something best in class. And so I am one very excited to be in person and to be shaking hands and hugging friends that I have not seen except over zoom in two years. But I'm really excited for the direction. Particularly AWS is taking the data ecosystem inside sense plans to be a core part of that. >>Awesome. It's exciting. The amount of innovation that has gone on is we think, you know, the next 10 years is we're going to see far more in the next, probably five than we did in the previous 10. Actually. Thank you so much for joining us, talking to us about science. We'll have to, we'll have to think about that. Well, when we get our Fanny pack, so we can talk about science, how we're using it, but awesome. To be able to bring analytics to everyone so that it is invisible, usable, and we can actually extract value from data in real time. Thank you for >>Having me today. Our >>Pleasure for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 I'm Lisa Martin. This is our third day here on set We've got two live sets, two remote studios, over a hundred guests on the program and a lot going on with AWS and its ecosystem of partners am pleased to welcome back one of our Cube alumni, Buddy Brewer, the GVP & GM of product partnerships at New Relic. Welcome back, Buddy. Good to have you. >> Thanks it's great to be here >> Great to be in an in-person event isn't? >> No kidding it's really amazing to see everybody out here and after spending so much time on zoom calls, we had a lot of really great moments among the team and the booth playing the game of seeing if people's height matched up with >> (laughs) >> What your expectation was because so many of the people we work with >> Never mind. >> We've only known over zoom. >> Yes ,and zoom has been a savior for all of us we've been doing so much recording on zoom at the same time it's great to be here in person and seeing what a safe job AWS has done with getting I from hearing upwards of 30,000 people in here that are here in person. So talk to me about you lead the technology partnerships at New Relic. Talk to me about your role, and then we'll get into the partnership with AWS. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, the point about zoom, it's fascinating. Like you said, that just having the ability to communicate with people has been such a key enabler of being able to make progress and to continue to lead our personal and our professional lives despite the pandemic I mean, imagine what it would have been like if this had happened 10 years ago, even, but certainly 50 years ago >> Right. or something like that, right? Like everything would have ground to a halt and technology took on such an amazing, you know, critical role in allowing us to do all of these things and so at New Relic, we're all about helping people make sure that all of this software works correctly. And so observability helps people understand the detail level about everything from the front end, the end user experience to every single piece that happens along the path of delivering that experience all the way down to the infrastructure into the network. But my role at New Relic is also to help all of the other tools that software developers use every day to create those experiences that they connect into their observability platform so that they can understand all of those details and make sure that people are able to continue doing things that have become really so basic to life like ordering groceries or getting food, or, you know, communicating with a loved one over something like zoom. >> Yeah the things that to your point, if this had happened, you know, five, 10 years ago, it would have been a completely different story. We've been able to function really well and one of the things too, that, you know, I noticed yesterday and today, you probably did as well with the plethora, typical AWS the plethora of announcements, the amount of innovation that's going on, the customer flywheel that we've just seen this acceleration of technology and what it's enabling, but the observability portion is really key you talk about, you know, the developers need to the whole SDLC they need to be able to understand exactly what's going on because at the end of the day, whether it's a consumer or an enterprise of the other end of the spectrum, we need to know exactly what's going on because people's patience is far thinner these days the pandemic showed is that there is really no having access to real-time data. Isn't a luxury anymore it's really a necessity. >> Right, yeah, absolutely. >> Talk to me about some of these so a lot of announcements coming up from AWS, you guys talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing there. And some of the things that are exciting on that front. >> Yeah, AWS is a really key partner for us. We're big users of AWS ourselves for our observability platform and all of our infrastructure and, you know, we've had our own journey as a 13 year old business that started out pre cloud and moving our own infrastructure to the cloud. And then along that journey, we've worked closely with AWS and we've built a lot of joint solutions to help people who are moving to the cloud themselves or who are cloud native to understand all of the details about what's happening in that software so we have over 60 different integrations to all of the different tools with Amazon that you can use on the cloud from data storage, to EKS on Fargate and all of that stuff. And then we recently announced a five-year strategic agreement with Amazon to make it even easier for customers to adopt New Relic if they're building in Amazon AWS and so you know, we're in their marketplace, we have an offering for startups, for people who are just getting started that, you know, provides really simple and fast on-ramps with discounts and things like that. That's all designed to help people, software developers in particular, focus on what matters most to them, which is building great experiences for their customers. You know, you mentioned that the SDLC and this is one of the things that, you know, our mission at New Relic is to make observability a daily data-driven habit for developers across all phases of the software delivery life cycle. The problem with observability and how it's used today is that it's only used in the run phase by most people they use it when the software is on fire to put the fire out we believe that, that telemetry has tremendous strategic value in the plan, build and deploy phases of software development as well. And so partnerships like AWS allow us to unlock the accessibility of that data across all of those different phases for people who software developers are as a result in many ways that the things that we were talking about earlier with the expectations that the pandemic has placed on how software has to work, it's not an option they're busier, they're under more pressure than they've ever been before and so we want to help them relieve that pressure with tools that help them do their jobs better. >> Relieving that pressure is key there is so much pressure on developers I mean, these days from observability to security and that sort of thing, but it sounds like one of the things that you're also fundamentally doing is really shifting that observability left and helping them from a cultural perspective, it seems like almost a shift, but you're trying to make things easier for them giving them more tools and to unlock what they're not seeing right now. >> That's right and you know, the interesting thing about it is everyone realizes that observability is critical to, you know, successful software businesses so for example, we did a survey recently of 1300 software developers and IT decision makers and executives, and found that among the C-level executives that were surveyed 80% of them expected to increase their observability budget and 20% of those expected to increase it significantly. However, that same survey found that a very small percentage of those who we actually surveyed feel that they have a mature observability practice today. And when we unpack the reasons why in the survey, we found that most of them reduce down to basically this issue of they just don't have enough time to instrument all of the software, especially in a world where the shift to the cloud has driven a change in architecture where monoliths have been torn down and replaced by hundreds, or may be even thousands of microservices. >> Right. >> And we're in an era now where if observability isn't really, really easy and incredibly fast and simple to execute on then software developers can no longer instrument fast enough to keep up with the pace of the software that they're delivering and so what that leads to is visibility gaps, visibility gaps lead to poor customer experiences. And so what we're trying to do, and we've been on this massive simplification of our own platform to make it, you know, incredibly cost-effective at just 25 cents a gigabyte for ingestion and really simple licensing seat based licensing, where you get access to all of our tools to make it really simple and to take simply minutes to get observability on all those different pieces. >> If simplicity is a word that we throw around a lot, but it's really critical element and it's interesting to understand how do you actually facilitate that? You talked about, you know, kind of the 80 20 rule there. >> Yeah. >> A lot of the organization's not on that maturity curve with observability, how does New Relic and its ecosystem of partners like AWS how do you help have those conversations within organizations in any industry tell them, understand how you can actually simplify that and unlock that visibility, knowing that it's not only a matter of software development, but it's a competitive differentiator. It's also something that can damage a brand if they're not top of it. >> Yeah, we launched a re-imagined version of our partner ecosystem really our entire integration ecosystem about six weeks ago on October 13th called New Relic Instant Observability. And one of the central goals of New Relic IO, which we call it for short is to make it take just like five minutes for people to instrument something. So in the old way, what people had to do is if they wanted observability, they had to go learn about an observability vendor then they had to go install it, figure out how all that works and then they could get to solving their problem, which might've just been simply instrumenting a Kafka you know and so what we want to do is just keep people in that mode if all you wanted to do is instrument Kafka, then go find the Kafka instrumentation tile on New Relic and observability and then there's a guided install process that takes you through that and at the end you've instrumented Kafka and if you want to add something else like EKS Fargate from Amazon, or if you want to add something else like a Java service, you can simply click more of those guidance installs and add within minutes in an incremental way without having to stop and do a whole vendor evaluation to do so in fact, one of the other things that we launched recently is a free tier that's free forever. So there's no trial process or anything you don't have to put in a credit card if all you want to do is instrument this one thing right now, you can go through this process provision a free account you get access to all of our functionality for one user and ingest up to a hundred gigabytes of telemetry data for free within minutes. And so what we're trying to do is take all of that adoption friction out so that people aren't fighting with their instrumentation so much, and again, they can get back to doing what they really want to do in the first place, which has built great experiences for their end users. >> Great experiences for the end users but that translates to employee experience that translates to an end user customer experience, which translates back to brand reputation. I'm just wondering, you know, you're focused on the developers and we've been hearing a lot about the last two and a half days, a big focus on developers has observability kind of escalated up and its evolution up the stack within organizations is this a C-suite concern? Is this a board level concern? where does this fit now? and what's the vision of New Relic to deliver on that? >> With observability? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 90% of those in the survey that I was talking about felt that observability was not just a tool that they needed to use, but strategically critical to their business and, you know, this goes back to, as we know, and especially as a result of the intensity on the importance of software coming out of the pandemic, your digital business is your business these days. And so if you don't understand what's happening in that software and you can't move quickly, then you know you're really in trouble in terms of trying to succeed in a highly competitive environment and that goes back to again, one of our core beliefs is that all of this telemetry data that people have been collecting about how their software operates is so useful in contexts outside of just when there's a problem in production. Imagine if you could take that information and you could actually put it inside the IDE, which is something that we did with a recent acquisition of a company called CodeStream. We can take this telemetry data and put it inside the IDE so that as developers are writing the software, they know where those issues are. You can click straight from a stack frame, for example, inside of our, where we show all of our errors in a capability called Error's inbox and shoot right into your IDE and go see where the line of code is that caused that error, shortening that feedback loop and unlocking this really big investment that a lot of companies make in telemetry data earlier in the software life cycle, we believe is the future of observability and we want to help people get there. >> Well, the observability is really key for organizations these days because we've been hearing every company these days has to be a data company. >> Yeah. >> And it's one thing to say that it's a whole other thing to be able to implement it and observability is absolutely critical to that as being able to take that data and apply it in different contexts to really enable that business to be digital which is absolutely table-stakes these days to be successful and to deliver that customer experience ultimately. >> Yeah. >> That's what it all do. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the other thing is really hard about this problem when I talk with our customers and we found this in the survey as well, is that, you know, software developers, don't just use one tool to create software they use a lot of tools in fact, 13% of those that we surveyed use 10 or more tools. >> Whoa. >> Just for the observability piece. And so, you know, obviously we're always trying to expand organically what we do inside of our platform to cover more and more use cases, but an equally important part of our strategy, if we really want to make observability a data-driven daily habit for people is to find all of those other, you know, really well-built amazing tools that those developers use and find valuable ways to integrate with them. And so that's the other part of our ecosystem that we've built out is this ability to take all of the other tools that you use and wire them into New Relic so that, for example, if you're using, let's say Lacework for security then you can, you know, if someone's installed a Bitcoin miner on your infrastructure somewhere, you can quickly navigate because of that integration from a poor customer experience through the infrastructure that's suffering may be with, you know, a lot of memory pressure, and a lot of CPU being used for this Bitcoin miner and then find out that, you know, through the integration where the miner was installed, how it got installed so that you can remediate those types of issues and connecting those pieces together, making software truly interoperable is another thing that's really critical to our mission at New Relic. >> It is critical to not only to the developers, but to the organizations and their success as businesses these days Buddy thank you for joining me, talking about what's going on at New Relic What's new, how you're really empowering those developers and all of the downstream positive effects that, that leads to we appreciate your time. >> Thank you ,thanks for having me. >> All right, you are Buddy Brewer I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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>>Welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are winning one of the industry's most important in hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners to life sets we have going on right now. There's a dueling set right across from me, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be digging into really the next decade of cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome two guests that sit next to me here. We've got Aaron Arnold Santa's partner at BCG gamma and a diesel associate director of data science at BCG gamma guys. