 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. You are watching Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. Day three, wall-to-wall coverage, here at Amazon re-invent 2015. All the keynotes are done, all the news is out there. People are getting ready for the big party tonight. It's our third day, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined with two guests here in the ecosystem of AWS, from two different businesses. Fran, Cesco, Roveda, VP of BizDev, and Fresh Desk, and Mark Wright, director of partnerships and evangelism at Iliad Network, Gaila Networks. That's right. Guys, thanks for joining. Get a little raw through the third day, but it's okay, we're here. Mark, let's start with you. Internet of Things, you guys have platform that's not hardware, it's software, runs in the cloud, but IoT's one of the things. Talk about your take on today's announcement news and then what your business does. So, our business, what Iliad does is we allow OEMs to easily connect their things to IoT and cloud in order for them to see how their things are actually being used in the field and how users are using them, right? All in order to improve it. So, we make it very easy for those OEMs. The great announcements today, the CTO, Amazon, the new services that are being offered, it allows us to now use things that are provided by Amazon rather than having to build it. And that's what we're providing to our customers is we're giving them now a higher level platform that they don't have to build that they can just use. So, the OEMs aren't really in the software cloud connect business. You kind of do that for them, is that kind of a take? Absolutely, correct, absolutely. You use the goodness of Amazon, all the things that Werner Vogels announced today. Kinesis and connect all that, kind of close the loop for the data. Absolutely, yeah, so very much like a ladder there. And the end goal is for these OEMs to just easily connect their things because they want the data, they want the intelligence, right? So, we're having some commentary on our intro about how Amazon's catching up is what people were tweeting. IoT's been around for a while, I mean sensors and stuff. But what they're doing is interesting, I want to get your take on this, and how evolved is the industry? Seamlessly connecting all the devices and not worrying about silo data and or devices. So, you might sensor something up there, a farm piece of equipment here, a piece of hand sanitizer there. So, the industrial side of it as well as the devices are very diverse. Yes, yes. So, the fragmentation is no common platform. Is that a real issue, and is Amazon's solution a good fit for that? So, first thing on what you said, and I think what's on the Twitter feeds is that Amazon's catching up. I don't see it like that. Amazon has a very powerful, their strongest player in this business, they were providing infrastructure, and they were allowing companies like us to build on that, to provide a solution. Now, something even on one of the other commentaries that was made, interviews, Brian Graceley was saying, people are learning from that, and then they're doing more. So, people that have been in this, just like Aela, all the things that we've learned in bringing OEMs on board, now we can provide to other OEMs and kind of best practices. And I think that's what Amazon is doing, and they're seeing, because they've been in this business now for a while, as a leader, they're seeing how people are using it, and now they're making it easier for their developers and their partners to go even further. And mobile, certainly, they got a lot of experience with mobile devices. Which is essentially, you could be, you see it as a proxy, it's a thing, it's a connected device. So now, they're seeing a farm equipment and a phone, really not really, to the network, it's a device. Yes, and they're taking it one step further. So just going mobile, that's just remote control, right? And so, people have been doing that for some time, just putting wifi on it. But Amazon allows going further, not just remote control, but actually gaining data, and even with the John Deere interview, or the John Deere presentation, right? It's no longer just a tractor, but it's working with the trusted advisors and the farm managers to determine what should be planted, what's the value crop, that's really the internet of things result and the return from the cloud. Francisco, I want to get your take on it. Internet of things, people are things. I used to read to my kids, thing one, thing two, that famous book, we probably all probably read that Dr. Seuss book, but the thing is, people are connected to the internet and your company deals with customer service. And those are people, those are people connecting in real time. Talk about what you guys do in Amazon and what you guys have and how that's relating to all this, because the lines are blurring, the machine's calling in with data, people are calling in, getting support. Talk about what your company does and how that fits into the Amazon infrastructure. Yeah, I'd love to. Freshness provides a cloud-based customer support software. It's a software that support agents have in front of them when they interact with end users. Whether they are ordering a product anymore information, they need to change your reservation they made for a vacation, or within a company, they need to upgrade their laptop, their telecom devices. And we are truly multi-channel. So end users connect with agents through mobile devices, through email, and even social media. And what we can expect in the future is these interactions to be multi-modal. So IoT could be one of them. We announced a couple of weeks ago the acquisition of a company called Frilp. We stand for Friend Help, which focuses on natural language processing. Even if it's consumer-based communication with technology behind it, it's going to be powering a lot of the features and products we're going to announce in the future. Allowing basically consumers or users to find answers from each other to common problems. So talk about that. It sounds so easy to say, oh, it's a different channel, so just move that over. It's pretty complicated when you think about the different channels of data. So you've got customers before, say it's text or social. Merging the data is not a trivial thing. Talk about the complexity and what is Amazon? What kind of tech is there to help you? What we love is the fact that often in AWS, to some extent, enable that technology, even in most advanced technology, is being consumerized more and more for use by not only end users, but also businesses. And that's one of the key drivers and other values that we bring to our customers is the usability. The ease of implementation is of use. Our decision five years ago when we launched to run on AWS was very strategic because we really wanted to focus on building amazing products, innovative products, and do that without having to worry about the underlying... How many customers do you guys have? We have more than 50,000 customers globally. And small, medium-sized businesses or large businesses, what's the makeup? The combinational