 Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Jeff Frick and this is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit, San Francisco. We are thrilled to welcome back to the program, Sandy Carter, who's the Vice President with Amazon Web Services. Been with the company about a year, we've had you on the program many times, first time since you've been at AWS. That's right, I'm celebrating my year yesterday with Amazon Web Services. And no cake, all right. I had a cake yesterday, actually. Cake and champagne, by the way. Sandy, we always love to hear, you talked to so many customers. Bring us back for a little bit. What brought you to AWS? What's exciting your customers when you're talking to them today? Well, I really love innovation. I love being innovative and bar none, Amazon is the most innovative company out there today. But really what brought me to Amazon was their focus on the customer, really obsession on the customer. When they say obsession, they really mean obsession. They work backwards from the customer. We really have this big, big thrust. In fact, one of my favorite stories is when I first came to Amazon, we'd be in these meetings and people would say, well, what does low-flying hawk think about this? Or what does low-flying hawk think about that? And I was like, who is low-flying hawk? Well, he's the person who would give comments on a forum and just a person who wasn't even spending millions of dollars with Amazon, but just had a lot of big clout. We actually just opened a building named Low-Flying Hawk, believe it or not. Have you identified this person? They do know who he is, yes. But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important. Sandy, at Reinvent, you actually, you spoke to the analysts, I was listening to the session, it's not just kind of, people think AWS, they think public cloud. You work for Amazon. It's everything kind of across, what you think of Amazon.com, AWS. Think from drones and using Kindles and everything like that. Can you give us a little bit of kind of that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation? Yeah, so it's really interesting. Amazon is very methodical in the way that we innovate and what we do is we really try to understand the customer. We work backwards from the customer. So we do a press release first. We do frequently asked questions next. And then we do an internal press release. Yeah, internal press release, internal frequently asked questions. And then we review a six page document, no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us to debate and learn from each other and just iterate on the idea that makes it better and better and better so that when we come out with it, it's a really powerful idea and powerful concept, something that the customers really want. So we'll ask you what you're doing now, but one more kind of transition question. What was your biggest surprise? You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery from people on the outside looking in in terms of culture and we know it's hard driving and innovative, growing like a crazy company, not only in business, but in terms of people. What was your biggest surprise once you kind of got on the inside door? My biggest surprise was just how incredibly encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS. My boss is Matt Garmin, he's been supportive since day one. You know, Andy, they just cheer you on and they want you to do well. And I've really never been at a company that everybody is really pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting, but really pulling for you to be successful. So that's really was the biggest surprise to me. And then that customer obsession, like it's not customer focus, it really is customer obsession. I think it's so well illustrated by the, again, not AWS, but Amazon with the store, right? With no cash register, no people. Amazon go. To think about that from the customer point of view is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store. So it's such a clean illustration of a customer centric way to attack the problem. And I love that because what we did is we opened up the beta first for employees. So we would go in and play with it and test it out. And then we opened it up in Seattle and we would give customer tours. Now it's open to the public in Seattle. So it just again shows you that iterative process that Amazon uses and it's super cool. Have you guys been? Have not been. In fact, my daughter went in, she put on a mask. She was going to pull the system that wasn't pulled and all the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly. I love how everyone loves to get so creative and try to get through the system. I try to break the system. But my daughter, that's what I would figure for sure. So what are you working on now? You've been there a year, what are you working on? So we are innovating around the enterprise workload. So we know that a lot of startups and cloud native companies have moved to the cloud but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises that are trying to figure out what their strategy is. And so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible? How can we innovate to get them migrated over as fast as possible? So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS. It's actually been running there longer than with any other vendor. And we have amazing performance, amazing reliability. We just released an ML, machine learning army for Windows so that you can use and leverage all that great Windows support and applications that you have. And then you guys saw earlier, we're talking to VMware. We know that a lot of customers want to do hybrid cloud on their journey to going all in with the cloud. And so we formed this great partnership with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud on AWS. And we're seeing great traction there, like Scribb's network just talked about how they're using it for disaster recovery. Other customers are using it to migrate. One CIO migrated 143 workloads in a weekend using that solution. So it just helps them to get to that hybrid state before they go all in on the cloud. Are they building a mirror instance of what their on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version? Is that how they're kind of negotiating that transition? Or how does that work? With VMware, they don't have to refactor so they can just go straight over. With Microsoft workloads, what we're seeing a lot of times is maybe they'll bring a SQL app over and they'll just do a lift and shift. And then once they feel comfortable with the cloud, they'll go to Aurora, which as you found was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had. And so we see a lot of that movement, bring it over lift and shift learning. And if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise, one of your big challenges is, how do I get my people trained? How do I get them up to speed? And so we've done, like we've got a full .NET stack that runs on AWS. So their people don't even have to learn a new language. They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell that work on AWS and bring that over. Sandy, bring us inside your customers because the challenge for most enterprises they have so many applications. And you mentioned lift and shift. I know some consultants out there are like, lift and shift is horrible, don't do it. It's like, well, there's some things you'll build new in the cloud. There's some things you'll do a little bit. And there's some stuff today, lift and shift makes sense. And then down the road, I might move it. I've seen, I think it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has as to, do you replat for them, refactor, all that and everything. So, I mean, there's many paths to get there. What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers? How is it easier for them to kind of move forward and not get stuck? Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations. So those tend to be really fast movement. And that's typically that. Data center evacuation. Yeah, that's an evacuation. They've got to get out of their data center by a certain date for whatever reason, right? They had a flood or a corporate mandate or something going on. And so we are seeing those, and those are still like lift and shift quickly. We are seeing a lot of customers who will create new applications using containers and serverless that we talked about today a lot. And that's really around the innovative new stuff that they're doing, right? So just eat, for instance, is a large, they do online food service out of the UK. I love their solution because what they're doing is they're using Alexa to now order food. So you can say, Alexa, I want a pizza delivered in 20 minutes. What's the best pizza place that I can get in 20 minutes? Or I want sushi tonight. Alexa will come back and say, well, it's going to take an hour and a half. You had sushi two days ago. Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight. And so it's really incredible. And then they even innovated and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering. So if there's a big football game or something going on, they'll use Amazon Fire to do that group ordering. All that is coming in through Alexa, but the back end is still Windows on AWS. So I love the fact that they're creating these new apps, but they're using some of that lift and shift to get the data and the training and all that moving and grooving too. What are you, from the training standpoint, how ready are customers to retrain their people? Where are their shortages of skill sets and how's Amazon helping in that whole movement? Well, training is essential because you've got so many great people at enterprises who have these great skills. So what we see a lot of people doing is leveraging things like .NET on AWS. So they actually, they have something they know, .NET, but yet they're learning about the cloud. And so we're helping them do that training as they're going along, but they still have something very familiar. Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort. They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud. They did deep dives with the Tiger team on cloud to get them really into the architecture and really understanding what was going on so they could leverage all those great skills that they had in IT. So we're seeing everything from, I got to use some of the current tools that I have to let me completely move to something new. And how have you been in the Bay Area also for about a year, right, if I recall? Actually, I just moved. I moved to Seattle. Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say, so they're going to make you move up north. I did because I was, But you timed it in the spring? I did, there you go. But it's nice and sunny, but it's great, it's great to live in Seattle. Amazon has such a culture that is in-person. So many people work there. It's really exhilarating to go into the office and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there. And then our EBCs are there. So our executive briefing center is there. So customers come in all the time because they want to go see Amazon go. And so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be. Yeah, I love the line that Warner used this morning is that AWS customers are builders and they have a bias for action. So how do you help customers kind of translate some of the culture that Amazon's living and kind of acting like a startup for such a large company into kind of the enterprise mindset? That's a great question. So we just proposed this digital innovation workshop. We are doing this now with customers. So we're teaching them how to work backwards from the customer, how to really understand what a customer need is and how to make sure they're not biased when they're getting that customer need coming in, how to build an empathy map and how to write that press release and internal press release and think differently. So we're actually teaching customers to do it. It's one of our hottest areas today. When customers do that, they commit to doing a proof of concept with us on AWS on one of the new innovative ideas. So we've seen a lot of great and exciting innovation coming out of that. All right, well, Sandy Carter. So glad we could catch up with you again. Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation, what's happening in the enterprise customers to our audience. For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE.