 Live from Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York City 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. And welcome back here on theCUBE, continue our coverage at AWS Summit here 2017. We're at the Javits Center, Hustlin' Bustle in Midtown, New York. A lot of things happening here in Manhattan. One of those things happening is Stu Miniman. Stu, you're always happy. Thank you, John. Are you curious about your credit score, by the way? You have any inclination, or any kind of curiosity about that? John, I'm happy with my credit score. I don't think I need any more credit. Well, I think what we were talking about. Just in case we have with us a CIO of FICO to join us, Paul Smoltz. Paul, it's good to see you. Thank you for being here with us today. Great to be here. Yeah, and we'll get to the credit scores later, all right? Because we do want to touch base on that. We will check up on it. Nice job on the keynote stage this morning. Talked about a lot of things. I mean, you had processing, planning, automation, managing, microservices, a lot of, for our folks at home who weren't privy to the presentation, just kind of sum up a little bit for me, if you would, what the message you were trying to get across this morning. Yeah, very high level. We are a 61-year-old company. We built a ton of software that we primarily have delivered on-prem. And it was about four years ago that's when we started to go to our private cloud and develop our solutions on the private cloud. It was mostly done in a lift-and-shift fashion. We took the solutions, implemented in our data centers, optimized it a little bit so we could do the shared services for the clouds, et cetera. But as we saw our customers starting to go to the public cloud, a lot of the financial institutions, now it's more secure to run and have your data in the public cloud. We have audit and compliance associated with the public cloud. So we obviously wanted to go to the public cloud so we could meet our customers there. So that was a very, very big message today. By going to the public cloud, I'll be reading the benefits of what the public cloud has to offer. We can lower our costs. We still have to rewrite a lot of applications to take full advantage of the services that AWS can provide. And that means that we enable our new application to be able to scale up and scale down. We also built the images that we deploy on AWS so we can deploy them at a much more rapid pace so we can enable scale for our customers, setting the solutions up in days and not week or month like we used to. So that's another huge benefit. And we talked about all the regions that AWS provides. 16 regions around the globe. We want to grow with our customer base and we don't want to build data centers around the globe. There's absolutely no need to, no value added in doing so. So we go where AWS goes and AWS keeps expanding the regions and we can deploy our software now at a rapid pace again in the various regions. And then finally what I said, which is very important, that's about security and compliance. Security aspects, we've gotten a significant amount of help so we've built our services in a very secure fashion but a lot of the services that now AWS provides is already pre-ordited and hence compliance such as PCI, et cetera is inherited as part of these services. So our solution, we use the extension of the services that AWS provides and that of course enables to go through the audit process at a much more rapid pace. So as you can hear a significant amount of benefits moving into the public cloud. So Cloud's a 61 year old company, obviously lots of legacy, probably lots of application. Where are you with your application portfolio? How much do you still own on-prem versus public cloud and how do you make those kind of decision points? Yeah, we obviously had a pretty significant amount of our install base still on the private cloud or as well as on-prem, right? The majority is still on-prem. Having said that, more and more of our customers have asked, how can we be smarter? So we don't have to maintain all the upgrades or we don't have to maintain all the security, et cetera. How can you enable us to move faster? So what we are seeing is that our customers is asking us to move to the cloud and the cloud for them probably don't always mean the public cloud or the private cloud. They just want somebody else to match their infrastructure. Having said that, a lot of them as I said, it started to experiment with the public cloud and that means that they're learning more and more about AWS and how to operate there and they're asking us to go there. So I would say we're still early in our journey. I would say that there's a high demand for us to deliver our services in the cloud and delivering it the private cloud, we probably just can't accelerate and do it fast enough for the customers who wants to migrate, hence the reason for why we're going to an already API-enabled infrastructure to deliver these services. Obviously Amazon has a lot of data services that you need to worry about kind of your governance and compliance. Got a note from the community actually, wondering if you've had a chance to look at Amazon Glue. Things like ETL, how much of a burden is that for you? Is that offering something that's compelling? How do you really look at that space? Yeah, so obviously as part of our services we use ETL service, we develop our own ETL service and we do that specifically to our products. Having said that, we look at every single service that AWS brings to the table and we look at Glue. Glue may not deliver what we exactly need to at this point in time, but we think as Glue evolves, we likely got to use these services. We rather would not develop and maintain those services ourselves. No good reason. So if all the criteria for the next generation service on AWS is met, it needs to shift. I mean, it's a no-brainer for us to use those features, right? How long have you been the CIO of FICO? I joined about 18 months ago, had my own company before, ran the infrastructure for Salesforce for around seven years and then ran the infrastructure for eBay for around four years. So I grew up in the cloud world. It sets me up, you know, one of the questions we've all been looking at for like the last decade is, what does cloud mean for the role of the CIO? Yeah, well, cloud means a lot of things for me, right? It definitely means that I focus on evolving the business, focus on the business value that can bring to the table, not focus on really building infrastructure, which doesn't really add any value to our day-to-day. It did at once, one time, where a lot of the feature set or security aspects or deployment aspects was not where they needed to be in the cloud. The services now that AWS provides gives us the ability to utilize those services and rewrite our