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. I D let's go ahead and start with you. Give us the low down what's going on at BCG gamma. >>We are focused on building responsible, sustainable, and efficient AI at scale to solve pressing business problems. >>Good. We're going to dig into that more. There was a lot of talk about AI this morning during the keynote yesterday as well. And you know, one of the things Aaron that we talked about the last day and a half is that every company, these days has to be a data company, but the volume of data is so great that we've got to have AI to be able to help all the humans process it, find all of the nuggets that are buried within these volumes of data for companies to be competitive. You talk about a sustainable efficient let's go ahead and talk about what do you mean by efficient AI? It sounds great, but help unpack what that actually means. And, and how does an organization in any industry actually achieving? >>Yeah. So when we talk about efficient AI, we're really talking about resilience, scale and adoption. So we all know that the environment in which AI tools and systems are deployed change and update very frequently, and those changes and updates can lead to errors, downtime, which erode user trust. And so when you're designing your AI, it's really critical to build it right and, and ensure it's resilient to those types of changes in the operational environment. And that really means designing it upfront to adhere to company standards around documentation, um, testing bias as well as approved model architecture. So, so that piece is really critical. The other piece about efficient AI is we're really talking about using better code structure to ensure that and enable that teams can search learn, um, and really clone AI IP to bring AI at scale across company silos. So what efficient AI does is it ensures that companies can go from proof of concept and exploration to deploying AI at scale. The final piece is really about solving the right business problems quickly in a way that ensures that users and customers will adopt and actually use the tool and capability >>That adoption there is absolutely critical. And >>You know, when we, when we're talking about AI, most of the time we're talking about three components and we call it like the ten twenty, seventy rule, 10% of the change is really about the better AI algorithms that are coming out. 20% is a better architecture, the technology, all of those components, but 70% of it is really about how are we influencing our business partners to make better decisions? How are we making sure AI is built right into the operational decision flow? And that's really, when we start talking about better AI, we move it away from kind of our pet project, buzzword bingo, into decision operational flows, you know, and, and there's, there's a journey there, there's a journey that we all are on. You see the evolution of AI right now. And I th and I liken it a lot to, um, myself when I'm, I'm a big football fan, right. And I've fantasy football is like my passion. I see. And when I look at the decision-makings, I've made 10 years ago versus now, now I actually have my own models. I'm running against it. I'm, I'm very much into the details of what is the data telling me, but, um, it's not until I bring that together with my decision making process, that really makes it so that I have bragging rights on Sundays. >>I wouldn't want to compete against Aaron. I mean, you know, I've got a lot of friends that do fantasy football, but I don't think they're taking, they're actually doing data-driven approaches as you are. One of the things I'm glad that you talked about the 10, 20, 70 formula for in dividing investments in AI. One of the things that really surprised me, and I'm looking at my notes here, because I was writing this down was that you said 10% AI and machine learning algorithms, 20% software and technology infrastructure, 70% though is also change management. That is hard, especially the speed with which every industry is operating today. What we've seen in the last 22 months, we've seen a massive acceleration to the cloud, every business pivoting, many times where our customers, in terms of understanding the challenges that they can solve with AI, given the fact that we're still in such a dynamic global environment, do what are you seeing? >>So I think it's actually quite, bi-modal some companies, including the public sector are really leaning in and exploring all the different applications and all the different solutions. Unfortunately, if they're not emphasizing that 70% on change management and the culture change and user adoption, those are substantial, but you don't get the return on the investment. Right. On the other hand, the other part of that bi-modal distribution is there are folks who are still really reluctant because they have made investments and it hasn't right. Brought about the change that they were hoping for. And so I think it's really critical to bring that holistic approach to bringing AI and advanced analytic tools to really change the way, you know, a company's attacking its problems and bringing solutions to its users and customers. >>Yeah. I like it a lot to us as us, as adults have when we teach our kids about math, right? Like less of my time with my own kids is focused on teaching them, the principles, the, and all those things, but it's more teaching them to be comfortable. Why are they learning math? What are they doing? How is that going to prepare them to be more competitive and, uh, later on in life. And so, and then the same thing's happening in this evolution in AI, right? There is this big tech and AI transformations that are happening. But the questions we need to ask ourselves within is are we taking the time to make sure our companies and our people are on the journey with us and that they understand that this is going to be better for them and give them a competitive advantage. >>That's critical. We know we've talked a lot in Alaska. We talk a lot about every show about people, process technologies and people as part of that. But I've definitely seen more of a focus. I think the last two and a half days of the people emphasis going, we have to have, we have to upskill our people. We have to train our people. We have to make sure that they're understand how this technology can partner with them and enable them rather than take things away. So it's nice to hear you talking about the big focus there being on the people that is because without that, then a deed to your point, a lot of those projects aren't successful >>And not only, I think the other piece there in terms of bringing the user along for the journey is you don't want them to feel like this is just another tool, right? Another part of their, in addition to their workflow, right? You want to take the burden away. You want it to really, um, not add, but to, to their, to their list of, of daily tasks, but subtract and make it easier. Right. And I think that that's really critical for a lot of companies as well. >>I think along with what you're talking about, we have to teach people to be responsible. So it's, it's one thing to do the job better, but it's another thing to be responsible because in today's world, we have to think about our responsibilities back to our communities, to our consumers, to our shareholders and into ultimately to the environment itself. And so responsive as we are thinking about AI, we need to think differently too, because let's face it. Data is fuel and we can accidentally make the wrong decisions for the globe by making the right decisions for stakeholders. We have to do a better job of understanding the why we're doing what we're doing, what we're doing, and not only the, the intended consequences of our decisions, but also the unintended consequences. And then we need to be responsible in the ways that we're using AI and that we're transparent in our use thereof. >>Yeah, Aaron, I think that's incredibly critical. I think responsible AI, um, has to be at the heart of, of AI transformation. And one of the interesting things that we have found is that organizations perceive their responsible AI maturity to be substantially higher than it actually is. Right. And less than 50% of organizations that have, you know, a fully implemented AI at scale, do not have a responsible AI, um, capability. And so at BCG, we've been working quite hard to integrate our gamma responsible AI program into the big AI transformations, because it's so critical. It's so absolutely important. And, and really that there's a lot of facets to that. But one of that, one of the critical ones is an ensures the goals and the outcomes of the AI systems are fair and unbiased and explainable, which is so critical. Um, I think it also ensures best that we follow best practices for data governance to protect user privacy, which I think is another critical, um, piece here, as well as minimizing any negative social or environmental impact, which again, I it's, it's just gotta be at the forefront of AI development. What about, >>And I think that there's a tech part to that too. So like one thing that we're working on called a gamma facet is really, you know, for the longest time in this AI transformation, AI was kind of a black box and it's kind of mystical, but we, we optimize our results. The transformation, when we talk about better, AI is, uh, the decision maker is in the center and knows the outcome. And so we make it a clear box. And so they're really, we're working a lot on, you know, the most common Python packages, uh, to make them more clear too, so that the business user and the data scientist understands the decisions that they're making and how it will impact the company and longer term society. >>What about the sustainability front? I mean, it's clear that I can understand why you have the 10 20, 70 approach that, that 70% is really important. There are companies that think they're much farther advanced in terms of responsible use of responsible AI responsibly than they really are. Um, but you know, we talk about sustainability all the time. It's a buzzword, but it's also something that's incredibly important to you to companies like AWS. I imagined a companies like yourself, where does, what does sustainable AI look like and how to organizations implemented along with responsible AI efficient AI? >>Yeah, I think it's the question in some ways right now, given everything that's happening around the world. And so AI for sustainability is, is really critical. I think we all have a part to play in this fight, um, to ensure our, our global environment. So I think we need to use the same AI expertise, the same AI technology that we bring to maximize revenue and minimize cost, um, to, to minimizing a company's footprint. Long-term I think that's really critical. One of the things we've seen is that 85% of companies want to reduce their emissions, but less than 10% of them know how to accurately measure right. Their footprint. And so we've been focusing on AI for sustainability across a couple of different pillars. The first is measuring the current impact from operations. The second is data mining, um, for optimal decisions to reduce that footprint. And the third is scenarios to plan better strategies to alter our impact. >>Excellent. Well, there's so much work to be done, guys. Thank you for joining me talking about what BCG is doing for responsible, efficient, ethical, and sustainable AI, a lot of opportunities. I'm sure for you guys with AWS and your list of clients, but we thank you for taking the time out to talk with us this morning. So much. I write for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to theCUBE's, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, and over 100 guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. We're very excited to be welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Peter McKay, the CEO of Snyk. He's set to talk about reinventing application security with Snyk. Peter, welcome back to the program. >> It's great to be back, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> Great to talk to you. So, my goodness, Snyk has had an incredible year, last year, this year, I was just looking at your Series F funding raised over 600 million in the month of September alone. Your valuation is, I think I saw over 9.6 billion, which is nearly doubled. This year-- >> Don't rush at 8.6, but yes, it was double the last time. Yeah, it's been been a crazy 2021, that's for sure. >> So, talk to me about some of that before we get into what you guys are doing with AWS. Let's talk about that, we talked about that funding. What are some of the strategic areas of investment? I know you've done a recent acquisition cloud skiff, but where are you really going to be focusing the Series F funding? >> Yeah, we've been very aggressive in building out our platform. We have a great vision for where we see developer security evolving and we want to get there fast. A lot of our customers and developers are kind of pushing us in that direction of really consolidating a platform. And so, to get there quickly, we do it organically building it ourselves, and we do it in inorganically where we can see other companies accelerate that roadmap. And so, it's this combination of very aggressive, organic expansion of both the breadth of our products, but also the depth, like adding more to our platform, but also the inorganic, because a lot of companies who have team and technologies that are very complimentary to what we're doing and allows us to continue to consolidate what is a very fragmented market in and around developers security. And so, we're going to continue to use the resources to accelerate that roadmap. The second part of it is, we are a little bit different than some companies where they kind of follow where the decision headquarters are of companies for us, we follow developers. And so, around the globe, Multinational Corporations have developers in the Philippines, in Argentina and all around the world and we needed to be there. And so, expanding our community, expanding our customer success organization around the world is critical for us. And so, that's something part of our kind of use of proceeds is the expansion of our go-to-market as well. >> Peter, modern development has changed. Next thing modern development has changed. So, traditional AppSec doesn't apply anymore. A new approach is needed. Talk to me about why Snyk believes that and what that new approach is. >> Yeah, you just go back to for 30 years, security was owned by application security teams and that's when it was kind of this waterfall application development model where they develop an app and every three, six, nine months, and then the security teams would audit that application and kind of send all the feedback, hear all the issues, go fix it, developers, and it was incredibly inefficient. And then you throw on top of this digital transformation and companies moving incredibly fast in building new applications. This agile development motion and all the incredible tools that allow developers to develop really fast. But then you get this very slow antiquated way of kind of testing it at the very end, right before you move the applications in production. So, it just didn't scale. And so, the concept is just way too late in the process. You really need to move security testing into that developer environment from the IDE, the CI/CD all the way through. So, when you're developing along the way, you're fixing the issues well ahead of time. And that's where modern development organizations are all this concept of shift left and building it in, into that's really the driver is moving security earlier and earlier in the software development life cycle. >> And that's key, especially you talked about the acceleration of digital transformation, but we've also seen the acceleration of the threat landscape in the last 20 months. There's been significant changes. The perimeter is so fragmented, it's expanding, the threat landscape goes all the way into outer space to low earth orbit these days. Talk to me about that as kind of a facilitator or an accelerator of what Snyk is doing to really focus on shifting security left with those developers. >> Yeah, I think people are kind of waking up to the fact that up to this point, they've spent billions and billions of dollars on endpoint securities and runtime security and all the things that are kind of in production. And they're realizing that, okay, well, why are we still vulnerable? Why are we still have these issues? And I think it's the realization that they're waiting too long to fix it. And a lot of the issues are happening. They're either new issues with moving to the cloud or they're issues that happen well before it got into production. And so, this realization that we've got to go earlier and earlier and fix these issues well before we go into production and don't wait till the very end. So, I think that's really driving the market to this shift lab. >> And you guys have actually kind of really pivoted your go-to-market model around that developers don't try and buy software the way that IT and security teams do. Talk to me about Snyk's GTM. >> Yeah, it's very unique in that it's really marrying this model developer security approach with the way developers want to buy. So, we start with our community and we do free content and tools all around building awareness for the developer community. We have, all of our products are free, so developers can try before they buy. And if you're truly a developer solution, you offer it free and let them use it. And then when they want to collaborate and they want to integrate and automate that moves from free to paid. So, it's very much of this bottoms up motion that really allowed developers to try MI. That's a big, big driver for our business, inbound motion drives 70% of our pipeline from them coming to us from this community. And then we come in kind of top down once they kind of get into different places. And we go in through those security organizations, which are trying to shift labs, trying to move security earlier, earlier and we work together with the security organizations to help move that to the developer world. So, you've got this bottoms up, developer adoption, viral adoption of Snyk within those organizations. Now, with the top-down kind of, and we become this bridge between the developer teams in engineering, and the security teams that are all trying to move in the same direction. And so, that's kind of how this market is evolved. And we're kind of that bridge for both those organizations. >> I was going to ask you about that, that bridge is critical, but also that bridge is a cultural change. I'm curious, how do you see organizations? It sounds like obviously you're, what over, I think, six, 700 customers now, a couple of million developers using the technology, so-- >> 1300 customers today >> 1300, okay. Wow! You have had a big year. 1300 customers, millions of developers using the technology. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys have figured out how to facilitate that cultural shift and shift security left, but also bridge between the IT and the security folks which have tended to be on sort of opposite sides of the spectrum. >> Yeah, I think the realization, I think a lot of people are very early on and I was... We'd been in the software industry for 25 years. Even nobody ever thought developers would care about security. Like there's no way developers really care about security. And really, if you think about, if you asked the developer, would you rather develop a secure app or an insecure app? If all things were equal, of course, they'd want it to be secure, but it needs to be easy. It needs to be like, don't slow me down, whatever you do, don't slow me down. And so, we have this, "Hey, it's all about speed of development, speeds, speed, speed." So, for us, we need to make it embedded, like integrated completely into that software development life cycle. So, developers don't have to be security experts, developers don't have to get out of their flow to do it, learn a different piece of software to figure out it's all embedded into that process. So, you can be fast and you can be agile, but you can also be secure at the same time. And so, part of that is embedding education and other things in there to learn that expansion of getting in the door and kind of building that momentum within these development communities all around the world. And so, I think we help all our customers with that kind of developer adoption and working together with the security teams and engineering teams on how we roll that out around best practices. And in some of the things we've learned over the six and a half years of doing this. >> It sounds very strategic and methodical and a great approach that is obviously quite successful. We talked about the growth trajectory now, 1300 customers. Let's talk about what you guys are doing with AWS. Here we are at reinvent this year. Talk to me about this Snyk, AWS partnership. >> Yeah, it's been really gaining momentum over the past year and a half, almost two years now. AWS, a lot of the workloads, one of the reasons, a lot of the applications don't go to the cloud is because of security issues and moving workloads to the cloud. Also developing applications in the cloud, security is a critical part of it. So, AWS is obviously infrastructure, but they also need solutions that allow them to make sure that those companies that are developing on AWS are secure. And so, we've integrated our Intel database into AWS inspector. We have a lot of offerings, very specific AWS offerings that our mutual customers can leverage. And we work very collaboratively with AWS in not only our technical roadmap with them, but also our go-to-market side, which is very much aligned. And it's continuing, we kind of, I say, we're in the second inning of that game. We got a lot more coming. >> Okay, but well aligned. Give me a customer example, if you will, have joined AWS Snyk customer that you've really helped with this transition, shifting security left they're building apps in the AWS cloud very successfully and securely. >> Yeah, I'd well, almost every company has some relationship with size with AWS. And so, for us, it's one of the first questions we ask anybody coming in is what's your relationship with one of the cloud vendors? And that inevitably it'll be, yeah, we have a relationship with AWS. And so, we talk about our roadmap that we have with AWS. They can buy our software through the AWS marketplace. You could leverage kind of your EDPs that you have with AWS to kind of build that scale. So, we're very technically aligned with the AWS platform. And so, you look at financial services, we've done a fair amount of financial services, insurance companies that are all kind of moving more workloads to AWS. Some of them have been our customers before, some of them separate from AWS, and now they're kind of, "Hey, can I move all my apps over and leveraged, Snyk in that process?" So, it's now, a good part of our go-to-market motion is coming through AWS marketplace as well. So, it's been a very successful partnership on both parties. >> A lot of momentum there, speaking of momentum, we talked about the funding raise this year alone, tremendous momentum going on for the company. What are some of the things that we can expect to see from Snyk in calendar year 22? >> Yeah, well, aggressive roadmap. I mean, that's still, we see, we have four modules today. We started with one and we added to, that was open to a security. We added a container security, infrastructure as code security. Then we added code security or a stats solution. We see modules five, six, seven coming out. we made an acquisition of drift technology, adding into kind of adding some more depth. So, you're going to see just a lot more continued aggressiveness on our side, as we scale both our engineering, organically and inorganically, but also, the go-to-market, now we're almost in all the major countries around the world and we're going to continue to invest in building that out and going where the developers are, the 28 million developers around the world. Our goal is to reach every one of them as fast as we possibly can with our free or paid, or whatever way is to get to 28 million developers as fast as we can. >> So, for those developers watching, where do you want to point them to go to, to start their free trial. >> Just go right to our website, snyk.io and you can get all of our products free, you can chat, schedule demos, you can do everything very easily if not. And it's very self-service so, if you don't want to talk to anybody, you don't have to talk to anybody, but if you do, we have plenty of people you can talk to. That's our world, frictionless motion. >> Frictionless and contactless at the same time, Peter, congratulations on the growth and momentum of the company. What you're doing, the evolution of the partnership with AWS and that lofty goal to reach 28 million developers. Am looking forward to our next conversation to see where you are on that progress. >> Same thing, same here, Lisa, thank you for your time. >> Oh, likewise. For Peter McKay, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Stick around, more great content coming up next. (soft upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas Lisa Martin live here with David Nicholson. We're at AWS reinvent 2021, this an outstanding event. There's a lot of people here, tens of thousands. And this is probably one of the most important and largest hybrid tech events that we're doing this year with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. We're going to be covering this two live sets, two remote studios, over 100 guests on the CUBE at this re-invent and David and I are pleased to welcome Giorgio Vanzini next the vice president and global head of partners and alliances at DXC, Georgia Welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Talk to us about what's going on at DXC, what are you in AWS doing together with what's the scoop? >> Yes Well, some exciting things are happening between AWS and DXC, which is we're really focusing on our customers that we have especially in the banking and capital markets, but also automotive. And then also we were a launch partner today with the AWS mainframe modernization right, and so we're focusing on mainframes as well. So exciting spaces for us to go collaborate and work with AWS, for our customers. >> Talk to me about some of the things you know the last 22 months have been quite challenging, quite dynamic and we've seen such a massive acceleration to the cloud. What have you seen from your perspective? Are you seeing customers in every industry that have really figured we've got to do this now because if we don't, we're going to be out of business? >> Yes, you're absolutely correct. We've seen a dramatic acceleration of people wanting or customers wanting to move to the cloud public and private, and an acceleration of assistance that they were requesting from a global systems integrator. So what we've seen is you know, part of our clouds ride strategy that we have, really understanding what does the customer need from a strategy perspective, from a business value perspective and the technology perspective, and AWS has been a great partner with us to actually accommodate all of these kinds of things and the announcements that you had today, you know, just substantiate kind of that fact as well. >> Can you double click on the Cloud Right approach, talk to us about what that is, why it's important and what are some of the outcomes that it's helping customers to generate? >> Absolutely love to Cloud Right is really DXC's strategy to take the customers on the journey from the mainframe to the cloud, and to customize this because every customer is different. They have different requirements, different environments, different business strategies. So therefore the Cloud Right approach is really customizing it for the customer. What is the right business strategy? What is the right technology strategy? And then migrating them over into the cloud as well. Keeping in mind that again, customers are specific, industries are specific. You know, data requirements are different analytics are different, you know, government requirements are different. So you need to those in mind when you transition customers over into the cloud space. >> Right, from a data residency, data sovereignty and all of the different rules and regulations that are popping up that are kind of similar to GDPR for example, that's a big challenge, but one of the things too that's happening Giorgio is that every company to be competitive these days has to become a data company, right? There's no choice, you've got to be data-driven, you've got to have a data strategy at the core of the business, otherwise there's a competitor in the rear view mirror, who's ready to take your place. >> That is absolutely correct, and so that's part of our Cloud Right strategy is understanding what are the business requirements from the customer? Understanding their competitive edge and migrating them over. Because in many instances, to your point, they have huge reams of data, petabytes of information of data, but really making sense of it, so running the analytics on it and having the business insights. So helping the customers understand that, but then also understanding of like, what are the key business requirements that they have? Which applications to migrate and which not to migrate? >> So I'm curious, you mentioned that you're a launch partner for mainframe modernization. That's sort of one slice of and very important slice of some organization's business and migration strategy to cloud. I'm curious what the DXC blend is between standardized offerings and bespoke services and how you manage that? Do you have a thought about that? Wouldn't it be great to have small, medium and large and have people click on it? >> Yes here's a T-shirt for you, which size are you? Now I'm actually glad you asked me that question because that's exactly going to the core of the Cloud Right strategy, and the Cloud Right really means that it's like, which T-shirt size is correct for you? Right. This is the question that we just addressed which is it has to be bespoke because one size does not fit all. And so understanding the customer requirements of do we need to move the data to the cloud? Or do we move to need a subset to the cloud? Do we need to move part of the business applications and which ones and in which order? Right? And so that's why I think we bring something to the table in the AWS mainframe modernization, which is unique because we have an end to end kind of approach from a planning to implementation, to execution and running as well. So I think DEX is uniquely positioned with our Cloud Right strategy. >> One of the things AWS Giorgio talks about is not being custom but being purpose-built. Talk to me about kind of compare contrast that with bespoke solutions, industry specific, obviously customers have specificities. Do you see a difference there between purpose-built under bespoke or are they aligned from your perspective? >> Yes, I do agree that a to technology layers are definitely common layers, horizontal layers, right Where I think you have bespoken limitations on the business strategy and the business rules. And so you have to understand what business is the customer really in and how to implement the business rules into the technology stack as well, and bringing it all together. So while the technology I think goes horizontal to your point right, you know, compute and storage is the same. Wherever you go the bits are the same, however how they're utilized and how you use them for your customers and your interaction is completely different from customer to customer and industry to industry, as you guys know as well. >> You know, it can be, it can be really disheartening working in this space when you think of 475 different kinds of instances and how important it is to get that right for a customer and how much they don't care. Ultimately they don't want to hear about it, they don't want to know, but they want you to get it right, so that it doesn't matter. So it's this irony of all of the work that people have to do like at DXC to make those details not matter. Any thoughts on that? Do you, are you a dejected because of that at all? >> Well, that is part of the value that we bring, right? >> David: Sure. >> To your point, absolutely the customer doesn't care in quotes, right? Just make it work for us and run it smoothly. On the other hand, we're on the hook to make sure that all the different partners that we have, that we integrate including AWS, right. Run smoothly and coherent and are up, you know, 99.999% of the time obviously right. And so the customers do care about our you know, interaction with them as well while AWS is always there. >> One of the things that we talked about a little bit ago is every industry had to pivot right. Dramatically the last 22 months or so. And we've seen every industry cloud is no longer a nice to have We've got to be able to get there, but you mentioned a focus in banking, and I think automotive, I'd love to get your perspectives on what some of the things are the opportunities that DXC sees in those particular industries, as opportunities to modernize. >> Yes, we latched on to banking and automotive because those are ripe for transition and the customers are willing to take the steps there as well. It doesn't mean that other industries are not relevant like, you know, consumer or retail or you know, technology and, and manufacturing. However, especially in automotive I think we have a unique positioning where we have the majority of the OAMs car manufacturers worldwide as customers, and when you think about AWS, you think about the utilization of the information that comes back from telematics information and customization, right. Petabytes of information that comes back from every device, which is a car and what kind of service you can provide there. So it's an industry you know, we talked about Tesla early on as well, right It's an industry that ripe for software and software updates. very similar you see a lot of things happening in the banking capital market space, where they're moving you know their customer base into new spaces as well. Just think about all the NFTs, those are happening, all the FinTech that's happening, right. So the, the banking capital markets companies have to, you know, have an evolution going on right, and assisting them in this evolution is as part of our strategy. >> So you're responsible for global partnerships and alliances DXC would be considered a large global systems integrator. The world is obviously moving in the direction of cloud. We've got the three big players AWS, and the other two I can't think of their names while I'm sitting here in Vegas right now, how do you balance what you do with those, with a variety of providers, for customers, and are you going to market primarily as DXC with the DXC relationship with the customer? Or in support of those cloud vendors that have essentially technology that if left unimplemented is essentially worthless, right I mean you, you bridge the divide between the technology and the true value of the technology, but are you the primary seat holder at the customer table, or is AWS the primary seat holder? Or is it a little of both? Long-winded question I apologize but I think you understand what I'm saying. It's an interesting world that we live in now. >> It definitely is, and if I wouldn't know you better I would say it's a trick question, but in all seriousness, we really are customer driven just like AWS as well right so, we really are trying to do the right thing for the customer. Hence our Cloud Right strategy, where we don't have a cookie cutter approach or saying just go do the following five things and you're going to be fine. We really want to look at the customer and say, what is important to you? What is the timeframe you're looking at? What is the strategic imperative that you have? What data do you have to move? You know, what system do you have to leave behind? And then do the right thing for the customer literally right. And so in this instance, absolutely you know, in my role AWS plays a huge role as you know is one of our core hyper scaler partners, a very good partner, we love AWS. And so making sure that they're always going to be there as part of that infrastructure is part of our strategy. >> You mentioned, oh sorry Dave >> No, I was just saying it makes sense. >> It does make sense in terms of being customer first, we talk with AWS, you can't kind of have an interview with, with one of their folks without talking about that. We work backwards from the customer first. This customer obsession, it sounds like from a cultural perspective, there's pretty strong alignment there with DXC. >> Exactly right, so I think from that perspective we share the same DNA where we look first to the customer and then say okay, how do we deduct what is right for the customer and implement it that way right, Because in many instances as you know, you mentioned the, the two other hyper scaler that we don't talk about, customers usually don't have a single source kind of approach, right They usually have a dual approach. And so while we have to work with that, there's preferred vendors that we engage with, right. And so clearly AWS is one of our preferred vendors that we engage with. >> Can you share an example? I'd love to know a customer that's taken the Cloud Right approach applied really kind of in a textbook way that you think really shows the value of DXC. Any customers, but even by industry if you don't want to name them, come to mind that really show the value of that approach. >> Yeah, So we, we just concluded a major migration from one of our leading insurance companies, a global big company that you know is similar with my birthplace. But what we really did is a Cloud Right approach of migrating them from their legacy mainframe and virtualized systems that they had, to a cloud approach. And in the process of doing this you know, we reduced their overall operating expenses, their cap X expenses obviously but also reduced their overall budget about 30% reduction by moving them to the cloud. Again during the Cloud Right approach of understanding what exactly to move in, which timeframe and what to leave behind right, Because in many instances, customers don't have an exit strategy. They rush to the cloud, but then leave their you know old legacy behind and like oh, what are you going to do with this? And so you need to have a comprehensive end to end system strategy of like, what do you want to leave behind? When do you want to sunset it? And when do you want to migrate certain things over as well? >> That's got to be quite challenging for I would assume a legacy historied insurance company been around for a long time, lots of data, but culturally very different than the cloud mindset. >> You bring up one of those soft skills, right. Which is the cultural aspect of talking with the customers of how do we migrate you? It's not just, and that's why I said it's not just a business decision or a technology decision. In many instances, you affect people's life as well. When you think about old systems administrators that were working on mainframes. Now if you move everything to the clouds, they become obsolete. So rescaling the workforce and having a comprehensive plan is part of the soft skills right, Where you think more comprehensive about the customer, it's not just technology it's really is the full experience right At 360 what happens to the people? How do we migrate the people? But also setting expectations with top management, for example right of saying, how is this going to change our business? What new opportunities are going to be there? So those are all the soft kind of skills as well. >> One of the things that struck me this morning during the AWS keynote is just all of the innovation that that goes on. But AWS really is a flywheel of the customer and all the opportunities that their customers create for AWS, and the opportunities then that AWS technologies create for the customers across industries I just thought that I just kind of really felt that flywheel this morning when Adam was talking about all of the things that they're revealing, you must feel the same as a partner. >> I do, and I I'm a tech geek, so I'm totally excited about this, and it you know it feeds my soul because I can remember when, you know, when we first had analytics with you know Redshift rights and then customers are coming back and going like, well could we do something that is real time? Because we have requirements in this, and then CAFCA came out right, as a new service and I'm like okay, great right, and so we're really there to embrace you know, every new service that comes out from AWS. Which is fantastic, right I mean the speed and agility that comes out with AWS and we totally embraced that for our customers. >> Awesome, Georgia thank you for joining David and me today talking about what's going on with DXC, your partnership with AWS, Cloud Right, and how you're helping customers get Cloud Right. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, I appreciate it too, thank you. >> All right. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the leader in global alive tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey guys, welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage day, one of AWS and re-invent live that's right live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to be here. We are running actually one of the industry's most important hybrid tech events with AWS this year, and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We have two lives dots, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni and a new guest to the program. Savina Joyce Sabina, Joseph GM of technology partners at AWS joins me as well as Scott Owen, the VP of business development and global channels at air slate, guys. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. It's a great to be here. Live happy. Fantastic. Let's go ahead and give the audience an overview of your roles. Sabina. We'll start with you. And then Scott will go to you. >>Great to see you again, Lisa general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas, and we also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow their business in the Americas. >>Awesome. Scott goes, I'd give, give us an overview of air slate and then your role. You will. >>You bet. Uh, so, uh, air slate, we have two offerings on the AWS marketplace or e-signature offering, which is sign now and then our no-code workflow automation, which we're really excited to bring on the marketplace. I lead our business development, uh, in channels organization for the company global partnership with AWS. Uh, we're very excited about it. >>Talk to me about some of the challenges that the tools that you just mentioned, what challenges are those solving for customers in any industry? So, >>Oh, the biggest challenges right now, obviously we are in a COVID environment and, and companies are trying to drive automation optimization, especially for remote workers to today. And so part of our solutions is obviously solving that in a very, very big way on a global basis as well. >>What are some of the key trends that you're seeing? We've seen so much flux on change in the last 20 months, but what are some of the key trends, especially as it relates to workforce productivity with those work from anywhere environments still persisting, >>It's still persisting. And I'd say the challenge is we're in a hybrid mode where you have both, you know, coming to the office, not coming to the office, but still very remote, just a last week's announcement of a new variant, for example, forcing everybody back out of the office, back into a remote environment. So flexibility, uh, around supporting that hybrid workforce is key. >>And of course here we are at a hybrid event. There are people here at a lot of them in person, but there's also a lot of content that's going on virtually for those folks that weren't quite comfortable coming back to an in-person event. But let's talk about savings about how AWS has been helping joint customers with air slate through the pandemic over the last 20 months as we saw this scatter. And now this work from this hybrid kind of work environment. Yeah. So, >>So I, Scott mentioned, right, that customers are really looking for business solutions. I did have some rapidly increased the last 20 months. We are really, we've been really working together to help both workers and businesses adapt to this remote environment. And customers are looking for simple and cost effective solutions anywhere from, you know, improving and automating their business workflows with e-signature solutions, all the way to complex processes with no code capabilities and air slate does a great job of providing these solutions for our customers. >>Some of the things from a business automation perspective that are critical these days is anything contactless talking about. E-signatures for example, it's, that's really became table stakes in the last 20 months. It's not talk to me about how you would from a biz-dev lens. Describe the partnership that air slate has with AWS. >>Yeah. For our company, it is the most strategic partnership that we have and it's all the way from our board level to our executive leadership team all the way through, throughout our organization end to end it's our most strategic partnership. >>And the things that we know and love about AWS that we've talked about with Sabina is their customer first focus, their customer obsession from a cultural perspective, is there alignment there with air Slate's culture, >>A hundred percent. And one of the cool things about the AWS partner program, which we're in a high echelon period, is the focus on the customer. The customer can reduce their EDP commit by buying solutions like ourselves on the AWS marketplace, as well as the AWS account executives are also paid and incented to sell our solution as well. So it's a one plus one equals three scenario. >>That's a good scenario. One plus one plus three. So be it, talk to me about the evolution. How long have you guys been partnering with air slate? And talk to me about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah. We've been working together for a few years now, but I would say the last 15 months, we've really accelerated that partnership again because of customer need and really built out high velocity Cosell motions. We made available to our slate, our partnership resources, both from commercial and public sector to scale the sales motion. As Scott mentioned, they're available in marketplace and they're also part of our ISV accelerate program, which means that our sales teams are incented to work with air slate, to close opportunities. And the key is all of this has led to 250% increase in customer wins year to date as compared to 2020. So that really speaks volumes with the partnership and the need that we are solving for our customers. >>Amazing, amazing growth, 250% in, in a year's period during a pandemic, that's massive, but we saw the acceleration of cloud adoption of digital transformation and this dependence on SAS and cloud for our business lives, our daily lives, our consumer lives. That was really absolutely critical. So Scott, from your perspective, what are some of the key aspects of the AWS relationship that you think really contribute to that success and that big metric that we just met? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, the metric is driven by the partner programs. When you have a customer that can buy on the marketplace, reduce their EDP commit. You've got account executives that are incented to resell us, but for us, we have really great leadership support around the globe. We've created joint KPIs of which we all have stacked hands on and said, here's the KPIs we want to deliver as a joint partnership. And we're delivering those, which is creating these results as well. Can you share >>Some of those KPIs even at a high level? >>Yes. A lot of them are what, uh, opportunities in our renewal base can we bring into the ado, uh, UWS, uh, ecosystem, if you will. Um, as well as in nearly every deal that we're in, we're asking, is this an AWS customer? Is it a Greenfield opportunity for AWS and bring in the associated teams together to close that opportunity, >>Scott, about some of the business outcomes, the benefits that your joint customers are achieving, leveraging the power of this partnership? >>Absolutely well there's enormous cost savings in the solutions that we bring to the table creates the optimization that we talked about, that they need. It's also driving that digital transformation, any company, any size in order to survive has to move digitally into this new space. And we believe that the two offerings we bring to the marketplace can solve that for them. >>That's one of the things that we saw, there's definitely some silver linings that have come out of the last 20 I'm losing count 22 months, something like that. And nothing like that, right. A time to value is absolutely critical. Let's talk about now go to market Sydney and going back over to you, how does AWS support partners like air slate, um, and taking the solutions to market? You talked about the marketplace, but talk to me about that from a strategic perspective. Yes. >>So one of the things we are very focused on is creating business automation solutions, especially for industry verticals across automotive, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, and air slate really has solutions that help address all of the horizontal use cases and the vertical use cases, which means then we can focus our demand generation activities and actually help both our direct sales team and also our channel partners really, really scale. So again, it's kudos to Scott and the air slate team in order to be able to really scale this partnership, but most importantly help our customers through these really tough times in the past 20 months. >>And it's, uh, uh, you mentioned that with the Omicron Darion variant being announced just in the last week, of course, these challenging times persist in this uncertainty persists to it's important to have partnerships, but I also imagine Scott from your, from your perspective, being able to show transparency to the customers that you're really one team, you know, with AWS, with your channel partners. Talk to me a little bit about that. What does customers actually see and feel >>While we're excited, especially around the ecosystem piece is for example, in the last few months, we've been able to activate 35 of AWS's largest channel partners, uh, due to the fact that we are in this hand, stacked KPI go to market together. And so the ecosystem of AWS, it's the trusted partner of almost every customer. And we are trying to advantage ourselves with that trusted relationship, bringing a set of solutions that helps drive the customer's outcome. >>You mentioned an important word there, Scott, that trust that is critical for every company that is becoming a data company. If they haven't become a data company by now, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about from a trust perspective, what that means for your customers to be able to adopt these solutions, automate their businesses, allow their folks to work from anywhere and have that trust and this solid partnership and technology. >>Well, and that's the benefit of the AWS partnership. When you think of security, reliability, our entire offering basis completely on the AWS infrastructure. So we bring that trust of you can trust that the technology that it's sitting on, you can trust that it's secure, that's reliable, and we're bringing a set of solutions that drives those customer outcomes, which is cost savings, optimizations, et cetera. That combination is a win-win out there. >>And that outcome spaced focus is critical. What are some of the things Scott that folks can learn at air Slate's booth this week at reinvent for those folks that are here in person and those folks that are attending virtually >>Great question. I love that question first and foremost, both offerings are on the AWS marketplace, but we're the only e-signature offering on the marketplace. And we're the only end to end workflow automation offering on the marketplace as well. So again, uh, important to note we're on that AWS marketplace, AEs from AWS can take advantage of that end. Customers can take advantage of that. Uh, and we take advantage of it just to the, our great go to market partnership. >>We're going to mark great, good to market partnership, but also I'm hearing a pretty significant differentiator being the only ones in the marketplace with those. Talk to me about how that, I mean, one, one more question. How does that facilitate like customer conversations? I imagine that's a huge differential >>Here's is a significant different traitor to us obviously, but again, it's the power of one. Plus one equals three in the partnership, we brought a set of solutions that the customer needs. We do it on the AWS marketplace and AWS infrastructure that we sit on that creates that trust factor that you mentioned. >>I have to add, right? That air slate and team, when they saw that they were the first right, they embraced that and they broke ground and they listed on marketplace and that's paying off for them. >>Very smart. Well guys, congratulations on your joint success. Your go to market strategy seems brilliant, and we look forward to hearing many more successful years from airside and AWS together. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure. You were great for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from AWS. Reinvent the leader in global alive tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live. Yes. Live in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Nicholson. David's great to co-host with you. How you doing >>Fantastic. Great to be here with >>You, Lisa, as always, we're going to have a great conversation. Next to Cuba actually is two lifestyles, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next decade and cloud innovation and Dave and I are pleased to welcome Scott Carter, the CTO of TSS to the program. Scott. Welcome. >>Thank you. It's really, really great to be here. Really >>This a little bit. Great to have you on the program. Talk to us a little bit about, about TCIs and let's talk about your kind of journey to the cloud and your relationship with AWS. >>Absolutely. Um, you know, TCIs, we've been around as a company for about 40 years. We specialize in, uh, payment products specifically on the issuing side. So card issuing, we've worked with some of the largest financial brands in the world and retailers as well. Uh, and, and a lot of, you know, what I always tell people is if you have a card in your wallet today, uh, you could probably pull it out. And at least one of those cards is something that we manage and service for our customers. And, and we, uh, do everything full lifecycle of those payment products for our customers around the globe >>On behalf of being a cardholder. Thank you. Talk to me a little bit about the AWS partnership here we are at re-invent. >>Yeah, well, we started a very special, uh, partnership with AWS about 18 months ago. We're about 18 months into the journey, uh, and really our goal and our vision is to build out a financial services cloud for all of our clients and our retailers and fintechs. Uh, we're really focused right now on migrating some of our key products to the AWS cloud environment. We built we've used us a variety of AWS technology by some on-premise and in the cloud environment to migrate our processing platforms and all of our customer servicing systems. So we're in the middle of that journey. Uh, we've had a lot of successes so far. AWS is helping us out. Our engineering team is working side by side with the AWS engineering team to produce what we believe is going to be the next generation of payments, especially on the card issuing side, >>Next gen that's, that's important as a consumers, consumer life business life. We have that expectation that we're going to be able to transact whatever we want anytime day or night, >>Absolutely choice is key, uh, virtual physical, no matter where you are, we want to be able to facilitate your payment and make sure you have everything you need to support you through the full card life cycles, the life cycle of your account. >>So you talk about those cards being in our wallets and handbags. I know there's one that's actually smoking. It's so hot from use in my co-hosts handbag, but, >>Uh, we appreciate that >>Talk, talk, talk about this journey from the perspective of someone who, um, I assume like me is not just out of college, right? You've working, you've been working in this business for a while. And so you're going through the transition from the world of what some will refer to as legacy it into the world of cloud. Uh, talk about the challenges there. How do you go after the low hanging fruit versus the high hanging fruit? How do you evaluate something from an ROI perspective? Talk about that. >>Yeah, and I, you know, uh, I get that quite a similar question a lot. I get, you know, people are, are interested in the journey and especially CTOs and CEOs who were starting journeys at their own. I get a chance to talk with a lot of banks and retailers about their individual like modernization and transformation journeys. Um, and you know, the, the basics are true about the journey. And I had somebody tell me years ago that it's, it's, it's psychology, it's not technology. Uh, you've really got to address the people's side of the equation. First, you've got to focus on training and upskilling, make sure that the team comes along on the journey. And then you've gotta be a really good recruiter. You've got to go out and get the talent, the skills you need to build a good foundation. You gotta have the right partners. >>You know, we have partners like PWC and, and, uh, AWS and others that are really helping us with the journey. So that part of it's really, really important. The key is, and I think for us, uh, we really started building our talent pool, uh, probably more than five years ago. And so we were able to bring in some skill sets in dev ops and some skill sets. And, you know, nowadays AI we'd do a lot with ML and AI skill sets. Uh, but we were able to build in a lot of cloud skills and start to build out our development environments first, very, very early on. That's what we did. And we used those development environments for our engineers to cut their teeth and really get comfortable in the cloud. Um, I remember probably about three years ago, we installed our first Kubernetes cluster. Um, and we did it with a small team. >>And then over time we really incented the team by allowing them to get more and more certifications and grow their skills. And we really built up a really large team around just our on-premise cloud first. And then later that helped us with the migration, the journey into the actual public cloud for those same services. Um, and we use that, that same team as there today, we really invest in our people. We think it's important to have a staff that's there. We insource our staff. We really believe in that. Um, that's super important, even though we have partners that we really value, we make sure that we've got a core group of people that are really passionate about the journey and about cloud. And so that >>You mentioned that, that kind of cultural aspect. Yeah. And you mentioned bringing in a team starting years ago with a specific focus. What about the transition of folks who have been it practitioners for maybe decades making that transition? How has, how has that worked out culturally? Have you adopted a policy where you're basically saying, look, if you have experience with this stuff, great, stay with it. Yeah. But we're hiring net new people for the new stuff. Is that the strategy or is it >>Look like I've seen some do that? I personally don't feel that that works because you need some subject matter experts. You need people who really know your products and your company and your solutions and your customers. You really need those people to come along the journey. So what we've done internally is we created, for example, a digital boot camps where our team members could sign up that could come in. We actually construct the boot boot camps on about a six week schedule. Uh, we do two week sprints. So we do three sprints. We, we get them sort of inculcated and agile from the very beginning, we have demos at the end of each sprint. So they're working in an agile way as they're going through their training course. And then of course we, that gives us a chance to identify people who are really high potential to move into some of our cloud teams and our dev ops teams. >>And so that's been really, really beneficial for us. And I would tell you that today we've got people that have a broad range of skills just because of that digital bootcamp. So they may have started their career doing assembler or COBOL or something like that. But now they've tacked on some dev ops and some cloud skills. Uh, we have some that know dynamo DB, and they also know DB too. And we like that. So they have a broad range and those people bring a lot of deep expertise that you're not going to necessarily get with somebody that you're bringing, you know, new, you know, sometimes straight out of college into your company. You've got to grow those people too, but you need the experience, people there to help develop them. >>No, we often talk about people, process and technology, and it's kind of a phrase that's thrown around right. At every event with every vendor. But I really admire the focus on the people, part that you're talking about there and how it's really essential to enable, to enable the people, how you started very strategically starting with the people in the focus and the training on-prem then making the decision that they've, they've got the foundation. Now we need to migrate to the cloud. I'm curious the why AWS, you have a lot of choice course here we are at reinvent. But talk to me about why AWS is that strategic partner. >>We've, we've looked at a number of different cloud platforms for our business. And in fact, uh, global payments is a large company. So TCIs is sort of the issuing part of that. And so we have really great relationships with GCP and other cloud platforms, even some Azure in certain pockets of the company for the issuing side of the business, we went through a thorough evaluation and we felt like the tools, the technology, the platforms, really the, the maturity of that platform. And then the scale, you know, scale matters in our business. And a lot of businesses, it matters, uh, you know, the locations of all of the, uh, uh, availability zones and the regions that was really important to us. We were able to align all of the different AWS regions to where our customer locations are. And that's becoming more and more important as we, you know, we try to be more flexible now about where we, uh, you know, deploy our products around the globe. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with has a point of presence in those markets and that we can do that very, very quickly. We can stand up a new environment when we need to. And so that's what that's been really beneficial that we made that choice with AWS. Um, you know, there's a lot of cloud platforms out out there there's a lot of choice, but we just felt like AWS was the best for us. >>AWS is also very, very, very customer focused, but they probably would say customer obsessed, really that customer flywheel that generates everything that we'd even heard this morning in the keynote culturally, is TCIs similar to AWS in that respect. And can you share a little bit about that? >>Very much. So our reputation as a business is based on the relationships that we built with our customers, and we're known for that in financial services, the TCIs brand and the way that we think about our customers and the way that we partner with them. Um, you know, we, when we taught with the AWS team, we, we try to explain, you know, our history is, you know, w we're kind of the cloud for our customers. So they have a number of products and services. We support those, we manage those products. We, we build on top of, of those products for them. And so we really understand that it's important, not only that you're building a platform, but that platform has got to be able to support all the different things that our customers do every day. And we want that to be broad. We don't want it to be narrow. It's not just focused in one area. If our customers come to us and they say, well, you know, I need to build a data and an analytics platform, or I need some really specific fraud capabilities. We want to be able to support that on demand with our customers. And that's really the journey that we've taken with AWS. AWS is enabling that for us. >>And on-demand is key. I think we've one of the things that's been in short supply during the last 22 months is patients, right? That's >>Right. Absolutely. >>So describe the role of a CTO in that process. What does that look like? Because this isn't, you're not making unilateral decisions here, obviously you're working with the team, but talk about the CTO's perspective as you make decisions about whether AWS is the right fit for a part of your environment or GCP or something else. >>Yeah. I think, you know, um, we, we have, uh, a long history of supporting our own solutions and supporting our systems. And we run some of the world's largest like authorizations platforms, which those are the platforms where when you go into the store and you swipe your card, you, you have to get a response back from us. Like we have to give you that and we have to give it, we have a really specific amount of time. We have to give that back to you. And so we really understand operations and support and how to scale, uh, applications and systems and, and, and how to build really, really reliable solutions. We really understand that part of the business. So whoever we partner with, and, and you asked about my decision to CTO, it was really a group decision. You know, I have to partner with our business team, I have to get their buy-in. Um, they have to support the decision, whatever we do, it's a big investment, we're making the move to the cloud. And so, um, but we have to make sure that we, we cover off the basis. They've gotta be able to at least whatever, whoever our partner is, they've got to be able to at least provide the operational support and the reliability that we're able to give our customers today. So it's just a spreadsheet that's right. Technical qualifier, >>And whoever has the most boxes checked wins. That's right. You're taking into consideration all of those cultural aspects and the goals of the business. That's right. So as a chief technology officer, it's not just about the technology, it's about the business >>That's right, right. So I have a very, very close relationship with the president of our business, Galen, Jowers, um, and, and we built a team and we have on, on the, uh, the actual modernization or transformation team, we have members that represent that from a business perspective there I report into, uh, directly into the business teams. And then we have, uh, people from my, from my side of the, of the company. And we work every single day together and we're driving this forward. So the important part of that is at some point, we, we go to our customers and we show them, Hey, for this particular product or service that we're offering, we're going to be moving that to cloud on this kind of a schedule. And we're there together as a unified front and a unified communication with our customer to explain that journey. And we think that's really important that we do it that way and not do it. You know, like I've seen some companies they'll segment it and sort of technology, or it goes off and they kind of do their own sort of cloud initiative to us that wouldn't work for our business. It's gotta be together and enjoy it with the business. >>You sound like a very much a transformational CTO to me versus a traditional CTO and working at a legacy company that's been around for 40 years. That's impressive that the company is that forward in thinking, first of all, about its people, but also about that business, it partnership. But that has to be in lock step. We talk about that all the time, but it's hard to facilitate that, but you really sound like you guys have done a phenomenal job with some key strategic foresight is not the word. Um, I liked, like Dave was saying, it's not a spreadsheet. It's a checklist of technology requirements that people element is absolutely. >>Absolutely. And you have to, you have to, you have to be all in together on it because you know that as you go on the journey, you're going to have some failure. You're going to experience some challenges. Your customers might not be happy with every decision you make. So you have to be in it together. You're going to have to make that commitment as a company. And that's what we decided early earlier on is that we were going to do that and it's worked out well for us. >>What are some of the things that are going to be happening next for TCIs as we hopefully round out the year 2021 and go into a much better 20, 22, >>We've got a, we've got some really big things on the horizon. One of the things that we're working on right now is, um, we've, since we've been at this for 18 months, we're starting to get to a point where we have certain solutions that are ready to go. We're ready. We're going to be able in 2022 to make some key announcements around some parts of our platform, they're going to be available in AWS as a, as an offering. So we're excited about that. A lot of our customer servicing and some of the things that we do outside of our core processing platform are already cloud native. We run them in a cloud environment on our premise and some of those services, we're going to be able to go ahead and launch into the AWS in 2022. So we're really excited about that. We're right now in the throws of building an onboarding team, that's going to be working with both our customers and with our internal teams to make that shift and start migrating those applications out to the environment. >>So big, big things underway there. We've got a couple of, uh, really key strategic relationships that we've built over the last 12 months or so, um, that are all in, on our cloud journey. And so we're going to be able to announce some of those, uh, pretty soon as some of our customers and prospects, uh, that really want to be on the journey with us. So we're pretty excited about that. And I don't want to spoil any surprises there, so we'll wait and let that come out with the, with the schedule. But yeah, we've got a lot of great things ahead and we're very, very excited for where we're going. >>Awesome, Scott, great stuff. I love how transformational you are, the focus that you guys have on the people, as well as the technologies and the processes. Exciting. Congratulations on your, on your 18 month journey. And we'll have to have you back on so we can hear some of those, those, uh, you know, little, uh, Easter eggs that you just dropped. >>I'd love to, I'd love to be back on. This has been great. All right. >>And how did you know I have a credit card in my wallet running a whole. >>I've been feeling bad about saying that the whole time. He's not going to go well when we're done here, >>Wherever in Vegas, we hope you've enjoyed this. Like for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in a live chat coverage.

