 We're live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's The Cube. Our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. This is our exclusive coverage of AWS re-invent conference. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, joined by co-host Dave Vellante here live. Day two, our next guest is Matt VanBurger, co-founder, CTO of City Tech. Welcome to The Cube. So, being a CTO, you got to love the tech of cloud which is going on with Amazon. So give us your take quickly on, one, Amazon's innovations. How relevant is it relative to what they're saying in terms of like, the tech keeks out there, coders, DevOps. What's your take on the tech that Amazon's rolling out? I mean, it's very innovative. I think it's the biggest opportunities for software developers, architects. You know, in the past you had to rely on hardware people, set it up to servers, infrastructure type folks. Now, you know, call an API to spin up a server or allocate storage. So that's completely, I think, turning things upside down as far as how IT is being done, how it can be done. For us, we're not an infrastructure company. We never have been. We've always been software. So it allows us to just jump in right away and offer a turnkey solution without having to build out data centers. Andy Jassy in his keynote, very inspiring, really smart guy. Dave and I had a chance to have a one-on-one with him, amazing guy. But he talks about words like experiments in his keynote. And that was interesting, Dave. He said, you can run experiments almost kind of saying, hey, you know, still early. But that's what a lot of people are using the cloud for. So my question to you is, as you look at the cloud and other businesses, what's the mindset of the people using the cloud? Is it experimental? What's the path to full-scale enterprise adoption? Yeah, he said two things, right? You got to be able to do experiment fast and then you got to be able to minimize collateral damage, right? Yeah. So you see in that? Oh, we do. I mean, we see adoption in various different ways. Sometimes people want to go full-scale, get in, maybe for a specific application. But a lot of times our opportunities come around where maybe there's a performance issue with an on-premise application. And we're helping them resolve that. And the first thing we do is let's spin that application up out on AWS because it's a known environment, known infrastructure. It's an experiment. Let's see how it performs there. Is there any issues with the software or the hardware it was running on? And then that grows out and says, hey, if it runs out there better, why not just move it out there? And can you guys help us do that? I thought the cloud was supposed to be slower. No, no, no, no, we see that. I mean performance much. So talk about city tech a little bit. When did you guys get started? We've been around since 2003. Okay, so you predated AWS? We did, yes. So talk about, I mean, three years in, AWS announces S3 and then EC2. So take us back in terms of your business, your business model, how it impacted that. Sure, sure. So we're a global consultancy. We specialized primarily in general enterprise application development type projects. About middle, about 2005, 2006, we started getting into large scale web content management implementations and started seeing the fact that we needed to have a development environment that we could stand up to develop our projects on. And what we initially did was leverage AWS for those type of purposes. It was more of just utility for us. It wasn't a strategic area for us to get into. But as Amazon started releasing more services, public computing infrastructure service became more popular, we started defining our business around Amazon web services. What was your development environment before that? Standing up servers in the back room, trying to make use of servers infrastructure on our client premise, which always was a big drag on the project from timeline perspective. So it was always, we got to find some gear to run this stuff on. Yes. And Amazon's perfect because we, we didn't want to build all the data center, that's for sure. I didn't want to get into infrastructure, big, large investments for doing that. So we'll use our clients. We'll spin up a few servers in the closet. Yeah, to get by. And then, 06, AWS comes out, it's early days. You guys hopped right on it, is that right? We started experimenting with it ourselves, looking at it, you know, we probably were a little bit pessimistic because at the very beginning too, is this really going to, you know, provide the performance and everything else. We were really attracted to the API, the way that Amazon architected their services where it was more API based first before the beautiful interface. Where a lot of vendors go for the glitz upfront and then you ask how you automate things in the back end, Amazon flipped it around, right? They said here, let's build these fundamental pieces of the architecture, let's enable them through APIs, and then we'll have partners and other people build those beautiful front ends. So we really like that because we know we're software developers, we love automation, and that just fit right into where we wanted to go. What was the learning curve like to get up into that Amazon environment, learn the API, you know, that whole thing? Yeah, I think from, because it's really software focused, the learning curve was not as great as if we just wanted to start a team and create a, develop a data center and have hardware and things like that. I think it is an interesting role that the skills that one might need to be able to maintain, it's definitely half or more software, development type skills, and the other half would be more operations, operating system type stuff. So DevOps is really the key. John was talking about when we were down in New York City and as John pointed out, we use AWS for one of the platforms that we have. And John started giving Andy Jassy feedback. Remember that? So there's like three or four things that I think you should do. And remember, he took it really seriously. He's like, hold on a second. And he started writing them down. So my question to you is as, so in the early days, AWS had a lot of white space. Can you give an example of some feedback that you guys gave Amazon that they actually implemented that it impacted your business? Yeah, yeah, we gave a lot of feedback early on when Route 53 came out, the DNS provider capability. We thought it lacked a few features. And as a partner of Amazon since the beginning, we've had routine kind of calls with their solution architects and things like that. And we provide some feedback as to the features that we think that Route 53 would need to have in order for us to rely on it and not have to worry about other DNS providers. So essentially your business modelers, you got this commodity infrastructure, which is AWS. You build value on top of that. You create managed services as well as your writing applications with your clients. So talk about the types of applications and talk about your engagements with customers. Give us some examples. Sure, sure. So first types of applications, we've grown to have expertise in the large scale web content management space. So today maybe a new term is web experience management. And that's large scale websites for Fortune 100, 500 companies. Also mobile applications on top of that. So what we did was we took that experience in the domain and expertise through a couple of other partners. Adobe is one of our partners. And we brought that platform out to AWS. And today we provide a managed hosting service for web experience management, specifically the Adobe platform. And we run it on AWS. So our clients might be worldwide type organizations that require multiple languages to be delivered, require content to be delivered efficiently, no matter where their customers are in the world. And for us, as a smaller organization, we can bring that platform out to the cloud. We can deliver it globally because AWS has a global footprint of infrastructure without, again, having to invest in all that infrastructure. So really standing on the shoulders of it. So your stack is AWS, Adobe and Red Hat? Yes, that's right. So talk about your stack a little bit. Yeah, yeah, so really on the bottom layer, it's AWS. And then we have, on the Red Hat side, we run Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our operating system. And then we have the Adobe Experience Manager, formerly named CQ, as the web content management system that sits on top of that. On the bookends of that architecture, we've developed life cycle type management capabilities around the infrastructure provisioning and things like that so that we can automate the standing up of server instances and deployments. And then on the other side, we've- So you guys are DevOps shop, right? Yeah, we're DevOps. And that's really what our clients, they contract with us to basically bring this custom software package into a software as a service type play. So they're just users of the technology. They author content, they activate content globally, and we manage the operational aspects and then also the development implementation side of it. So what are some of the cool texts that you're tracking as a CTO right now? What's getting you excited? I mean, obviously, certainly the cloud. And mobile is really an interesting area. But the cloud's going to hold for you guys. Yeah, it'll hold for part of it. I think all these technologies are definitely just continuing to evolve and define. I really think that the mobile side is still, although mature, it still has a lot of ways to go. I mean, as a mobile developer, we do a lot of mobile applications. We're seeing recurring issues of this app doesn't run very well on this device versus this other device, those type of things. Yeah, I mean, mobile apps really aren't very mature in a way. I mean, they are, and they aren't, right? They are sort of bespoke apps that you could maybe get in your iPhone. But as far as enterprise mobile apps, what are your customers asking you for in that regard? Are they asking for app stores? Are they asking for you to just sort of help them take their, you know, what I saw, often use the term, you know, pave the call path, take the existing apps and go mobile. What are you seeing out there? I think it goes back and forth. It's going from native applications that are in app stores to responsive implementation, which is basically one, you know, web application that can serve a tablet, a mobile, and a big browser, and it renders appropriately for that size of a device. So we're seeing a lot of that. I think our clients are still looking at it though as, you know, the big browser, the main browser first, and then let's figure out the mobile app after that, where we're trying to talk to them more about mobile first. Let's design it up front to support both because later when you retrofit it, you do a lot of changes to your brand and how the content is doing it. Yeah, so I don't want to ask you about that. I mean, when you go to a mobile app, oftentimes it's just neutered, right, and you find the full site, and then you struggle through the full site. Are you seeing your clients, are you able to help them build apps that are fully functional, you know, as functional as a full site? It's a challenge, it's a back and forth because you want to bring all that capability out to the world first. You got to make trade-offs, right? But sometimes it's overwhelming, right, so if it doesn't perform, those type of things. So those are really conversations like what's really important, and contextual-based content as well. You know, I think it's an exciting area where, you know, where you are and you go to the site, it's targeting you with that specific content you would be expecting to get. You know, when you go to the site. So I think that's a very, very cool, evolving area too, is, you know, driving the right content at the right time and the right location. Which again, has been thought about and talked about for so long, but it's not seamless yet, you know, and how it's been done. Do you talk to any other peers in your area about Amazon where it's like, hey, you're on Amazon, people come to you and ask you your advice, like what's going on with Amazon, how easy does it use? Do you talk to other folks about it? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. What do you guys, what do you tell them? Oh, it's a piece of cake, I mean, what's the advice, technically, you tell them? Solid, certain requirements they need to do? I think the first thing I do is a lot of people are attracted to the cost savings. And I'm always said that's great too, but from a scalability, extensibility, you know, those perspectives, those are why you should look at the cloud, AWS specifically, where they're at. Certainly, I always have good things to say, especially, I mean, if you're a large company or a small company, AWS, great fit. Well, we heard yesterday, the guy talking about doing things they've never done before, good do with Amazon, is there anything that surprised you about Amazon that you kind of go, well, this wouldn't have been possible without Amazon? Sure, I think some of the scalability, some of this genome, the DNA sequencing and things like that, I don't think possible without a computing infrastructure like that, you know, and able to instantly stand it up. We were at our booth and somebody came by and said we need to come up with an application a capability for delivering very small bits of content, web content, in case of emergencies. You know, and I said, well, what are you guys doing on the application side, where are you running it and things like that? And like, well, we're building a brand new data center to support some of this, but I still need to have like this, you know, DR plan, where, you know, if that's dead, then I still need to deliver a message to the public or whatever. Like, well, what are you doing building a data center right now? You probably should be looking at it in terms of just leveraging AWS for this and abandoning that whole idea of a data center. And we went on to talk about, you know, maybe the bandwidth costs for them are low and those type of things, but still, you just can't, you can't compete. I mean, we're getting some chatter on our CrowdChat application and one of the comments is that last time about cloud and infrastructure, but where's the big data conversation in analytics? So it's kind of being talked about, but not primarily, I mean, the cloud enables you to do some things that just get better analytics, get the knowledge workers working. Do you have a lot of mobile usage for your workers? Mobility, is that big for you guys? Mobility is huge for us and our clients and the big data play for what we specialize in and that web experience management is everybody wants to know who's clicking on what, when, and they want to mash that data up with maybe purchase history and those other type of things. So what we're seeing is a lot of need to pull all of it together, mine it in close to real time and drive content, personalized content based on that. So ads or more work on it? It could be ads or it could be just a, you know, you're shopping for a new pair of shoes and you know, that knows who you are and maybe you want to look at high tops and throughout the rest of your experience on the site you're seeing high tops and you're seeing maybe the previous pair that you've bought before and it's targeting you that content that's going to make you want to convert much, you know, higher percentage of convergence. So what are you doing there? You're taking sort of analytic data and presenting it in near real time. That's right, yeah. And merging it essentially with transaction data at some point, right? So we're closing the loop, you know, instead of getting all that data and then having it be mined off, you know, off hours or in not real time and then changing the content, we're saying, all right, as somebody's navigating through the site, let's get all this data, let's mash it up with other data in near real time and then use that to target content right away. Because once the visitor leaves the site, they may not come by and come back and purchase, you know? Much like how, you know, Amazon.com does things, yeah. Matt, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it, hear your perspective, CTO perspective here at Amazon, reinvent. This is, you know, the cloud game is seven years old for Amazon. I was commenting earlier, it's kind of top of the first inning, Dave's used our sports analogies and all the rest of it was spring training as the game gets going. We're talking about EMC. So a lot of prospects out there for the enterprise business for Amazon. We're here exclusive coverage here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.