stack. So I don't have to worry about our cat-backs, et cetera. We shift it all to our backs and we scale it as we see fit, right? With our customers, faster deployments, faster ways for innovation, utilizing all the new services being deployed. And that to me is truly a business benefit, right? I don't want to run data centers. It doesn't have a significant model value. I did an interview with FICO a couple of years ago and where it was early in looking at container services. Bring us up to speed. Where do containers fit into your environment? What do you look to Amazon for that environment? You're playing with serverless at all yet? Yes, I mean, obviously we experiment with all of the new functionality that's being brought to the table. We have done quite a bit on the Dockerfronts. We are evaluating the Kubernetes. We're excited that that is the direction that AWS is going. We would like to see some of the things move a little faster. That's always the case. Yeah, well, that was the news last week. You know, we're hoping to get Adrian on because we're supporting CNCF, Kubernetes, how, when. Exactly, exactly. But of course we're experimenting and the moment that it's there and available for us, I'm fairly certain that we'll head down that route, right? It's a nice packaging. It's an easy deployment, an easy update. You also talked about serverless. Serverless is a big thing for us. We mostly use it for admin functions to kick things off, to enable the auto-scaling, et cetera, et cetera. We don't really run the critical transactions as part of serverless, as you can imagine, because we operate large and regulated industries, so we have to have significant logging around what we do. But for a lot of the admin functions, we actually already use serverless as part of our platform on AWS. You've been on the job, what, April, right? Last year? Yes. You walk in at this very transformative time, right at FICO, and the role of the CIO in general is at a transformative time, too, because you have a lot more options. So scale all that in terms of speed and how quickly you have to make decisions, how your role changes now, because of the capabilities that you have at your disposal, and the options that you have to decide between. Yeah. You know, the interesting part of this is, and we talked about it with some of the other speakers backstage, we've seen the movie before, right? It's on a Salesforce, right? We build our own infrastructure, et cetera, but we used AWS as well for a lot of our development. So it's not like it's so new anymore. AWS even is not a young company anymore. It actually is a proven company. You heard it, right? A million users, et cetera. So for us, it's pretty easy to go with proven technology to learn from where others have been, right? We stand up the shoulders of giants. We have a lot of companies already have done and moved to the cloud and run successfully in the cloud. I think actually the financial and insurance industry is probably some of the folks that's laid to the game, if you so may, because they have not been used to running in public clouds. So that mindset is something that you have to bring to the table, and we have to ensure that we educate all of our folks that has been used to on-prem, that has been used to operating in a certain world and still run cobalt systems on mainframes of what it means to move to the clouds. And that's a big transformation to change that mindset and operate also in an agile way, right? We have to change the way that we operate, the way that we plan, the way that we deliver. So it's all coordinated across multiple product lines, planned out and delivered in an agile fashion so we can seek our product and have the product interact with each other. And that delivery cycle and the way that we package things has to be thought of very differently. So for that we actually created a series of micro-learning within the company where we just recorded five minutes of our CEO, five minutes of some of the engineering that we're packaging so everybody could get up to speed at a very fast pace of what it really means and then we do deep dive curriculums that is specific to your role within the company. Plus, what's on your list of what you're looking for from Amazon and your other vendors out there to make your life easier? Sound like glue sounded interesting but doesn't fit exactly the way you do it. Kubernetes, you're keeping an eye on what else is out there. Yeah, obviously we want to see reference architectures. We want to see and learn from what people have done before. In some cases we will be first to market with certain things but we're looking to get that jump started in general, right? We want to leapfrog the way that we deliver our stuff. We want to make sure that we can do faster, bigger, better, smarter. And that means that we have to test and validate a ton of technologies out there. If there's somebody that already had gone down the route that we really can have a tensed down type of discussion with to understand what's actually going on, that helps us, right? That helps us understand what's been done, what's the capabilities are, et cetera. And that we can utilize in how we deliver our service to our customers. So when you think about it, it's less than 12 months ago that we just started the AWS journey. We now have both my FICO scores on AWS. We have marketing services. We're just about to release a series of our solutions on AWS for the financial services. So it's fast. It's going fast and we have to understand all the new technologies. And you're feeling like a whiplash going on right now there because you've covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time. Well, as I said, we're fortunate enough to have folks that understand clouds and helps and this is really a big team effort, right? All the way from engineering, CEO, our CTO, sales has to understand how to sell platform rather than sell solutions. So there's a lot of education that has to go on. And I think that's actually key to ensure that you bring the whole company with you. You know, it doesn't matter if you have one or two or five people that can run really fast because they'll turn around and find out that nobody's running with them. So we have to make sure, right, that we bring the whole company with us as we implement these solutions. And explain what it is. What are the benefits? Why? How does it work? And we put a significant amount of effort into that in our company. Well, can we work on this FICO credit thing off-camera? How about that? Off-camera. Good luck with that. Klaus, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. No, I appreciate the time. Again, nicely done this morning on the keynote stage. Thank you. Klaus Smoltz, CIO of FICO. Joining us here on theCUBE will continue our coverage from the AWS Summit from New York right after this.