 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin live on the show floor of AWS re-invent 19 with Stu Miniman. This is almost the end of our second day of coverage. And as we were just saying, there's more people in here now than there were probably a couple hours ago. 65,000 or so folks at AWS is expecting here. And I think they're all in the expo hall now. Stu and I are pleased to welcome from Amazon business, David Stout, the head of Global Alliances and Partnerships. David, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here this afternoon. So everybody on the planet knows amazon.com. It has transformed our lives. I also think that it's transformed us as consumers and put pressure on any business to be able to deliver to us what we want whenever we want it. Yeah, everybody this week's getting alerts on their phones of package deliveries this week. Oh, of course, yes. That's probably one of the best parts of your day is when that Amazon package shows up. And it's so fast, I always forget, what did I order? I hope it's for me. But I'd love for you to share with our audience what Amazon business is. Yeah, so obviously, as you said, we all know about Amazon, we all know about AWS, right? 65,000 people here this week. Amazon business is a group that's been around since 2015 and we're focusing specifically on the needs, procurement needs of business and institutional customers. So the big theme that we heard from Andy Jassy was talking about transformation. We can't incrementally change the environment. So tell us a little bit what happens in your space and how that ties into those transformations. Yeah, a couple things. So one, like I said, we started in 2015 focusing on both private and public sector customers. And what we're really trying to focus on is that experience you talked about for consumers taking that same ease of use and experience to the business world. Corporate procurement is really hard and cumbersome. There's a lot of tools that need to be used. And so we're trying to drive that same ease of use into the corporate and public sector world as well. So one of the things that we've done, we launched in 2015, as I said, we don't share a lot of details but we did about a year ago announce it we're on about a $10 billion annualized run rate. We're in nine countries around the world. So outside of the United States, we're also live in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, France, sorry, India, Japan and just announced last month that we're in Canada. So it's a fast growing business and we continue to try to find ways, our customers are great to give us feedback on how we can continue to innovate to serve their needs. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I have some history in my career working with procurement organizations and change is not something I hear from them. When I think of public sector, it's like, well, it's on the GSA contract we're going to negotiate it from the years. When you go to companies and you say, hey, we've got the new product, oh, well I got to go through the procurement cycle to get that through these environments. So how do we make sure that companies can take the innovation, be agile and take advantage of these things now from a procurement standpoint? Yeah, so there's a couple things. So one, this week you're here in a town about digital transformation, right? Something that isn't an event, it's an ongoing evolution. One of the things, we've been coming to reinvent for four years now, and what we're seeing and continually seeing is that there's a convergence between the IT strategies and the procurement strategies. A lot of that is happening through technology and enablement of new technology, but it's a super interesting observation for us sitting on the sidelines and helping drive some of that innovation for customers. The role of the Chief Procurement Officer has changed a lot in recent years alone where this role, as you were saying, there's this now convergence with IT, but the CPO has a much bigger opportunity now to become much more of a strategic driver of business, whether it's evaluating supply chain management and looking for ways to streamline operations. This is a big shift from the financial perspective. Talk to us about some of the things that Amazon Business is seeing in your customers and how it is enabling those two sides, the IT folks and the procurement folks to come together so that what they're enabling is that digital business transformation. Yeah, absolutely. Historically, procurement teams, office CPOs and their teams were responsible for very traditional things, sourcing, contract management, risk management, supplier onboarding and offboarding, compliance with, to your point earlier, Stu, on regulations and is it on a schedule or not. Those are all still really important attributes and will continue to be huge focus areas for those organizations, but I think with the advent of technology, what you're starting to see is a lot more focus on how do we use artificial intelligence? How do we use RPA? How do we use machine learning to find new opportunities to drive efficiencies within those operations? And so I think because of that, what you're starting to see is a lot more harmonization between what CPOs are thinking about and the strategies they're employing and the CIOs and we're really seeing a convergence between those two organizations. We published Amazon Business published an article with ProcureCon a couple months ago and one of the findings that came out of that study was that there is a convergence happening. Over 55% of the respondents said that their goals are either fully aligned or mostly aligned with the goals of the CIO organization. So we're pretty excited about that happening. We think that we're going to be helping customers continue to drive that collaboration and for forward thinking organizations that are trying to drive more technology, we believe it's going to be a requirement and essential. That's awesome. It aligns with some of the broader trends we've been seeing in cloud adoption overall. It can't be IT and the business separately doing their things. Help us understand how this movement forward translates into innovation for customers. Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind. AWS, there's a number of things happening here. AWS, yesterday oftentimes is, sorry, oftentimes AWS is considered as a starter for when you think about digital transformation and cloud transformation. The pace of that evolution is amazing, right? Yesterday there were 14 press releases issued on new technologies and capabilities that AWS is delivering directly or through partners. And I think those types of things are helping drive that pace of evolution that we talked about earlier. One of the things that I found really interesting is AWS has a partner network, it's very mature. There's tens of thousands of partners. They launched it in 2013 and it's a huge portion of their business and growth. Amazon business is much younger in our maturity and we're just starting to launch a partner network. But one of the things we're really interested in is how do we work with third-party organizations and my team's responsible for really extending the range and reach of our traditional sales, marketing and services channels by working with third parties. Those take the forms of primarily software companies. So you see ERP organizations, e-procurement platforms and accounting expense management platforms as examples there. And the infrastructure providers that leverage that. So Okta is an identity management provider. They're a sponsor of ReInvent this year. They're a partner of Amazon business and we've built a preconfigured integration that will allow Okta customers that are using their single sign-up product to access the Amazon business store easily and within the controls that they've established. Yeah, it actually, we just had Dave McCann from the AWS Marketplace on the program earlier and we've watched the evolution and maturation of Marketplace. How does that tie into the world? Allowing really, I've been calling for years, it closes what we have to the enterprise app store there. So how does this play into your work? Yeah, so I think there's going to continue to be convergence between Amazon business and AWS over time and the Marketplace. We offer kind of a goods Marketplace. They offer a software Marketplace and a services Marketplace. And so I think we're still working on how do we harmonize that experience better and we've got a lot of work to do there. We have a saying at Amazon that it's always day one and that's a great example where we still have a lot of work to do. But one of the things that is another one of our partners, Koopa, which is a procure-to-pay platform and a long time Amazon business partner, we've done some pretty creative things to improve the user experience and make it easier for customers to use both Koopa and Amazon business and concert together. Koopa announced a couple of months ago that they've built an integration to the AWS Marketplace. And so that's a pretty exciting opportunity where people who are provisioning services via the AWS Marketplace can have that transaction flow seamlessly into their procure-to-pay solution and let the user who's provisioning that focus on what they want to do, which is developing new solutions to serve customers. Yeah, Koopa is one of our CUBE clients. I was just covering their event, Koopa London, just a few weeks ago. One of the things that's interesting about them and I'd love to get your feedback on that is their community is really massively influential in their technology and I presume in terms of the partnerships that they forge and as really catalysts for that procurement role being so strategic to the business. Talk to us about some of the customers that you are working with and those third party folks as well. How are they influencing the roadmap of Amazon business? Yeah, so our customers are never shy to tell us what we need to be better at, right? And it's one of the things that we've been able to grow so quickly, right? So we've segmented our business into four verticals so we focus on healthcare education government and then commercial, which is our largest segment. We have customer advisory boards from each one of those segments and those are very intimate working sessions with everyone from micro customers up to Fortune 100 customers that are never shy, as I said, to provide feedback on what we need to do better. I was with a client last week who and one of our partners who it was great to hear them say we love, they just had been at a customer advisory board and they said, we love the fact that those features we suggested to you 12 months ago are now in production. And so it's a huge part of what we do. It's a huge part of what drives our roadmap. We have probably the most sophisticated voice of customer feedback monitoring systems that I've seen and that includes everything from how our sales professionals talk to customers and log that feedback on feature requests to monitoring social feeds, to understanding what our customers want. So it's a big part of what we do and how we do it. And I think it's one of the things that makes Amazon a really differentiated company. I see Amazon business with Amazon overall. All right, so David, I think most people not only do they know Amazon, but many of them, including disclaimer myself, are Amazon Prime customers. You also have something called Business Prime. Maybe explain a little bit what that is. Yeah, so most of us are Prime members as consumers and there's a number of features that come with that. There's a shipping program, which is where it started, and then we've added different solutions, whether it's music or video or storage. Amazon business has the same philosophy. And so right now there are, we have a Business Prime shipping program, which was launched two years ago. We also have a other Business Prime offerings, including advanced analytics. So within the Amazon business portal, you can actually look at spend categorization and we've got some pretty powerful data visualization capabilities that's Prime benefit. And we have a pretty extensive roadmap for other features that are going to continue to come. We have some financing vehicles that are tied to it already and there's a lot on the roadmap. Well, if you need some more business videos for your Business Prime customers, give us a call. We have a large library with Amazon for that. Thank you, I appreciate that tip. I'll let you know. Let's talk about security. It is a fundamental component of any organization because there is so much data and we're only generating more and more and more. Businesses need to ensure that how they're transacting with any organization and that their data is managed in a secure way. What are some of the fundamental elements of Amazon business that you guys have built into the technology to deliver that security for your business customers? Yeah, so first of all, we're built fully on AWS as you would expect and so there's just a bunch of- They're happy about that by the way. So that's just a safety feature that I think gives most of its comfort. I think back to this kind of notion of convergence of IT and procurement, this is something I find really interesting and so this Procuricon article I mentioned a few minutes ago, one of the findings in that was that 70% of respondents said that their security strategy is shared jointly between their IT and their procurement teams and so obviously security here at Reinvent, you walk the expo floor, there's an entire row of things that are focused on security and how to continue to drive that within the cloud in an efficient way. This whole concept of IT and procurement coming together to share objectives, I think that's a great example where it's already happening and we continue to expect that it will happen in more detail. What are some of the things that surprised you most about the last day and a half with all the announcements that folks understanding more about Amazon business, some of the feedback that you've gotten on the show floor or in customer meetings that kind of highlight, yeah, we're doing the right thing here. Yeah, so I think for, it's always humbling when people don't know about us, right? As I said, we've built a pretty big business but it's still really, really early and so to me that's a great opportunity that we can continue to do more to educate customers about the opportunity and how Amazon can help transform their procurement practices. It's still super early so we're always wanting to hear that feedback and what else can we do? For customers that are aware of this what's been really also humbling is how much they're finding us to be a bigger and bigger portion of their strategic vision in the future. And so we're really excited about that on both fronts, right, the opportunity to do more but also the customers who are adopting us or seeing great opportunities to consolidate their suppliers, drive greater efficiencies and most importantly provide a better end user experience that they're used to from their home purchasing. Of this last question for you, looking at the vertical focus that you guys are taking, you mentioned the verticals. Any of them in particular that are really kind of leading the way here for that IT procurement strategic collaboration, you mentioned healthcare, commercial, anything that you really see as early adopters' leading edge? Yeah, so we actually see, there's probably some nuances between each vertical but we've seen some great adoption across all four of those verticals. So we have 55 of the Fortune 100 as customers. We have 80% of the largest educational institutions in the US as customers. We have greater than 50% of the largest health systems in the US as customers already and greater than 40% of the largest municipalities in the United States. So we've seen some really great adoption across all four segments. Again, I think the needs of a small dentist office are going to be different than the needs of a industrial manufacturing organization and so we continue to find solution sets where it'll address the needs of each one of those customers. We have strategic teams that are focused specifically on those segments and how to solve them as I said before, customers will always tell us what we can do better at. That's probably what drives our innovation. And where can folks go, business owners, small and large, to learn more about Amazon business? Amazon.com slash business. Easy enough. David, thank you for joining Stu and me on our program and sharing with us what Amazon business is. We appreciate it. Yeah, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me. All right. First Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from day two of our coverage of AWS re-invent 19 from Vegas, signing off. Thanks for watching.