build. We have young startups. We have a small, medium-businessing growth stage and larger companies. And why do they buy your product? Because it's easy to stand up, easy to implement. What's the value proposition? Price? The pain point is today there are a lot of solutions whether it's from premise, legacy. What we find also is a lot of customers use in-house built solutions. But over time, with new innovation, new technology, new software are not scalable. So they get stuck with the moment where usability becomes an issue, scalability becomes an issue, and then we come into play with an interface which is very easy to adopt and easy to understand. Some connectors here and there, some integration work. Yeah. Mark, I want to get your take on security. Yes. So Internet of Things brings up security question. Right. Are my devices secure? You know, the old story about the HVAC system people backdooring in from some device or subsystem in the company. This might open the door for security. So have you been following, are you guys doing anything in security relative to the IoT? Because I can see the buy-build decision on OEM. Right. Okay, do I build it or do I partner up? Right. So I think that's probably key. Absolutely, and it's very front and center with customers as well. And the key here is people cannot be lazy and there's no reason for them to be. There is the technology available. From a hardware perspective, there's a technology available that we can use enterprise-grade security in the technology we're using to connect, right? In the transport, there's technology there that's easily used to encrypt the data that's going up. So we can implement AAA technology even in IoT things, right? We can authenticate, we can authorize who gets access with role-based and then we can audit what's going on. The problem is that people get too lazy and they're building, it's a water sprinkler so I don't need security. You've got to take that extra step. So you guys provide security? Oh, absolutely. We build that in with the connectivity solution we have with our partners. So I always look at Amazon's opportunities. It's very easy to get into Amazon. Customers like it. But I want to ask you guys a question. Why are you guys all in with Amazon? Why are you guys part of their ecosystem? What attracted you guys to Amazon? Right. Well, from our perspective, from Ayla's perspective it had all the tools that we needed to allow us to come to market quickly with a solution that was very secure. It's very scalable. We can take a manufacturer from proof of concept to ramp in production of hundreds of thousands in a very, very short period of time, right? And they offload all of the management and the heavy lifting so that we just have to manage it from a platform level, right? Why build that infrastructure when you can use this and provide a great platform? Why you guys? What I love about our decision to go to VS is yes, on one hand is the focus on building products and letting the pros manage infrastructure and the back end. The other one, and I'm wearing my pure BD hat is, as you mentioned, the ecosystem. Not only per se, but also the innovation that ecosystem can bring that can be shared with us by AWS and the partners. But the other thing is a network effect because extensions, integrations, new features, new products can be brought to us and to our customers thanks to partnership with other companies. In fact, we announced this week an integration with AWS and our service desk, ITSM product called Fresh Service, where it's possible for DevOps team to manage their AWS assets from within the help desk without having to bounce back and forth between accounts. So what are some of the benefits you guys got with Amazon? Because one of the things I'd like you to share is something I've commented on the opening, which is the ecosystem is a big opportunity for Amazon. And I won't say they've done a bad job. They've just been so busy with the product and they've been growing. The ecosystem's now also now grows. It's a drafting effect. It used to be a kind of select parties, kind of knew they were, some people were afraid to jump in, maybe they're going to get eaten up by Amazon. Kind of like the old Microsoft days when people are afraid, you know, embrace and extend or that kind of, you know, dominating, we're going to eat you up. People were afraid of Amazon, you know, wait a minute, they might do what I'm doing. That's kind of going away now. So talk about the ecosystem today. What's it like? What benefits you guys see? So there's two on that. One is by Amazon continually developing by bringing on state of the art features, right? It allows their ecosystem partners to also advance. Right, that's a key point. Then the other point we have, even with Frederick and his business, the, you know, when you first look at it, we look very disparate, but at the same time, because we're all on AWS as our own customers, our OEM customers now need support, customer support as they're going into new fields in IoT, makes us easy for us to partner as well, right? And then for the end customer, in our case, the OEM, they're getting a much more vertical connectivity on this information, on their whole business intelligence and just their business operations, right? Now from customer success into their device, and then we have other partners where we can then even take that into the business intelligence applications. The bottom line is, are you guys making money? Absolutely. I think at the end of the day, good ecosystems make a multiple of what the enabler makes. Yes. So I mean, back in the glory days of the mini computer days, you know, and then client server, and the client server was really to me the first, we saw that channel develop where, you know, the support and the services were making 10, 15X that. Yeah. Are you guys seeing that as well? Oh, very much, very much. In fact, the beauty I mentioned before, kind of a network effect, I think there is a fact that AWS to some extent is a common denominator, a common language, amongst the different partners of the ecosystem allows us to understand each other quickly, the challenges that we faced, but also, you know, the solution that we can provide to our customers. Very often, we go hand-on-hand with AWS folks to our customers, and we present solutions, and some of our customers are frightened by the change, but they see how the advantage, the benefits are jumping into not only cloud, but solid, reliable solutions. Well, guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. And the word solution provider is a word that's been kicked around for many, many years, but now with Amazon, to me, it's a dream, because you can actually provide solutions to stuff that they have and tailor it to the customers. And I think that to me is a great opportunity that they have, and I hope they don't blow, Amazon, don't blow this opportunity. And at the end of the day, it's all about making money, right, the providers need, the ecosystem needs to be profitable. So, we are here on the ecosystem at Amazon re-invent. We'll be back with more after this short break. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE.