 Okay, we're back at AWS re-invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. I think it's the first time at re-invent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re-invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Tom, tell us about Merkle for those who might not be familiar with you. Yeah, so Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the Densu umbrella. Densu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. So you're a tech company? Yes. So there's some big, big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic, the force march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? So what we're seeing is we've got, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem that we manage today within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients that they're all realizing they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. So you're relatively new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you could talk about that, Ankar. Well actually as a partner we may be new, but Merkle works with AWS, has been working with AWS for over five years. As a customer. As a customer. So what we did was last year we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restack program basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkle comes in with the specialization of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of a Dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. So I mean your on-prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on-prem. A lot of technical that when the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator, the right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical. Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem, especially mark tech ecosystem. So these databases they house customer touch points, customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases currently sit on-prem on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them, give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service? We do that as a service. Yes, yes. Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business. Right. Right, take away, it's classic. I mean, it's really, it's happening, this theme of AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes. Super clouds, we call them. Super clouds, yeah. It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for them. Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, the couple of big verticals, one being media. And all I keep talking about is direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. Yes. Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that kind of the play here? Yes, direct to consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and build those next generation solutions for our customers. So what kind of initiatives are you working on? So there are like three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. And they have a transformation like direct to consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind, but they don't know where to start, what tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services to give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. But that's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environments by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. Leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data, join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four, five focus areas. So I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy, like who owns the data. You're kind of alchemist. Your clients have first party data. And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources and you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? Well, ultimately, client owns the data because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call it. So Merkle has a service called Data Source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers, their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data, take this third party data from Merkle, and then segment their customers much more intelligently. And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer. We'll work with the chief technology officer. We kind of, we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue and you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in there too. CDO, chief dig officer, CMO. Sometimes they're one and the same, other times they're mixed. I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. It's all data. It's all data. Yeah, some of the rules that come into play, as Tom mentioned and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct-to-consumer, omni-channel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise that now you're making that available as a service. Is that right? Yes. How far are you into that journey of sassifying your business? Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkel. Where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off. So cloud again, we use cloud in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is sass offerings. Software as a service offerings like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum when it comes to cloud. And you've got a combination of, you have a consulting business and also... So Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business, that data assets that I was talking about that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. And we have a dashboard portfolio. How do you mention analytics a couple of times? How do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yeah, so that's a very important line because data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it. Because that's the actionable part. So few areas, I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now who those set of customers are? You know, where they should target this? Who their target customers are? What the demographics are? That's all done through an analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. It used to be really pure art, right? It's really becoming- Not anymore, it's all data-driven companies. Moneyball, moneyball. Yes, exactly. This may be still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you got to go with the data. That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel. Yeah, teach them how to fish. Last question, where do you see this? Two to three years. Where do you want to take it? I think future is cloud. AWS being the market leader, I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sells in majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to take. Yeah, that's good news for AWS. Little your DNA could rub off on them would be good. Yeah. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re-invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high tech coverage. Right back.