 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 live, yes live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave it's great to co-host with you, how you doing? Fantastic, great to be here with you Lisa. It always, we're going to have a great conversation next. theCUBE actually has two live sets, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And Dave and I are pleased to welcome Scott Carter, the CTO of TISIS to the program, Scott, welcome. Thank you, it's really, really great to be here. Really, really. Great to have you on the program. Talk to us a little bit about TISIS and let's talk about your kind of journey to the cloud and your relationship with AWS. Yeah, absolutely. TISIS, we've been around as a company for about 40 years. We specialize in payment products, specifically on the issuing side, so card issuing. We work with some of the largest financial brands in the world and retailers as well. And a lot of what I always tell people is if you have a card in your wallet today, you could probably pull it out and at least one of those cards is something that we manage and service for our customers and we do everything, full life cycle of those payment products for our customers around the globe. On behalf of being a card holder, thank you. Talk to me a little bit about the AWS partnership. Here we are at Reinvent. Yeah, well we started a very special partnership with AWS about 18 months ago. We're about 18 months into the journey 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. We're really focused right now on migrating some of our key products to the AWS cloud environment. We've built, we've used us a variety of AWS technology both 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. We've had a lot of successes so far. AWS is helping us out, our engineering team. It's 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 Jen, that's important as a consumer's, consumer life, business life, we have that expectation that we're going to be able to transact whatever we want. Absolutely. Anytime, day or night. Absolutely, choice is key. 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 cycle, 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-host's handbag. What? But we appreciate that. Talk about this journey from the perspective of someone who I assume like me is not just out of college, right? 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. 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, I get a similar question a lot. People are interested in the journey and especially CTOs and CIOs who are starting journeys of their own. I get a chance to talk with a lot of banks and retailers about their individual, like modernization, transformation journeys. And the basics are true about the journey and I had somebody tell me years ago that it's psychology, it's not technology. You've really got to address the people 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 got to be a really good recruiter. You've got to go out and get the talent and the skills you need to build a good foundation and you've got to have the right partners. We have partners like PWC and 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, we really started building our talent pool probably more than five years ago. And so we were able to bring in some skill sets in DevOps and some skill sets in nowadays AI. We do a lot with ML and AI skill sets, 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. I remember probably about three years ago we installed our first Kubernetes cluster 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. And we use 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. 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's what we do. You mentioned that kind of cultural aspect. 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 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. But we're hiring net new people for the new stuff. Is that the strategy or is it a mix? No, you know, it looks like. I've seen some companies 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 on the journey. So what we've done internally is we created, for example, digital boot camps where our team members could sign up, they could come in. We actually construct the boot camps on about a six week schedule. We do two week sprints, so we do three sprints. 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 the training course. And then of course, that gives us a chance to identify people who are really high potential to move into some of our cloud teams and our DevOps 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 boot camp. So they may have started their career doing a Simbler or Coball or something like that, but now they've tacked on some DevOps and some cloud skills. We have some that know DynamoDB and they also know DB2. 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 new, sometimes straight out of college into your company. You've got to grow those people too, but you need to experience people there to help develop them. You know, we often talk about people, process and technology. And it's kind of a phrase that's thrown around, right? At every event and 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 the people, how you started very strategically starting with the people and the focus and the training on-prem, then making the decision that they've got the foundation. Now we need to migrate to the cloud. I'm curious though, why AWS, you have a lot of choice, of course here we are at reinvent, talk to me about why AWS is that strategic partner. You know, we've looked at a number of different cloud platforms for our business. And in fact, Global Payments is a large company, so TISIS is sort of the issuing part of that. And so we have really great relationships with GCP and other cloud platforms, even some Azure and 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 maturity of that platform and then the scale, scale matters in our business and a lot of businesses, it matters. The locations of all of the 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 try to be more flexible now about where we 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 been really beneficial that we made that choice with AWS. There's a lot of cloud platforms 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. 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 Tsis similar to AWS in that respect? And can you share a little bit about that? Talk to us about that. Our reputation as a business is based on the relationships that we've built with our customers. And we're known for that in financial services. The Tsis brand and the way that we think about our customers and the way that we partner with them. You know, when we talk with the AWS team, we try to explain, you know, our history is, you know, 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 build on top 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's 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. That on demand is key. I think we've, one of the things that's been in short supply during the last 22 months is patience, right? That's right, absolutely. 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, we have 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 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 applications and systems and how to build really, really reliable solutions. We really understand that part of the business. So whoever we partner with, and you asked about my decision, CTO, it was really a group decision. You know, I have to partner with our business team to get their buy-in. They have to support the decision, whatever we do. It's a big investment we're making to move to the cloud. And so, but we have to make sure that we cover off the basis. They've got to 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 that's a big part of that. So it's not just a spreadsheet. That's right. Of technical qualifiers. That's right. 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. Chief technology officer, it's not just about the technology, it's about the business. That's right. Fair to say. So I have a very, very close relationship like with the president of our business, Gail and Jowers. And we've built a team. And we have on the actual modernization or transformation team, we have members that represent that from a business perspective. They report directly into the business teams. And then we have people from my side 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 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. It's 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, 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 got to be together and in joint 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 that that has to be in lockstep. We talk about that all the time, but it's hard to facilitate that. But you really feel like you guys have done a phenomenal job with some key strategic foci, is that the word? Like Dave was saying, it's not a spreadsheet, a checklist of technology requirements that people element is absolutely table stakes. Absolutely. And 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, early 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 thesis as we hopefully round out the year 2021 and go into a much better 2022? We've got some really big things on the horizon. One of the things that we're working on right now is 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 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 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 throes of building an onboarding team that's going to be working with both our customers and with some of 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 really key strategic relationships that we've built over the last 12 months or so that are all in on our cloud journey. And so we're going to be able to announce some of those pretty soon, some of our customers and prospects 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 schedule. But yeah, we've got a lot of great things ahead and we're very, very excited for where we're going. Awesome. It's got great staff. 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 18 month journey. And we'll have to have you back on so we can hear some of those little Easter eggs that you just dropped. Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to be back on. This has been great. All right. Thank you so much. And how did you know I have a credit card on my wallet burning a hole? How do we do that? I've been feeling bad about saying that the whole time. This is not going to go well when we're done here. It's not wrong. We're in Vegas. We hope you've enjoyed this segment for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.