 Live from London, England. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello and welcome to the AWS Summit Live from London's Excel Center. I'm Susanna Streeter and this is my co-host on theCUBE, Dave Vellante. And there are lots of breakout sessions taking place right across this venue. One of them all about bringing to life the AWS Marketplace and really helping people, companies understand how to make that journey to the cloud. And my two guests here right now have been at that session trying to communicate that to the many delegates who are there. Ian Mobley, who's from Computer Center. He is the public cloud lead for the UK and Ireland and Garth Forth who's a director of AWS Marketplace. Thank you very much for joining us. Happy to be here. Come on through. Now there are real complexities on there. Just helping people navigate their way through. Tell me a little bit more about how Marketplace has evolved because it's been rapid, hasn't it? It has been rapid. We launched as an initial service in 2012. So we just had our seventh birthday last year. We started with pretty modest aspirations and it was all about helping developers take advantage of EC2 and be able to take advantage of AWS services available at the time. So it was a catalog about 250 mostly open source applications that developers could sort of find, explore, discover and provision straight from the EC2 console where they were doing their work. Over time we've added support for a lot of new product types. So we support SaaS applications. Re-invent last year, we announced support for Docker in being able to take Docker images and deploy those into SageMaker. We were talking about that earlier. Also support for containers. And so as customers are moving to more of a serverless type architecture, we have a ready-made set of container images that they can deploy directly into ECS, EKS or Fargate. I'd say one of the more interesting sort of inflection point in our evolution was when people started buying real stuff for real money. Because I think when we got started serving the developers, I kind of think of that as kind of a Lamborghini kind of crowd. That's a customer by the way. But Lamborghini guys just, you know, developers want to go as fast as they possibly can. They don't really care for speed limits. You know, they just want to get the job done as quick as they can. We had an example, for example, our first million dollar transaction. We were surprised to see it. We woke up one Monday and we saw a million dollar transaction. So I told my finance team not to get too excited. I went to the customer and I said, was this a mistake or did you intend to do that? And the developer team said, no, that was the best software sale ever because I didn't have to talk to anybody. Good to make money while you're asleep, isn't it? Absolutely. But they were able to basically, they didn't have to go through a lengthy process of procurement and legal reviews and everything else. They literally were able to subscribe to the product and get it deployed within seconds. And they estimated that it took about three months off of their engineering cycle, was being able to go that fast. But the interesting thing on million dollar transactions is there's a lot of other people that care about that. So I got a letter about eight weeks later from their corporate headquarters in New York that said that development team was not really authorized to spend that much money on that product. And so that is what I call the Volvo crowd. And there are big parts of our customer that are very, very interested in safety and airbags and collision avoidance and all that other fun stuff. And so what Marketplace has been really innovating on in the last couple of years is finding a way to modernize how companies buy and deploy software in the cloud, do that at speed, but do it in a way that's compliant with whatever regulation or governance that they need. So do it at speed, but variable speed, it says. Variable speed. And just a lot of our customers in the public sector or in healthcare or financial services, they're heavily regulated on their own and they have a certain way they need to do things. And so we've been building features like the Private Marketplace, which we just launched, actually allows the customer to go in and reason over our catalog. We have about 4,800 listings in our catalog, 1,400 different vendors, and they can decide on their own which one of those are approved for use or not. Because it's very hard to meet the procurement demands of various different public sector organizations, isn't it? Because they're so diverse. They are very diverse, but that's also one of the reasons, like I'm excited to have Ian here. We've been working for the last couple of years to figure out how we can more effectively work with partners to sort of serve our joint customers. So Ian, what's your story? How do you fit? What's, yeah, it's a good question. So I think Computer Center entered into the fray with AWS sort of circa re-invent 2017. So just at the time where Marketplace was launching to partners, I guess, in the mainstream. And we looked at the offering in partnership with these guys and what it would mean to our customers. And that was kind of, we're very, customer letters and organization, if you know anything about us. Our customers were asking for different ways to potentially buy traditional software packages as they moved into the AWS cloud. And they were moving at scale and that velocity that we talk about. And it was about, well, is this a product or a mechanism that can help them streamline? Can they simplify on the way? Can they cut some of that complexity on that journey? We see that very much as our role to help them achieve that. This seemed like a really good mechanism. So we fast forward through 2018. We do some great deals together, those sort of that we talk about. And we see that this is becoming more mainstream for customers as they're landing in AWS in the cloud and thinking about different ways, different software titles. Challenging, do we need to do things as normal or should we do things a different way? What about this dynamic that you were just talking about that Garth was just saying about the procurement folk, the Volvo crowd versus the Lamborghini crowd. So what do you, you've developed a workflow, approval process, how does that work? Yeah, well, I'll kind of unpack it a little bit. The private marketplace allows, and every customer is a little bit different. Sometimes it's the chief security officer who kind of makes the final decision. Sometimes it's procurement. Sometimes the legal team has specific constraints on what they want to approve and not. I really haven't found two customers that are identical in terms of how their workflow works. Could be an LOB manager, could be a CFO. I mean, you're right. So we effectively, we did some surgery on the underlying service to create a new IAM role. And so if Ian is the administrator for his organization, regardless of role, he's given permission to go approve and disapprove products. And some customers are kind of in a whitelist mode, which is basically you can use only the things that I've whitelisted. So everything's forbidden until I've explicitly approved it. Other companies, like a lot of smaller companies that may not have that much process over more of a blacklist mode, we're sort of like everything in the marketplace is fair game, except the ones I've specifically said not to use. And so we just created this really flexible infrastructure that lets customers customize the marketplace to their needs. So you give superpowers to some admin. Yep. And then the whitelist blacklist, depending on what it is, and then it becomes frictionless. It becomes frictionless. And then the user experience, the customer can actually add their own logo, they can put their own language around kind of how they want to sort of represent that to the developers. And then every developer in their organization then sees that experience. And they can see what's been approved and what hasn't. Oh, okay. So you sort of private label through the channel. Yeah. So that I, as a consumer, see whatever brand that your customer wants me to see. Exactly. And then we've also got a facility because with over 4,800 listings in the marketplace, 1,400 different vendors, nobody's got time to go reason over every single item. And we're adding hundreds every year. So that keeps growing. And so we've got a facility. If a developer has a specific technology that they really require, we've got a little simple workflow. So a developer can say, I need this widget to build this thing. And then we kick it off to the admin who can improve our discipline. And as we were talking about for our video class, if you've got to have precise understanding of the pricing so that there's 100% clarity. And then once you have that, then you can split the pie however it is. Then you can split up. And we did, like one of the foundational technologies that we launched in 2017 was this notion of a private offer. And so if I want to make a private offer to Ian at a price that he and I have negotiated and legal terms that he and I have agreed to, I can do that through Marketplace. And then the way that would work in a large organization is once somebody subscribes once to that price, everybody in the organization that uses that product is using it at the agreed price. And then we extended that to enable channel partners now. So for the ISVs that Ian and Computer Center works with now, he's now able to go create private offers for his customers. So you've essentially created a two-sided marketplace that you can affect. I think the interface between the two organizations is really important. It becomes that sort of tripartite with the ISV, putting the customer right at the center. I think that's the synergies that we see in two organizations. So do you really see what your input has been then with the items that are listed as well? Do you get that? For like selection? Yeah. Yeah, like Ian was saying, it's pretty customer focused. We work with customers. We have a set of people around the world that do what we call category management. And their job is to work with customers and make sure that we're stocking the right inventory on the shelves, so to speak. So we get that input like every day. And then that helps you develop new product. New content, new products. And say head of the competition. We try to think more about like, let's focus on our customers. We don't spend a lot of time chasing tail lights, but we're very customer obsessed. One of the things that always interested me about the marketplace is it's so complex in terms of regions, tax laws, pricing considerations, on and on and on. So many permutations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've succeeded in just essentially making that all transparent and what's behind that? Well, I think Amazon and AWS, like we operate within the legal frameworks in all the countries where we operate in. So we have our own requirements in terms of how we remit and collect tax in countries compliant with local laws, right? So we had to do that just to operate AWS, right? We were able to leverage a lot of the same plumbing we had to build for ourselves and effectively make that available to our ISVs. So we have like, there's a small ISV, actually they've grown to be quite big, but here in the UK is a company called Matillion who uses us exclusively as their cloud channel. And we take them, AWS is available in 18 regions marketplace. And then everywhere we need to, we will remit and collect tax on his behalf and then give him reports that he can share with his auditor to ensure compliance with local laws. And so we do a lot of that stuff. He's a small firm, you know, and for us to be able to sort of like extract and abstract all that complexity from him and just give him a nice monthly report that shows him all the taxes we pay on his behalf, that's a big service for ISVs. So how does it transform your business? You just said that. So I say it's transforming rather than transform because it's a continuum thing all the time. I think it's absolutely that different way of procurement is firstly, the thing that customers are asking for. So it's just one cog in the wheel for AWS that the customer's picking up on. I think the point that GARF is very well glossing over is that between us we're doing the heavy lifting on behalf of the customer. I think that's to Dave's point. I think that's the whole point here. We've all got a part to play in the ecosystem and it's all about that customer experience that's most important. I think what we're seeing is repeat customers come back actually, that's the biggest, if I look at from the start of 2018 to the end, it was the repeat visits. So you get the one million pound or dollar deal. It's a customer coming back twice or three times in the year to do the same thing again. But have any been put off by this new approach? I haven't seen that. So genuine, it hasn't appeared so far. So there's some education of course that has to happen because it's different. It's not the norm. If you think about enterprise customers, they've been buying in a particular mode for 20 or 30 years or longer as we joke about. So this is just an education process that let them know what and how. And then once they're on the bandwagon, it kind of becomes that streamline process. Yeah, and I'd add, I'd build on top of Ian's point, like you can kind of think about the way customers thought about procuring infrastructure before AWS existed, like back in the way back of 2005. Like buying hardware and storage and networking gear was crazy hard and very difficult and long and laborious and you were racking and stacking and everything else. And then AWS comes along with services like S3 and EC2, you know, and it makes provisioning access to hardware. It's seconds, you know, not months of procurement. And in a way, we're kind of, software is now catching up. And in a way, what marketplace is trying to do is to revolutionize the way people acquire software for the cloud in the same way that AWS did infrastructure. Well, and you're creating to me a consumer dynamic, not unlike Amazon retail, where there's trust, simplicity, comfort levels, and you know, you even don't tell Jeff this, but I'll pay a little bit more from Amazon website because I trust it, you know, but not too much, right? And you guys have to stay price competitive. Absolutely. And so, but that to me is that it's that consumer like experience that you're, you know, obviously IT is more complex, but you're somewhat creating that on the side. Yeah, and we looked to retail for all sorts of cool inspiration, you know, on the retail side, they have a retail marketplace, which is a huge and thriving business with millions of merchants. And so we're constantly comparing notes and saying, like, what are the things that you're doing for your merchants and are the things that can inspire us on our side to kind of follow suit. I will note that, you know, I, when I get in front of customers, I like to do, I like to show our user experience and we have a pretty website and all that other good stuff. The vast majority of customers actually interface with us through command line and automation tools and all that other stuff. So the retail analogy only gets me so far. Developers, you know. Developers, you know. Developers, you know. Well, thank you very much. Garth Forth, it's really great to have you here, director of AWS Marketplace and Ian Mobley. As you say, we're in the midst of this transformation. It's really great to hear your story. So thank you very much for doing this here on theCUBE at the AWS Summit in London. That's all from us for now.