>>Welcome everybody to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. We're here in the main hall. Yes, this is a physical event. It's a hybrid event, probably the industry's most important hybrid event in the year. We're super excited to be here. Of course, last year during the lockdown, reinvent was purely virtual. This year. They go in hybrid 20 plus thousand people. I hear the whisper numbers like 25, 20 7,000 hundreds of thousands of people online. The cubes here, two sets, we've got two remote studios, super excited. I'd like to introduce my co-host David Nicholson. He'll be here all week with us. Uh, John furrier is also here, Lisa Martin for the cubes wall-to-wall coverage. And we're so psyched to start off this session with Kenneth Chestnut. Who's the head of technology partnerships at Stripe. Stripe's an amazing company, Ken. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me, Dave and David. I greatly appreciate it. How about this? >>Right. Finally live event. We've done a few. We probably done four or five this year, but >>It's good to be back in person. It is. Yeah, absolutely. It's >>A Stripe. I mean, wow. Can a powering the new economy. Tell us a little bit more for those people who may not be familiar with Stripe. They probably use it without even knowing it when they sign it away. Yeah. So tell us about the >>Well, uh, Stripe was founded in 2010 by two brothers, Patrick and John Colson. And really it was from their first business and realizing how hard it was to actually charge for things on online. Um, you had to acquire a relationship with, uh, with a gateway provider to accept payments. You had to acquire a relationship with a, with a acquiring bank. Um, and you had to do that for each and every country that you wanted to service. Uh, so the same way that AWS reduced the barrier in terms of not having to procure, spend millions of dollars on storage, computers, networking, uh, effectively, what we we've done at Stripe is reduce the barriers around economic infrastructure, accepting payments online, >>Use that undifferentiated heavy lifting for payments. So describe Ken, what it was like kind of pre Stripe. You would literally have to install servers, get storage and put, put software on there, get a database. And then what if you had any money left over, you can actually do some business, but, but describe the sort of what the experience is like with Stripe. >>Sure. So, uh, the R R with, with Stripe, we literally talk about seven lines of code. So we, we allow any developer to, um, uh, provide a set of APIs for any developer to accept payments on online. And we do the undifferentiated heavy lifting in terms of accepting payments, accepting those payments, processing them revenue, reporting, and reconciliation, um, all ensuring compliance and security. Um, so it's like you said, uh, taking care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting are around accepting payments online in the enabling >>The enabler. There is the cloud. I mean, it was 2009, 2010. You guys were founded, the cloud was only like three years old. Right. And so you had to really sort of take a chance on leveraging the cloud or maybe early on you just installed it yourself and said, this isn't going to scale. So maybe tell us how you sort of leverage the cloud. >>Sure. Um, so we're a long time, uh, AWS, uh, customer and user, um, uh, back in the early days of, of Stripe in the early days of, of AWS. And we've just grown, uh, with, with AWS and the ecosystem. And it's interesting because a lot of, uh, a lot of the companies that have been built on, on AWS and grown to be successful, they're also Stripe customers as well. So they use Stripe for their economic infrastructure. >>We use Stripe, we run our company on AWS and we use Stripe. It it's true. The integration took like minutes. It was so simple. Hey it, test it, make sure it scales. But so what, what's the stack look like? What is there, is there such thing as a payment stack? What's the technology stuff? >>Sure. So we initially started with payments and being able to accept payments, uh, on online. Uh we've we brought in out our, our, our Stripe product portfolio now to effectively provide economic, uh, infrastructure for the internet. So that could be accepting payments. Uh, it could be setting up marketplaces. So companies like Lyft and Deliveroo, uh, use Stripe to power their marketplaces with their, with their drivers and, and, um, uh, delivers, um, uh, we provide, uh, a product called radar that, uh, that, um, prevents fraud, uh, around, around the globe. Um, based upon the data that we're seeing from our, from our customers, um, we have, uh, issuing and treasury so that companies can provide their users or their merchants with banking services. So loans, uh, issuing credit cards. So we we've really broadened out the product portfolio of Stripe to provide sort of economic infrastructure for the internet. So >>We talked about strike being in the cloud from an infrastructure perspective and how that enables certain things, but that in and of itself, doesn't change the dynamics around sovereignty and governance from country to country. Sure. Uh, I imagine that the global nature of AWS sort of dovetails with your strategy, but how, how do you address that? It's one thing to tell me in Northern California, you can process payments for me, but now globally go across 150 countries. How do you make that work? Yeah, >>Uh, absolutely. So we, we establish relationships, uh, within, within each company country that we operate in we're in about 47, uh, countries, uh, today, um, and that's rapidly expanding so that companies can, can process or accept payments and do, uh, financial transactions within, within, within those countries. So we're in 47 countries today. We, we accept a multitude of different payment, uh, different currencies, different payment types. So the U S is very, uh, credit card focused. But if you go to other, other parts of the globe, it could be a debit cards. It could be, um, uh, wallets, uh, uh, Google pay, Ali pay, uh, others. So really it's, uh, providing sort of the payment methods that users prefer in, in the different countries, uh, and meeting and meeting those users where, where they are. >>Are you out of the box compliant? What integration is required to do that? Uh, what about things like data sovereignty, is that taken care of by the cloud provider or you guys, and where, w w where does, where does AWS end and you guys pick up? Yes, >>We're, we're PCI compliant. Um, we, we leverage AWS as our, as our infrastructure, um, to grow, grow and scale. So, um, one of the things that we're, we're proud of is, uh, through, throughout 2020 and 2021, we've, we've had 11 nines of, uh, of, of, uh, or five nines of uptime, um, even through, um, uh, black Friday and cyber Monday. So providing AWS provides that, that infrastructure, which we built on top of to provide, uh, you know, five nines of uptime for our, for our users. >>You describe in more detail, Kenya, your ecosystem. I mean, you're responsible for tech partnerships. What does that ecosystem, how I paint a picture of it? >>Sure. So, um, uh, a number of users want to be able to use Stripe with, with their other, uh, it infrastructure and, and their business processes. So a customer may start, uh, with a salesperson may start with a quote or order, uh, in, in Salesforce, want to automate the invoicing and billing and payment of that with, with Stripe and then, uh, reconcile re revenue and an ERP solution like SAP or Oracle or NetSuite or into it, um, in the case of, of small, medium businesses. So really, um, what we're focused on is building out that, that ecosystem to allow, uh, um, our, our customers to streamline their business processes, um, and, and integrate Stripe into their existing it infrastructure and, and business processes. >>You mentioned a lot of different services, but broadly speaking, if I think about payments, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were one of the early, uh, sort of software companies, if I can call you that, um, platforms, whatever, but to really focus on a usage based pricing, but how do I, how do I engage with you? What's, what's the pricing model. Maybe you could describe that a little. >>Sure. So the pricing model is very, very transparent. Uh, it's on, it's on the website. So, uh, we, we take a, um, a percentage of each transaction. So literally you can, you can set up a, a Stripe account it's self-service, um, uh, we, we take a 2.9% plus 30 cents on every, uh, Tran transaction. Um, we don't, you don't start getting, um, uh, charged until, uh, you start accepting payments from your, from your customers or from your users. >>Um, can you give us a sense of the business scope, maybe any metrics you can share, customers, whatever. >>Sure. So there's a couple of things we can share publicly, just in terms of the size of the business. I think since, uh, since 2020, uh, more than 2 million businesses have launched on, on Stripe. Uh, so, uh, 2 million in, in, in, in 2020, um, we've, uh, uh, in the past 12 months, we've, uh, uh, uh, processed over 173 billion, uh, API calls. Uh, we do we process about, um, uh, hundreds of billions of, of, of, uh, payment volume, uh, every, every year. Um, if you look at sort of the macros of the business, the business is growing faster than the broader e-commerce space. So the amount of payment volume that we did in this past year is more than the entire industry did when Patrick and John founded the company. And in 2010, just to give you a, uh, an idea of the, the, the size of the business and sort of the pace of the business >>You're growing as e-commerce grows, but you're also stealing share from other sort of traditional payment systems. Okay. So that's a nice flywheel effect. And of course, Stripe's a private company they've raised well over a billion dollars of Peter teal, and it wasn't original founders, so are funders. So, you know, that's, he's talking scale. I want to go back to something you said about radar. Sure. So there's tech in your stack fraud detection, right. So some of >>That in machine learning, right. >>So, and so you guys, I mean, are you a technology company, are you a F a FinTech company? What are you? >>We're a software company. We provide software and we provide technology for developers, uh, to make online businesses and make, uh, uh, commerce, uh, more seamless and more frictionless >>Cloud-first API first. I mean, maybe describe how that is different maybe than, you know, the technical debt that's been built up over, you know, decades with traditional payment systems. >>Yes, it's very similar to the early, earlier days of AWS where a lot of tech forward companies leveraged Stripe, um, to, um, whether it be large enterprises to transform their businesses and move online, or, or, uh, uh, startups and developers that want to, uh, start a new business online and, and do that, uh, as quickly and seamlessly as possible. So it's, it's quite the gamut from large enterprises that are digitally transforming themselves companies like Marske and, and NASDAQ and others, as well as, uh, um, startups and developers that have started their businesses and born on born on Stripe. So >>When you talk about a startup, how small of an entity makes sense, uh, when you think of, if you look at, from an economic perspective, lowering the friction associated with transactions can lift up a large part of the world with sort of, you know, w with very, very small businesses. Is that something that this is all about? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, you know, two, 2 million business have sub launched on, on, on Stripe, uh, in, in the past year. And, and those businesses vary, but it could be literally a, a developer or a, uh, uh, a small, uh, SMB that wants to be able to accept payments on online. And it can just set up a Stripe account and start accepting payments. >>Yeah. So this is not a one hit wonder, um, lay out the vision for Stripe, right? I mean, you're, you're a platform, uh, you're, you're becoming a fundamental ingredient of the digital economy sounds pre pandemic. That was all a bunch of buzzwords, but today we all know how important that is, but what lay out the vision for us can, >>Yeah, it really are. The mission of Stripe is to grow the GDP of the internet. Um, and, and so what that means is, uh, more and more our, our, our basic belief is more and more and more businesses, uh, will, will, uh, go, go online, uh, with, uh, with the pandemic that that was, uh, accelerated. But I think that the general trend of businesses moving online, uh, will continue to accelerate, and we want to provide, uh, economic infrastructure to support those businesses. Um, you know, um, uh, uh, Andreessen talked about sort of software, software eating the world well fit. Our belief has FinTech is eating software. So in, in the fullness of time, I think the opportunity is for, uh, any, any company to be a financial services company. And we want to empower any company that wants to, or any user that wants to be a financial services company to, to provide the economic infrastructure for them to do so. >>And, and, you know, I mean your data company in that sense, you're moving bits around, you know, and those datas, I like to say data's eating software, you know, cause really you gotta have your data act together. Absolutely. And that's an evolving, I mean, you guys started to, to 2010, I would imagine your data strategy has evolved quite dramatically. Yeah. >>It's a great, it's a great call out Dave. Uh, one of our other products is a product called Sigma. So Sigma allows, uh, merchants or our customers to query payment and transaction data. So they want to be able to understand who, who, who are their customers, what are the payment methods that those customers prefer in different countries, in different regions? Um, so we're, we're starting to have some interesting use cases, um, working with, with AWS and other partners when you can start combining payment and transaction data in Stripe with other data to understand customer segmentation, customer 360 lifetime value of a customer customer acquisition costs, being able to close the books faster in your ERP, because you can apply that payment and transaction data to your general ledger to, to close the books faster at the end of the month or at the end of the, at the end of the year. So, uh, yeah, we we're, um, uh, as, as more and more companies are using Stripe, um, they want to be able to take advantage of that data and combine it with other, other sources of data to drive business. >>Yeah. You mentioned some of those key metrics that are, that are so important to companies today. I'll give you the last word re-invent this hall is packed, um, a little bit surprising, frankly, you know, but, uh, but exciting. Uh, what are you looking forward to this? >>Yeah, I'm just looking forward to meeting people in person again, it's, uh, it's great to be here and, and, you know, uh, uh, we have a strong relationship with AWS. We have lots of partners in, in, in common here, uh, as well, both consulting partners and technology partners. So really looking forward to meeting with partners and customers, and especially as we, as we plan for next year and, uh, launching our, our, our partner program beginning of next year. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, uh, groundwork and things to learn from, from here. As we, as we, we, we, we launch our, our, our partner business formula next >>I'll bet. Looking forward to that, Ken, thanks so much for coming to the cure. You so much. It was great to have a chat at the time. All right. And we want to thank our sponsors, uh, AWS, of course, and also AMD who's making the editorial segments that we bring you this week possible for Dave Nicholson. I'm Dave Volante. You're watching the cube at AWS reinvent 2021. Keep it right there, right back.

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. This year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two life studios, two remote studios, and over 100 guests. So stick around as we talk about the next 10 years of cloud innovation, I'm very excited to be joined by another Lisa from Zscaler. Lisa Lorenzen is here with me, the field CTO for the Americas. She's here to talk about ZScaler's mission to make doing business and navigating change a simpler, faster, and more productive experience. Lisa, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So let's talk about Zscaler in AWS. Talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing together. >>Yeah, definitely. Z scaler is a strategic security ISV partner with AWS. So we provide AWS customers with zero trust, secure remote access to AWS, and this can improve their security posture as well as their user experience with AWS. These scaler recently announced that we are the first and only cloud security service to achieve the FedRAMP PI authorization to operate. And that FedRAMP ZPA service is built on AWS gov cloud. ZScaler's also an AWS marketplace seller where our customers can purchase our zero trust exchange services as well as request or high value security assessments. We're excited about that as we're seeing a rapid increase in customer adoption as these scaler via the AWS marketplace, we vetted our software on AWS edge services that support emerging use cases, including 5g, IOT, and OT. So for example, Zscaler runs on wavelength, outposts, snowball and snowcones, and Zscaler has strategic partnerships with leading AWS service providers and system integration partners, including Verizon NTT, BT, Accenture, Deloitte, and many of the leading national and regional AWS consulting partners. >>Great summary there. So you mentioned something I want to get more understanding on this. It sounds like it's a differentiator for CSO scale. You said that you guys recently announced to the first and only cloud security service to achieve FedRAMP high. Uh, ATO built on AWS gov cloud. Talk to me about and what the significance of that is. >>I L five authorization to operate means that we are able to protect federal assets for the department of defense, as well as for the civilian agencies. It just extends the certification of our cloud by the government to ensure that we meet all of the requirements to protect that military side of the house, as well as the civilian side of the house. >>Got it super important there, let's talk about zero trust. It's a super hot topic. We've seen so many changes to the threat landscape during the pandemic. How are some of the ways that Z scaler and AWS are helping customers tackle this together? >>Well, I'd actually like to answer that by telling a little bit of a story. Um, Growmark is one of our Z scaler and AWS success stories when they had to send everyone home to work from home overnight, the quote that we had from is the users just went home and nothing changed. ZPA made work from anywhere, just work, and they were able to maintain complete business continuity. So even though their employers might have had poor internet service at home, or, you know, 80 challenging infrastructure, if you've got kids on your wifi bunch of kids in the neighborhood doing remote school, everyone's working from home, you don't have the reliability or the, maybe the bandwidth capacity that you would when you're sitting in an office. And Zscaler private access is a cloud delivered zero trust solution that leverages dynamic resilient, TLS encrypted tunnels to connect the user to an application rather than putting an end point on a network. >>And the reason that's important is it makes for a much more reliable and resilient service, even in environments that may not have the best connectivity I live out in the county. I really, some days think that there's a hamster on a wheel somewhere in my cable modem network, and I am a consumer of this, right. I connect to Z scaler over Zscaler private access, I'm protected by Zscaler internet access. And so I access our internal applications that are running in AWS as well this way. And it makes a huge difference. Growmark really started with an SAP migration to AWS, and this was long before the pandemic. So they started out looking for that better user experience and the zero trust capability. They were able to ensure that their SAP environment was dark to the internet, even though it was running in the cloud. And that put them in this position to leverage that zero trust service when the pandemic was upon us, >>That ability or that quote that you mentioned, it just worked was absolutely critical for all of us in every industry. And I'm sure a lot of folks who were trying to manage working from home, the spouses from home kids doing, you know, school online also felt like you with the hamster on the wheel, I'm sure their internet access, but being able to have that business continuity was table-stakes especially early on for most organizations. We saw a lot of digital transformation, a lot of acceleration of it in the last 20 months during the pandemic. Talk to me about how Z scaler helps customers from a digital transformation perspective and maybe what some of the things were that you saw in the last 20 months that have accelerated >>Absolutely. Um, another example, there would be Jefferson health, and really, as we saw during the pandemic, as you say, it accelerated a lot of the existing trends of mobility, but also migration to the cloud. And when you move applications to the cloud, honestly, it's a complex environment and maybe the controls and the risk landscape is not as well. Understood. So Z scaler also has another solution, which is our cloud security posture management. And this is really ensuring that your configuration on your environment, that those workloads run in is controlled, understood correctly, coordinated and configured. So as deference and health migrated to the cloud first model, they were able to leverage the scalers workload posture to measure and control that risk. Again, it's environment where the combination of AWS and Z scaler together gives them a flexible, resilient solution that they can be confident is correctly configured and thoroughly locked down. >>And that's critical for businesses in any organization, especially as quickly as how quickly things changed in the last 20 months or so I do wonder how your customer conversations have has changed as I introduced you as the field CTO of the America's proceeds killer. I'm sure you talk with a lot of customers. How has the security posture, um, zero trust? How has that risen up within the organizational chain? Is that something that the board is concerned about? >>My gosh, yes. And zero trust really has gone through the Gartner hype cycle. You've got the introduction, the peak of interest, the trough of despair, and then really rising back into what's actually feasible. Only zero trust has done that on a timeline of over a decade. When the term was first introduced, I was working with firewall VPN enact technology, and frankly, we didn't necessarily have the flexibility, the scalability, or the resilience to offer true zero trust. You can try to do that with network security controls, but when you're really protecting a user connecting to an application, you've got an abstraction layer mismatch. What we're seeing now is the reemergence of zero trust as a priority. And this was greatly accelerated honestly by the cybersecurity executive order that came out a few months ago from the Biden administration, which made zero trust a priority for the federal government and the public sector, but also raised visibility on zero trust for the private sector as well. >>When we're looking at zero trust as a way to perhaps ward off some of these high profile breaches and outages like the colonial pipeline, whole situation that was based on some legacy technology for remote access that was exploited and led to a breach that they had to take their entire infrastructure offline to mitigate. If we can look at more modern delivery mechanisms and more sophisticated controls for zero trust, that helps the board address a number of challenges ranging from obviously risk management, but also agility and cost reduction in an environment where more than ever belts are being tightened. New ways of delivering applications are being considered. But the ability to innovate is more important than ever. >>It is more important than ever the ability to innovate, but it really changing security landscape. I'm glad to hear that you're seeing, uh, this change as a result of the executive order that president Biden put down in the summer. That's good news. It sounds like there's some progress being made there, but we saw, you mentioned colonial pipeline. We saw a lot in the last 20, 22 months or so with ransomware becoming a household word, also becoming something that is a matter of when companies in any industry get hit and versus if it's no longer kind of that choice anymore. So talk to me about some of the threats and some of the stats that Z scaler has seen particularly in the last 20, 22 months. >>Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I'm just going to focus on the last 12 months, cause that's really where we've got some of the best data. We've seen a 500% increase in ransomware delivered over encrypted channels. And what that means is it's really critical to have scalable SSL inspection that can operate at wire speed without impeding the user experience or delay in critical projects, server communications, activities that need to happen without any introduced in any additional latency. So if you think about what that takes the Z scaler internet access solution is protecting users, outbound access in the same way that Zscaler private access protects access to private resources. So we're really seeing more and more organizations seeing that both of these services are necessary to deliver a comprehensive zero trust. You have to protect and control the outbound traffic to make sure that nothing good leaks out, nothing bad sneaks in. >>And at the same time, you have to protect and control the inbound traffic and inbound is, you know, a much broader definition with apps in the data center in the cloud these days. We're also seeing that 30% of malware is delivered through trusted applications like file shares or collaboration tools. So it's no longer enough to only inspect web traffic. Now you have to be able to really inspect all flavors of traffic when you're doing that outbound protection. So another good example where Z scaler and AWS work together here is in Amazon workspaces. And there's a huge trend towards desktop as a service, for example, and organizations are starting to recognize that they need to protect both the user experience and also the connectivity onward in Amazon workspaces, the same way that they would for a traditional end user device. So we see Z scaler running in the Amazon workspaces instances to protect that outbound traffic and control that inbound traffic as well. >>Another big area is the ransomware infections are not the problem. It's the result. So over half of the ransomware infections include data theft or leakage. And that is a double whammy because you get what's called double extortion where not only do you have to pay to unlock your machines, but you have to pay not to have that stolen data exposed to the rest of the world. So it's more important than ever to be able to break that kill chain as early as possible to ensure that the or the server traffic itself isn't exposed to the initial infection vector. If you do happen to get an infection vector that sneaks through, you need to be able to control the lateral movement so that it doesn't spread in your environment. And then if both of those controls fail, you also need the outbound protection such as CASBY and DLP to ensure that even if they get into the environment, they can't exfiltrate any of the data that they find as a result. We're seeing that the largest security risk today is lateral movement inside the corporate network. And that's one of the things that makes these ransomware double extortion situations, such a problem. >>Last question for you. And we've got about a minute left. I'm curious, you said over 50% of ransomware attacks are now double extortion. How do you guys help customers combat that? So >>We really deliver a solution that eliminates a lot of the attack surface and a lot of the risks. We have no inbound listener, unlike a traditional VPN. So the outbound only connections mean you don't have the external attack surface. You can write these granular policy controls to eliminate lateral movement. And because we integrate with customer's existing identity and access management, we can eliminate the credential exposure that can lead to a larger spread in a compromised environment. We also can eliminate the problem of unpatched gateways, which led to things like colonial pipeline or some of the other major breaches we've seen recently. And we can remove that single point of failure. So you can rely on dynamic optimized traffic distribution for all of these secure services. Basically, what we're trying to do is make it simpler and more secure at the same time, >>Simpler and more secure at the same time is what everyone needs regardless of industry. Lisa, thank you for joining me today, talking about Zscaler in AWS, zero trust the threat landscape that you're seeing, and also how's the scaler and AWS together can help customers mitigate those growing risks. We appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness. >>Thank you >>For Lisa Lorenzen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent stick around more great content coming up next.

(innovative music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. My name is Dave Vellante, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. Hybrid as in physical, not a lot of that going on this year. But we're here with the AWS ecosystem, AWS, and special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage of the event. We've got two live sets, two remote studios, more than a hundred guests on the program. We're going really deep, as we enter the next decade of Cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Danny Allan, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Veeam, and James Kirschner who's the Engineering Director for Amazon S3. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's kick things off. Veeam and AWS, you guys have been partnering for a long time. Danny, where's the focus at this point in time? What are customers telling you they want you to solve for? And then maybe James, you can weigh in on the problems that customers are facing, and the opportunities that they see ahead. But Danny, why don't you start us off? >> Sure. So we hear from our customers a lot that they certainly want the solutions that Veeam is bringing to market, in terms of data protection. But one of the things that we're hearing is they want to move to Cloud. And so there's a number of capabilities that they're asking us for help with. Things like S3, things like EC2, and RDS. And so over the last, I'll say four or five years, we've been doing more and more together with AWS in, I'll say, two big categories. One is, how do we help them send their data to the Cloud? And we've done that in a very significant way. We support obviously tiering data into S3, but not just S3. We support S3, and S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. And more importantly than ever, we do it with immutability because customers are asking for security. So a big category of what we're working on is making sure that we can store data and we can do it securely. Second big category that we get asked about is "Help us to protect the Cloud-Native Workloads." So they have workloads running in EC2 and RDS, and EFS, and EKS, and all these different services knowing Cloud-Native Data Protection. So we're very focused on solving those problems for our customers. >> You know, James, it's interesting. I was out at the 15th anniversary of S3 in Seattle, in September. I was talking to Mai-Lan. Remember we used to talk about gigabytes and terabytes, but things have changed quite dramatically, haven't they? What's your take on this topic? >> Well, they sure have. We've seen the exponential growth data worldwide and that's made managing backups more difficult than ever before. We're seeing traditional methods like tape libraries and secondary sites fall behind, and many organizations are moving more and more of their workloads to the Cloud. They're extending backup targets to the Cloud as well. AWS offers the most storage services, data transfer methods and networking options with unmatched durability, security and affordability. And customers who are moving their Veeam Backups to AWS, they get all those benefits with a cost-effective offsite storage platform. Providing physical separation from on-premises primary data with pay-as-you-go economics, no upfront fees or capital investments, and near zero overhead to manage. AWS and APM partners like Veeam are helping to build secure, efficient, cost-effective backup, and restore solutions using the products you know and trust with the scale and reliability of the AWS Cloud. >> So thank you for that. Danny, I remember I was way back in the old days, it was a VeeamON physical event. And I remember kicking around and seeing this company called Kasten. And I was really interested in like, "You protect the containers, aren't they ephemeral?" And we started to sort of chit-chat about how that's going to change and what their vision was. Well, back in 2020, you purchased Kasten, you formed the Veeam KBU- the Kubernetes Business Unit. What was the rationale behind that acquisition? And then James, I'm going to get you to talk a little bit about modern apps. But Danny, start with the rationale behind the Kasten acquisition. >> Well, one of the things that we certainly believe is that the next generation of infrastructure is going to be based on containers, and there's a whole number of reasons for that. Things like scalability and portability. And there's a number of significant value-adds. So back in October of last year in 2020, as you mentioned, we acquired Kasten. And since that time we've been working through Kasten and from Veeam to add more capabilities and services around AWS. For example, we supported the Bottlerocket launch they just did and actually EKS anywhere. And so we're very focused on making sure that our customers can protect their data no matter whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's on-premises in a data center, or if it's running up in the Cloud in EC2. We give this consistent data management experience and including, of course, the next generation of infrastructure that we believe will be based on containers. >> Yeah. You know, James, I've always noted to our audience that, "Hey AWS, they provide rich set of primitives and API's that ISV's like Veeam can take advantage of it." But I wonder if you could talk about your perspective, maybe what you're seeing in the ecosystem, maybe comment on what Veeam's doing. Specifically containers, app modernization in the Cloud, the evolution of S3 to support all these trends. >> Yeah. Well, it's been great to see Veeam expands for more and more AWS services to help joint customers protect their data. Especially since Veeam stores their data in Amazon S3 storage classes. And over the last 15 years, S3 has helped companies around the world optimize their work, so I'd be happy to share some insights into that with you today. When you think about S3 well, you can find virtually every use case across all industries running on S3. That ranges from backup, to (indistinct) data, to machine learning models, the list goes on and on. And one of the reasons is because S3 provides industry leading scalability, availability, durability, security, and performance. Those are characteristics customers want. To give you some examples, S3 stores exabytes the data across millions of hard drives, trillions of objects around the world and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second. S3 can process in a single region over 60 terabytes a second. So in summary, it's a very powerful storage offering. >> Yeah, indeed. So you guys always talking about, you know, working backwards, the customer centricity. I think frankly that AWS sort of change the culture of the entire industry. So, let's talk about customers. Danny do you have an example of a joint customer? Maybe how you're partnering with AWS to try to address some of the challenges in data protection. What are customers is seeing today? >> Well, we're certainly seeing that migration towards the Cloud as James alluded today. And actually, if we're talking about Kubernetes, actually there's a customer that I know of right now, Leidos. They're a fortune 500 Information Technology Company. They deal in the engineering and technology services space, and focus on highly regulated industry. Things like defense and intelligence in the civil space. And healthcare in these very regulated industries. Anyway, they decided to make a big investment in continuous integration, continuous development. There's a segment of the industry called portable DevSecOps, and they wanted to build infrastructure as code that they could deploy services, not in days or weeks or months, but they literally wanted to deploy their services in hours. And so they came to us, and with Kasten K10 actually around Kubernetes, they created a service that could enable them to do that. So they could be fully compliant, and they could deliver the services in, like I say, hours, not days or months. And they did that all while delivering the same security that they need in a cost-effective way. So it's been a great partnership, and that's just one example. We see these all the time, customers who want to combine the power of Kubernetes with the scale of the Cloud from AWS, with the data protection that comes from Veeam. >> Yes, so James, you know at AWS you don't get dinner if you don't have a customer example. So maybe you could share one with us. >> Yeah. We do love working backwards from customers and Danny, I loved hearing that story. One customer leveraging Veeam and AWS is Maritz. Maritz provides business performance solutions that connect people to results, ensuring brands deliver on their customer promises and drive growth. Recently Maritz moved over a thousand VM's and petabytes of data into AWS, using Veeam. Veeam Backup for AWS enables Maritz to protect their Amazon EC2 instances with the backup of the data in the Amazon S3 for highly available, cost-effective, long-term storage. >> You know, one of the hallmarks of Cloud is strong ecosystem. I see a lot of companies doing sort of their own version of Cloud. I always ask "What's the partner ecosystem look like?" Because that is a fundamental requirement, in my view anyway, and attribute. And so, a big part of that, Danny, is channel partners. And you have a 100 percent channel model. And I wonder if we could talk about your strategy in that regard. Why is it important to be all channel? How to consulting partners fit into the strategy? And then James, I'm going to ask you what's the fit with the AWS ecosystem. But Danny, let's start with you. >> Sure, so one of the things that we've learned, we're 15 years old as well, actually. I think we're about two months older, or younger I should say than AWS. I think their birthday was in August, ours was in October. But over that 15 years, we've learned that our customers enjoy the services, and support, and expertise that comes from the channel. And so we've always been a 100 percent channel company. And so one of the things that we've done with AWS is to make sure that our customers can purchase both how and when they want through the AWS marketplace. They have a program called Consulting Partners Private Agreements, or CPPO, I think is what it's known as. And that allows our customers to consume through the channel, but with the terms and bill that they associate with AWS. And so it's a new route-to-market for us, but we continue to partner with AWS in the channel programs as well. >> Yeah. The marketplace is really impressive. James, I wonder if you could maybe add in a little bit. >> Yeah. I think Danny said it well, AWS marketplace is a sales channel for ISV's and consulting partners. It lets them sell their solutions to AWS customers. And we focus on making it really easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage software solutions, including software as a service in just a matter of minutes. >> Danny, you mentioned you're 15 years old. The first time I mean, the name Veeam. The brilliance of tying it to virtualization and VMware. I was at a VMUG when I first met you guys and saw your ascendancy tied to virtualization. And now you're obviously leaning heavily into the Cloud. You and I have talked a lot about the difference between just wrapping your stack in a container and hosting it in the Cloud versus actually taking advantage of Cloud-Native Services to drive further innovation. So my question to you is, where does Veeam fit on that spectrum, and specifically what Cloud-Native Services are you leveraging on AWS? And maybe what have been some outcomes of those efforts, if in fact that's what you're doing? And then James, I have a follow-up for you. >> Sure. So the, the outcomes clearly are just more success, more scale, more security. All the things that James is alluding to, that's true for Veeam it's true for our customers. And so if you look at the Cloud-Native capabilities that we protect today, certainly it began with EC2. So we run things in the Cloud in EC2, and we wanted to protect that. But we've gone well beyond that today, we protect RDS, we protect EFS- Elastic File Services. We talked about EKS- Elastic Kubernetes Services, ECS. So there's a number of these different services that we protect, and we're going to continue to expand on that. But the interesting thing is in all of these, Dave, when we do data protection, we're sending it to S3, and we're doing all of that management, and tiering, and security that our customers know and love and expect from Veeam. And so you'll continue to see these types of capabilities coming from Veeam as we go forward. >> Thank you for that. So James, as we know S3- very first service offered in 2006 on the AWS' Cloud. As I said, theCUBE was out in Seattle, September. It was a great, you know, a little semi-hybrid event. But so over the decade and a half, you really expanded the offerings quite dramatically. Including a number of, you got on-premise services things, like Outposts. You got other services with "Wintery" names. How have you seen partners take advantage of those services? Is there anything you can highlight maybe that Veeam is doing that's notable? What can you share? >> Yeah, I think you're right to call out that growth. We have a very broad and rich set of features and services, and we keep growing that. Almost every day there's a new release coming out, so it can be hard to keep up with. And Veeam has really been listening and innovating to support our joint customers. Like Danny called out a number of the ways in which they've expanded their support. Within Amazon S3, I want to call out their support for our infrequent access, infrequent access One-Zone, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive Storage Classes. And they also support other AWS storage services like AWS Outposts, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball Edge, and the Cold-themed storage offerings. So absolutely a broad set of support there. >> Yeah. There's those, winter is coming. Okay, great guys, we're going to leave it there. Danny, James, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really good to see you guys. >> Good to see you as well, thank you. >> All right >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of 2021 AWS re:Invent, keep it right there for more action on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage, right back. (uplifting music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to theCUBE's, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, and over 100 guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. We're very excited to be welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Peter McKay, the CEO of Snyk. He's set to talk about reinventing application security with Snyk. Peter, welcome back to the program. >> It's great to be back, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> Great to talk to you. So, my goodness, Snyk has had an incredible year, last year, this year, I was just looking at your Series F funding raised over 600 million in the month of September alone. Your valuation is, I think I saw over 9.6 billion, which is nearly doubled. This year-- >> Don't rush at 8.6, but yes, it was double the last time. Yeah, it's been been a crazy 2021, that's for sure. >> So, talk to me about some of that before we get into what you guys are doing with AWS. Let's talk about that, we talked about that funding. What are some of the strategic areas of investment? I know you've done a recent acquisition cloud skiff, but where are you really going to be focusing the Series F funding? >> Yeah, we've been very aggressive in building out our platform. We have a great vision for where we see developer security evolving and we want to get there fast. A lot of our customers and developers are kind of pushing us in that direction of really consolidating a platform. And so, to get there quickly, we do it organically building it ourselves, and we do it in inorganically where we can see other companies accelerate that roadmap. And so, it's this combination of very aggressive, organic expansion of both the breadth of our products, but also the depth, like adding more to our platform, but also the inorganic, because a lot of companies who have team and technologies that are very complimentary to what we're doing and allows us to continue to consolidate what is a very fragmented market in and around developers security. And so, we're going to continue to use the resources to accelerate that roadmap. The second part of it is, we are a little bit different than some companies where they kind of follow where the decision headquarters are of companies for us, we follow developers. And so, around the globe, Multinational Corporations have developers in the Philippines, in Argentina and all around the world and we needed to be there. And so, expanding our community, expanding our customer success organization around the world is critical for us. And so, that's something part of our kind of use of proceeds is the expansion of our go-to-market as well. >> Peter, modern development has changed. Next thing modern development has changed. So, traditional AppSec doesn't apply anymore. A new approach is needed. Talk to me about why Snyk believes that and what that new approach is. >> Yeah, you just go back to for 30 years, security was owned by application security teams and that's when it was kind of this waterfall application development model where they develop an app and every three, six, nine months, and then the security teams would audit that application and kind of send all the feedback, hear all the issues, go fix it, developers, and it was incredibly inefficient. And then you throw on top of this digital transformation and companies moving incredibly fast in building new applications. This agile development motion and all the incredible tools that allow developers to develop really fast. But then you get this very slow antiquated way of kind of testing it at the very end, right before you move the applications in production. So, it just didn't scale. And so, the concept is just way too late in the process. You really need to move security testing into that developer environment from the IDE, the CI/CD all the way through. So, when you're developing along the way, you're fixing the issues well ahead of time. And that's where modern development organizations are all this concept of shift left and building it in, into that's really the driver is moving security earlier and earlier in the software development life cycle. >> And that's key, especially you talked about the acceleration of digital transformation, but we've also seen the acceleration of the threat landscape in the last 20 months. There's been significant changes. The perimeter is so fragmented, it's expanding, the threat landscape goes all the way into outer space to low earth orbit these days. Talk to me about that as kind of a facilitator or an accelerator of what Snyk is doing to really focus on shifting security left with those developers. >> Yeah, I think people are kind of waking up to the fact that up to this point, they've spent billions and billions of dollars on endpoint securities and runtime security and all the things that are kind of in production. And they're realizing that, okay, well, why are we still vulnerable? Why are we still have these issues? And I think it's the realization that they're waiting too long to fix it. And a lot of the issues are happening. They're either new issues with moving to the cloud or they're issues that happen well before it got into production. And so, this realization that we've got to go earlier and earlier and fix these issues well before we go into production and don't wait till the very end. So, I think that's really driving the market to this shift lab. >> And you guys have actually kind of really pivoted your go-to-market model around that developers don't try and buy software the way that IT and security teams do. Talk to me about Snyk's GTM. >> Yeah, it's very unique in that it's really marrying this model developer security approach with the way developers want to buy. So, we start with our community and we do free content and tools all around building awareness for the developer community. We have, all of our products are free, so developers can try before they buy. And if you're truly a developer solution, you offer it free and let them use it. And then when they want to collaborate and they want to integrate and automate that moves from free to paid. So, it's very much of this bottoms up motion that really allowed developers to try MI. That's a big, big driver for our business, inbound motion drives 70% of our pipeline from them coming to us from this community. And then we come in kind of top down once they kind of get into different places. And we go in through those security organizations, which are trying to shift labs, trying to move security earlier, earlier and we work together with the security organizations to help move that to the developer world. So, you've got this bottoms up, developer adoption, viral adoption of Snyk within those organizations. Now, with the top-down kind of, and we become this bridge between the developer teams in engineering, and the security teams that are all trying to move in the same direction. And so, that's kind of how this market is evolved. And we're kind of that bridge for both those organizations. >> I was going to ask you about that, that bridge is critical, but also that bridge is a cultural change. I'm curious, how do you see organizations? It sounds like obviously you're, what over, I think, six, 700 customers now, a couple of million developers using the technology, so-- >> 1300 customers today >> 1300, okay. Wow! You have had a big year. 1300 customers, millions of developers using the technology. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys have figured out how to facilitate that cultural shift and shift security left, but also bridge between the IT and the security folks which have tended to be on sort of opposite sides of the spectrum. >> Yeah, I think the realization, I think a lot of people are very early on and I was... We'd been in the software industry for 25 years. Even nobody ever thought developers would care about security. Like there's no way developers really care about security. And really, if you think about, if you asked the developer, would you rather develop a secure app or an insecure app? If all things were equal, of course, they'd want it to be secure, but it needs to be easy. It needs to be like, don't slow me down, whatever you do, don't slow me down. And so, we have this, "Hey, it's all about speed of development, speeds, speed, speed." So, for us, we need to make it embedded, like integrated completely into that software development life cycle. So, developers don't have to be security experts, developers don't have to get out of their flow to do it, learn a different piece of software to figure out it's all embedded into that process. So, you can be fast and you can be agile, but you can also be secure at the same time. And so, part of that is embedding education and other things in there to learn that expansion of getting in the door and kind of building that momentum within these development communities all around the world. And so, I think we help all our customers with that kind of developer adoption and working together with the security teams and engineering teams on how we roll that out around best practices. And in some of the things we've learned over the six and a half years of doing this. >> It sounds very strategic and methodical and a great approach that is obviously quite successful. We talked about the growth trajectory now, 1300 customers. Let's talk about what you guys are doing with AWS. Here we are at reinvent this year. Talk to me about this Snyk, AWS partnership. >> Yeah, it's been really gaining momentum over the past year and a half, almost two years now. AWS, a lot of the workloads, one of the reasons, a lot of the applications don't go to the cloud is because of security issues and moving workloads to the cloud. Also developing applications in the cloud, security is a critical part of it. So, AWS is obviously infrastructure, but they also need solutions that allow them to make sure that those companies that are developing on AWS are secure. And so, we've integrated our Intel database into AWS inspector. We have a lot of offerings, very specific AWS offerings that our mutual customers can leverage. And we work very collaboratively with AWS in not only our technical roadmap with them, but also our go-to-market side, which is very much aligned. And it's continuing, we kind of, I say, we're in the second inning of that game. We got a lot more coming. >> Okay, but well aligned. Give me a customer example, if you will, have joined AWS Snyk customer that you've really helped with this transition, shifting security left they're building apps in the AWS cloud very successfully and securely. >> Yeah, I'd well, almost every company has some relationship with size with AWS. And so, for us, it's one of the first questions we ask anybody coming in is what's your relationship with one of the cloud vendors? And that inevitably it'll be, yeah, we have a relationship with AWS. And so, we talk about our roadmap that we have with AWS. They can buy our software through the AWS marketplace. You could leverage kind of your EDPs that you have with AWS to kind of build that scale. So, we're very technically aligned with the AWS platform. And so, you look at financial services, we've done a fair amount of financial services, insurance companies that are all kind of moving more workloads to AWS. Some of them have been our customers before, some of them separate from AWS, and now they're kind of, "Hey, can I move all my apps over and leveraged, Snyk in that process?" So, it's now, a good part of our go-to-market motion is coming through AWS marketplace as well. So, it's been a very successful partnership on both parties. >> A lot of momentum there, speaking of momentum, we talked about the funding raise this year alone, tremendous momentum going on for the company. What are some of the things that we can expect to see from Snyk in calendar year 22? >> Yeah, well, aggressive roadmap. I mean, that's still, we see, we have four modules today. We started with one and we added to, that was open to a security. We added a container security, infrastructure as code security. Then we added code security or a stats solution. We see modules five, six, seven coming out. we made an acquisition of drift technology, adding into kind of adding some more depth. So, you're going to see just a lot more continued aggressiveness on our side, as we scale both our engineering, organically and inorganically, but also, the go-to-market, now we're almost in all the major countries around the world and we're going to continue to invest in building that out and going where the developers are, the 28 million developers around the world. Our goal is to reach every one of them as fast as we possibly can with our free or paid, or whatever way is to get to 28 million developers as fast as we can. >> So, for those developers watching, where do you want to point them to go to, to start their free trial. >> Just go right to our website, snyk.io and you can get all of our products free, you can chat, schedule demos, you can do everything very easily if not. And it's very self-service so, if you don't want to talk to anybody, you don't have to talk to anybody, but if you do, we have plenty of people you can talk to. That's our world, frictionless motion. >> Frictionless and contactless at the same time, Peter, congratulations on the growth and momentum of the company. What you're doing, the evolution of the partnership with AWS and that lofty goal to reach 28 million developers. Am looking forward to our next conversation to see where you are on that progress. >> Same thing, same here, Lisa, thank you for your time. >> Oh, likewise. For Peter McKay, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Stick around, more great content coming up next. (soft upbeat music)

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)