 Hi everybody, welcome back to theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22 when the Venetian at in Las Vegas. It is Wednesday and the place is still hot but I can guarantee you that. We continue our series of discussions as part of the AWS startup showcase. This is the global startup program, a part of that showcase. And I'm joined by two gentlemen today are going to talk about what Core Stack is up to. One of them is Easy Natarajan who is the founder and CEO. And good to have you with us today. We appreciate it. Thanks, Easy. Nice to be here, John. And Brad Winnie, who is the area sales leader for startups at AWS. Brad, good to see you. Good to see you, John. Thanks for joining us here on the showcase. So Easy, first off, let's just talk about Core Stack a little bit for people at home who might not be familiar with what you do. It's all about obviously data, governance, giving people peace of mind but much deeper than that. I'll let you take it from there. So Core Stack is a governance platform that helps customers maximize their cloud usage and get governance at scale. When we talk about governance, we instill confidence through three layers, solving the problems of the CIOS, solving the problems of the CTO, solving the problems of the CFO together with a single pane of glass which helps them achieve continuous, holistic, automated outcomes at any given time. So Brad, follow up on that a little bit because Easy touched on it there that he's got a lot of stakeholders with a lot of different needs and a lot of different demands but the same overriding emotion, right? They all want confidence. They all want confidence and one of the trickiest parts of confidence is the governance issue, which is policy. It's how do we determine who has access to what and how we do that scale and across the only startups and enterprises, this is a huge concern, especially as we talked a lot about cutting costs as the overriding driver for 2023, the economic compression being what it is, you still have to do this in a secure way and in as a riskless way as possible and so companies like Core Stack really offer a core, no pun intended, function there where you abstract out a lot of the complexity of governance and you make governance a much more simple process and that's why we're big fans of what they do. So we think governance from a three dimensional standpoint right now, how do we help customers be more compliant, secure, achieve the best performance and operations with increased availability at the same time do the right spend from a cost standpoint. So when all three dimensions are connected the business velocity increases and the customers ability to cater to their customers increase. So our governance tenants come from these three pillars of finance operations, security operations and AI operations are total operations. Yeah, please, go ahead. So part of what's going on here which is critical for AWS is if you notice a lot of VZ's language is at the business value with key stakeholders of the CTO, the CISO and so on and we're doing a much better job of speaking business value on top of AWS services but the AWS partners, again like Core Stack have such great expertise in that level of dialogue that that's why it's such a key part for us and why we're really interested in partnering with them. You know, how do you wrestle with this? Or wrestle may not be the right word but because you do have, as we just went through this litany of these business parts of your business or a business that need access and that you need to have policies in place but they change, right? I mean, and somebody maybe from the financial side should have a window into data and other slices of their business. There's a lot of internal auditing obviously it's got to be done, right? And so just talk about that process a little bit how you identify the appropriate avenues or the appropriate gateways for people to access data so that you can have that confidence as a CTO or CISO that it's all right and we're not going to let too much out to the wrong people. So there are two dimensions that drive the businesses to look for that kind of confidence building exercise, right? One, there are regulatory external requirements that say that I know if I'm in a financial industry I may need to follow in NASD, PCI and sort of compliance or if I'm in the healthcare industry maybe HIPAA and related compliance so I need to follow, that's an external pressure. Internally the organizations based on their geographical presence and the kind of partners and customers they cater to, they may have their own standards and when they start adopting cloud, hey for each service, how do I make sure the service is secure and it operates at the best level so that we don't violate any of the internal or external requirements at the same time we get the outcome that is needed and that is driven into policies that is driven into standards which are consumable easily like AWS offers well-architected framework that helps customers make sure that I know I'm architecting my application workloads in a way it meets the business demands and what Corsak has done has taken that and automated it in such a way, helps the customers simplify that process to get that outcome measured easily so they get that confidence to consume more of the higher order services. Okay and I'm wondering about your relationship sort of what AWS goes because it's almost like to me it's like going DC fishing and all of a sudden you get this big four, 500-pound fish, like now what? Now what do we do, right? Because we got what we wanted, you know? So talk about the now what with AWS in terms of that relationship and what they're helping you with and the kind of services that you're seeking from them as well. Thanks to Brad and the entire global startup ecosystem team at AWS and we have been part of AWS ecosystem at various levels starting from marketplace to ISV Accelerate to APN partners, cloud management tools, competency partner, core cell programs, you know? The team provides different leverages to connect to the entire ecosystem of how AWS gets consumed by the customers. A customers may come through channels and partners and this channels and partners may be from Wards to MSPs to SIs to how they really want to usage and the ecosystem that AWS provides helps us feed into all these players and provide this higher order capability which instills confidence to the customers end of the day. And you know this can be taken through an MSP, this can be taken through a GSI, this can be taken to the customer through a war and that's how our play of expansion into larger AWS customer base. Brad, from your side of the fence. You know, this is where the comments of scale come to benefit our partners and AWS has easily the largest ecosystem, whether or not it's partners, customers and the like and then all the respective teams and programs bring all those resources to bear for our startups. Your analogy of catching a big fish off the coast, I actually have a house in Florida, I spend a lot of time there. I've yet to catch a big 500 pound fish, but yeah. But they're out there. But they're definitely out there and I, you know, so in addition to the formalized programs like the global partner network program, the APN and marketplace, we really break our activities down with the core stacks of the world into two major kind of processes, cell two and cell with. And when we say cell two, what we're really doing is helping them architect for the future. And so, and that plays dividends for their customers. So what do we mean by that? We mean helping them take advantage of all the latest serverless technologies, the latest chipsets like gravaton, thing like that. So this, that has the added benefit of just lowering the overall cost of deployment and expend and that's, and we focus on that really extensively. So don't ever want to lose that part of our, of the picture of what we do. And the cell with is what he just mentioned, which is our teams out in the field compliment these programs like APN and marketplace with, you know, person-to-person relationship development for core key opportunities in things like FinTech and retail and so on. We have significant industry groups and business units in the enterprise level that our teams work with day in and day out to help foster those relationships and to help Core Stack continue to develop and grow that business. Yeah, we've talked a lot about cost, right? There's a difference between reducing costs or optimizing your spend, right? I mean, there's a very different prism. So in terms of optimizing and what you're doing in the data governance world, what kind of conversations, discussions are you having with your clients and how is that relationship with AWS allowing you to go with confidence into those discussions and be able to sell optimization of how they're going to spend maybe more money than they had planned on originally? So today because of the extra external micro market conditions, every single customer that we talk to wanting to take a posture status of, hey, where are we today? How are we using the cloud? Are we in an optimized state? And when it comes to optimization again, the larger customers that we talk to are really bothered about the business outcome and how their services and ability to cater to their customers, right? They don't want to compromise on that just because they want to optimize on the spend. That conversation is trickled down to taking a posture assessment first and then are you using the right set of services within AWS or the right set of services being optimized for various requirements? And AWS help in terms of catering to the segment of customers who need that kind of a play through the partner ecosystem. Yeah, we've talked a lot about confidence too, cloud with confidence. What does that mean to different people, you think? I mean, because don't you have to feel the mountain and say, okay, what's kind of your level, your tolerance level for certain, not risks, but certain measures that you might need to take? I actually think it's flipped the other way around now. I think the risk factor is more on your on-prem environment and all that goes with that because the development of the cloud in the last 15 years has been profound. It's gone from, that's been the risky proposition now with all of the infrastructure, all the security and compliance guardrails we have built into the cloud. It's really more about transition and risk of transition and that's what we see a lot of and that's why again, what governance comes into play here which is how do I move my business from on-prem in a fairly insecure environment relatively speaking to the secure cloud? How do I do that without disrupting business? How do I do that without putting my business at risk? That's a key piece. I want to come back if I may, something on cost cutting. Sure. We're talking about this on the way up here. Cost cutting, it's the bonfire of the vanities in that everybody is talking about cost cutting and so we're in doing that perpetuating the very problem that we kind of want to avoid which is our big cost cutting. And I say that because in the venture capital community what's happening is two things. One is everybody's being asked to extend their runways as much as possible but they are not letting them off the hook on growth. And so what we're seeing a lot of is a more nuanced conversation of where you trim your costs it's not essential spend but reinvest especially if you've got good, strong product, market fit reinvest that for growth. And so that's, so if I think about our playbook for 2023 is to help good, strong startups either tune their market fit or now that they have good market fit really run and develop their business. So growth is not off the hook for 2023. And then let me just hit on something before we say goodbye here that you just touched on too Brad about how we see startups right, AWS. I mean obviously there's a company focus on nurturing this environment of innovation and of growth and for people looking at maybe through different prisms and coming in. So if you would maybe from your side of the fence easy from Corsetac about working as a startup with AWS. I mean how would you characterize that relationship about the kind of partnership that you have and I want to hear from Brad too about how he sees AWS in general in the startup world. But go ahead. It's kind of a mutually enriching relationship, right? The support that comes from AWS because our combined goal is help the customers maximize the potential of cloud. And we talked about confidence and we talked about all the enablement that we provide the partnership helps us get to the reach at scale. We are talking about customers from different industry verticals having different set of problems and how do we solve that together so that like the reinvestment that happens in fact healthcare customers that we repeatedly talk to even in the current market conditions they don't want to save, they want to optimize and re-spend their savings using more cloud. So that's the partnership that is mutually enriching. Absolutely. Yeah, to me this is easy. I think the reason why a lot of us are here at AWS especially in the startup world is that our business interests are completely aligned. So I run a pretty significant business unit in a startup name but a good part of my job and my team's job is to go help cut costs. So tell me, show me a revenue, show me a revenue-responsibly position where a part of your job is to go cut costs. It's so unique and we're not a non-profit, we just have a very good long-term view which is if we help companies reduce costs and conserve capital and really make sure that that capital is being used the right way then their long-term viability comes into play and that's where we have a chance to win more of that business over time. And so because those business interests are very congruent and we come in and we earn so much trust in the process that I think that that's why I think we being AWS are uniquely successful startups. Our business interests are completely aligned and there's a lot of trust for that. It's a great success story, it really is. And thank you for sharing your little slice of that and growing slice of that too from all appearances. Thank you both. Thank you, John. Thank you very much, John. This is part of the AWS startup showcase and I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here at AWS ReInvent22 and theCUBE of course, the leader in high-tech coverage.