 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE virtual's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. We're not in person this year, we have to do all the CUBE interviews remote, but we got two great guests from the Amazon web services partner network, AWS, APN, Craig Wicks, senior manager of AWS SaaS Factory and Todd Golding, principal cloud architect, global SaaS tech lead. Gentlemen, thanks for joining theCUBE, appreciate it. Thanks John. First of all, I want to get in Craig with you and just take a minute to explain what is the SaaS Factory? Because this is a unique and growing team within AWS. And we've been saying it for years, but the move to the cloud obviously has been obvious as mainstream, but your team, your role is doing some interesting things. Explain what is the SaaS Factory and what do you guys do? Yeah, thanks John, really delighted to be here today. Yeah, the SaaS Factory may be for those that may be somewhat disappointing, there's no factory, there's no sort of easy button for SaaS, there's no templates, there's no machinery, we wish we had it, but we're really a global team of subject matter experts in SaaS that really help AWS partners transform their business, right, both business and technical to the SaaS model and help them do that faster with greater confidence and all the best practices that our team has learned over the years. And Todd, you're a solution architect, so you're the partner, you have to help your customers get there, you know, being a solution architect really is like the mechanic of the business, you've got to lay out the engine of innovation and this is what clients are trying to strive for. Can you take a minute, explain how your role is involved in this, obviously SaaS is not, it makes sense on paper, but making it happen is not a trivial, what are you at your role? Yeah, so I'm very much in fact connected to Craig, we're all part of the same organization and we're sort of very much deeply involved with these organizations, we get very much embedded with these partners that we work with and really help them through sort of the nuts and bolts of what it means to transform an application to a multi-tenant sort of SaaS model, so that means helping them figure out how to map that to different AWS services, it means helping them figure out how to realize the sort of the business objectives of transforming to SaaS, but really our goal is to sort of just get into the weeds with them, figure out their specific domain because there's no one size fits all for SaaS, figure out how that really connects to where they're at in their trajectory in terms of where they're trying to get to and the journey is a business and then find that alignment with AWS services so there's sort of that trifecta of lining all those bits up and sort of formulating a technical strategy that really brings all those pieces together for them. Craig, I want to get your thoughts on the trends and Todd, you can weigh in too, I want to get your reaction. Over the weekend, I was pinging some folks on the internet, LinkedIn and whatnot, from eight years ago when we did our first cube at re-invent, it was the second year of re-invent and nobody was there in the industry, press wasn't there, we're the first, I think press to be there and a lot of people have either moved on to big positions or companies have gone public, got bought, major things have happened since 2013, cloud certainly rose there, SaaS became the business model, everyone kind of knows that, but the dynamics today are different when you think about the on-premises and you got the edge, a big part of the themes this week in the next couple of weeks as we unfold here at re-invent, this is different but the same, can you share, what is the trend that people are riding on, what's the wind of innovation? Yeah, and certainly I would say, first of all, just personally I've been in SaaS for some time, I was involved early on in sort of a model, we call the application service provider model, which was sort of a predecessor to SaaS, if the gray hairs out there, remember that one, but I think first of all, I would say SaaS is everywhere and people want it to be everywhere and so there's just, we just see insatiable demand for SaaS from customers out there, right? And I think the challenge and problem we see is that organizations that we work with just can't transition fast enough, right? The real technical challenges that are in front of them in terms of how they build and architect the SaaS solution and but most importantly, the business model that sort of underpins that is a huge transformation for companies that they're going through and that's one of the things that we just see, just in my time in SaaS factory in AWS, the range of organizations we've worked with has just changed. So early on, we're working with companies in infrastructure around security and storage and those areas and in the last few years, it's just expanded to all sorts of industries in public sector, oil and gas, sort of financial services. Everyone really wants to build to this model and that's really born around the customer demand they're seeing for SaaS. That's interesting. You mentioned challenges. I want to get your thoughts. You mentioned ASP application service provider. Do you remember those days vividly? Mainly a tech thing, but it's really a consumption model around delivery of software and services and web services came on and 2000 and the rest is history. We've got Amazon web services but now as you get more vertically expanded oil and gas and go mainstream, what are some of the challenges because as people get smarter, that's not just about self-service or buy as you go. It's a business model you mentioned. Is it a managed service? Is it self-service? Has it been embedded into the application? Can you share some of the new things that are emerging on the business model side that people should pay attention to? What are some of those challenges? Yeah, I think one of the first things is just fundamentally you're operating service, right? So that changes the dynamics for everything for in terms of how you engage with customers, to how you deliver, the kind of simple thing I often tell people is, who's answering the pager now? If someone goes, if something goes wrong, it's not your customer, it's you, right? And you have to manage and sustain that service and really continue to provide innovation and value to customers, right? That's one of the challenges we see is organizations are now on a treadmill in terms of innovation where customers expect something from a SaaS model and you really have to deliver on that. And then one of the final points I would say is it really transforms how you think about going to market, right? Sales and marketing are fundamentally transformed in traditional ways of really selling software and technology largely go away and go away in some good ways in SaaS where you can really put customers in an experience, right? And have them evaluate your technology in a manner where they can have a trial experience, right? And in a way to really introduce them to technology very slowly and then they grow over time, right? As they see value in that software, which is very aligned to how we think about, you know, at AWS or on technology. Okay, Todd, I got to ask you, obviously, you know, want to drive that car, the SaaS car, what's under the hood, do we have the right tires? What's the conditions? And it's not any technical issues here. If I'm a customer, I'm an APN partner, okay? I'm in there, I got a traditional business, pandemic hits or just my business model's forcing me. What's your advice? What do I got to do? What's the playbook on the technical side? How do I go to the next level? Well, you know, we're obviously gonna ask a lot of questions and probably the answer to that, sadly, like most technical people will say to you is it depends, which is never the answer anybody wants to hear. But so we're definitely gonna ask a lot of questions to you about like where you're at, what are the immediate sort of pressures in your business? This is where the technical team, people in our team tend to be wearing a little bit of a business hat here where we want to know before we sort of guide you down any one particular technical path, like what are sort of the key sort of dimensions of getting you to a SaaS delivery model? But probably as a theme, generally what we're saying to people is, let's look at how we can get you there incrementally. Let's get you into a SaaS model as fast as we possibly can. So we have a lot of different sort of patterns and strategies we'll use that are about sort of incremental adoption of SaaS, which are how can I sort of lift my existing environment, move it into a SaaS model, present a SaaS offering to the business, let me operate and run, get the metrics and analytics, get the sort of operational efficiency and the DevOps goodness of SaaS, and then sort of move after that into the insides of that SaaS application and think about now, how can I begin to move that to more modern constructs? How can I move that to containers potentially or how can I begin to adopt serverless technologies? How can I apply IAM and other constructs to achieve tenant isolation? So we're really just trying to put them in a position where they can sort of incrementally modernize their applications while still realizing the benefits of getting to market in a SaaS model. So you're saying that the playbook has come in, low hanging fruit has used existing core building blocks, EC2, S3, Dynamo, whatever, and then hit the higher level services as you get more experience or is there a certain recipe that you see working for customers? So it's probably less about that. It's not about necessarily where you're at in the service continuum and which services you're using. We're going to move you to a set of services that are probably a good set of services that are that way to move your monolith and most effectively into a SaaS model as a beginning point that could land you an EC2, that could land you in containers. The more important thing we're going to do here is we're going to surround that sort of experience with all the other moving parts that you have to have billing metrics. We're going to build in onboarding so that you can get frictionless onboarding. Those are all going to be net new things you have to build. We're probably going to change your identity model and connect that up with Cognito or one of our partner solutions. So for us, it's sort of grabbing your existing environment. Can we move it over effectively, maybe modernize it a little bit along the way, but more importantly, build all those horizontal concepts in leveraging the right AWS services for you to bring that to life. That's actually smart. I like the way you described it that way. It's almost as if it's the core tenant of what Amazon stood for. You stand it up fast and you get value, right? So what you're saying is whatever it takes is a variety of tools to stand it up. I mean, this is interesting, Craig, and Todd, if you can comment on this, because one of the things that we've been reporting on, I've done probably a dozen interviews specifically around companies that have moved to the cloud early proactively, kind of in this way, not in a major radical way, but operationally they've been transforming piece by piece as how Todd, you laid it out, and then pandemic it. And they've had successfully positioned themselves to take advantage of the forcing function of necessity of dealing with remote work and all of these things that just clobbered them. So, and again, they were on the wave at the right time, kind of not because they had to because they did the right work. This is a factor. This is going to tell sign. Can you guys share your reaction of what you've seen with the SaaS factory because this is the benefit of moving to the cloud, being positioned. I mean, it's pandemic today, tomorrow it's edge. What's after that, right? Space, I mean, there's a lot of things. This is kind of the playbook. What's your reaction to that, Craig? Yeah, I certainly see, you know, organizations that we work with that are really delivering an SaaS model being more agile, right? The ability to sort of flex resources and change the way they sell and work with customers and find ways to sort of deliver to them that don't require some of the things that are really maybe some of the things that are holding the back from traditional software in terms of how fast they deliver new features and services and, you know, changing to sort of market and world dynamics very quickly, right? It's a big part of that. And, you know, one of the things we talked about in the SaaS model is really not just getting to SaaS but being to deliver in that model, right? And drive innovations to customers very quickly so that you're really getting sort of securing, you know, sort of them as loyal customers and sort of a lifetime customer, hopefully. You know, that's a big part of SaaS. Yeah, and there's two types of organizations that you guys have been successful with. The startup, obviously, you know, category creators or disruptors will come in, you know, come in with an app, born in the cloud, kick some ass, you've seen that movie, happens all the time, it's still going on. And then you've got the existing organizations that have to stay in that innovation wave and not get crushed by the change. Can you guys share how the factory's working, the SaaS factory, from a mix of clients? Is it more established? Is it startup in between? Give us a taste of what's the makeup. Yeah, it's range. Just to give you a range of some of the companies we worked with from kind of legacy technology companies or companies that have been around in some time, like BMC, you know, F5, Al fresco, we've all worked with over the past few years and they've launched products with our team on AWS, you know, to kind of startups like Matillion, you know, Cloud Zero, Cohesity, which just launched a data management and service and announced here at re-invent, to very kind of specific industry players. I think this is a trend we've seen most recently where we work with organizations like NASDAQ, iBase T in the aerospace area, Emerson in oil and gas, we've seen a number of oil and gas companies really come to us based on sort of dynamics, their industry and the constraints that customers are in in terms of how they can deliver and the value that they provide. Is there a key thing that's popping out of all these deals that kind of has, is a tell sign a pattern or a specific thing that's obvious? And then when you look at the data, when you zoom out. Yeah, I think one thing I would just say people underestimate the transformation they have to go through continually and we still have organizations that come to us and maybe they come to Todd or others and they're really, they're envisioning this as a technical transformation, and they sort of want to talk all about the application and sort of the new architecture that they want to move to, but we really see the opportunity to line business and technology around SaaS as a model and that's really fundamental to getting it right. And so, often we see organizations that really have unrealistic launch dates, which is pretty common in software and services these days, but particularly in SaaS model, we just see that they underestimate the work in front of them and kind of what they need to bring to that. Todd, real quick, before we get into the announcements, which are cool technical things that pop out of these organizations, is there the cream kind of rises to the top when you look at the value proposition, what are they focused on technically? You know, it's interesting because to me, a lot of the focus tends to be more on the things that would surprise you. Like a lot of people are want to sort of think about how to design the application and the business logic of their application and take advantage of the scale and the sizing of AWS. And those things are still all true, but really in a SaaS organization, with a really successful SaaS organizations, we'll see a lot more shift to the agility and the operational efficiency, right? So really good organizations will say, we're going to invest in all the metrics and all the analytics, all the tooling that lets us really have our finger on the pulse of what our customers are doing. And then they'll derive all their tech and their business strategy based on this really data-driven experience. And I see that as the trend and the thing we certainly advocate a ton inside of the SaaS factory is, don't underinvest in that data because that data is really, especially in a multi-tenant environment where everybody's running in this sort of shared environment, that data is essential to understanding how to morph your business, how to innovate, understand how your cost profile is really evolving. And so I see the really strong organizations building lots of the sort of foundational bits here, even ahead sometimes of building features and functions into their own products. It's not only moving fast and deploying tech is moving fast on the business model innovation as well. That's what you're basically saying. Don't overplay your hand and try to lock in the business model logic because it's going to change with the data. That's what you're saying. Yeah, they're playing for the innovation. They're playing for the agility. They're playing for new markets, new segments that may evolve. And so they're really trying to put themselves in the position of being able to pivot and move. And they're really taking pride in the fact that their technology lets them do that. You know, that's not, that's a business model that's not for the faint of heart. You know, when you have a market that has a lot of competitiveness to it and certainly was seeing the sea change happening over this year and past few years with cloud completely changing the playing field, winners and losers are emerging. And that's, I think, this key. It's, you know, as I said in the Godfather, you know, you need a wartime conciliary for these kinds of times. And this is kind of what we're seeing. And I think that's a great point, Todd. Good stuff there. Okay, so announcements. You guys had some things on stage, talked about Craig. You guys launching some new stuff, new programs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, John, I guess our model is really to learn from a range of partners and experiences we have. And then, you know, build tools and approaches to help everyone go faster, right? Because we certainly can't work with thousands of organizations. And one of the things that our team has had the opportunity over the last few years is publish a ton of articles, blogs, white papers, you know, very specific approaches to building SaaS solutions. If you search Todd Goulding out there on YouTube or anything, you'll find a bunch of things. But we wanted to bring on that all together. And so we've created a central directory called the SaaS Factory Insights Hub. And there's right now over 70 unique pieces of content that our team has produced and curated. Whether you're starting on your SaaS journey, right? You need SaaS 101 and business planning to level 400, right? Ten at isolation from Todd Goulding, right? That's all there and available to you on the SaaS Factory Program page. What's some of the interesting things that came out of that data from the insights that you can share? Yeah, a couple of things that we have, we've published most recently, I would point to are really interesting. We've just recently published a F5 case study where we go deeper in terms of their transformation to really understand what was behind the scenes in that. We also published a white paper called the SaaS Journey Framework where for the first time, our team really broke down the journey. And what are the steps required and what are some of the key questions you need to ask? And then a final piece I'd point to for the people that Todd talks to is we have a white paper on SaaS 10 and isolation strategies where we really go deep on that particular challenge and what's there. And that's also published and available on our SaaS Factory Insights Hub. Could you just define what is that mean, tenant isolation strategies? What is that? Go to Todd with that for sure. Todd, let's get that on the record. What is the definition of SaaS tenant isolation? Sure, sure. So, you know, I think I've been in the room and with a lot of people that reinvent and basically I've been in Chalk Talks and said, you know, what's tenant isolation to you? And a lot of people will say, oh, that's authentication essentially. Somebody got into the system. So now I know my system is isolated. But in a multi-tenant environment, right, where we're running all these resources and this data all commingled from all of these different tenants, it would be a huge blow to the business if one tenant somehow inadvertently exposed the resource or exposed to the resources of another tenant. And so fundamentally tenant isolation has all of these techniques and strategies and architectural patterns that you use to ensure that one tenant can inadvertently get access to the resources of another tenant. So it's a sort of a layer of protection and security that goes beyond just the authentication and authorization schemes that you'll typically see in a SaaS architecture. So that's basically like having your own room, lock and key, doorway, not just getting in that no one can access your stuff. Yeah, so it's a whole set of measures. You can imagine identity and access management and other policies sort of defining tenant boundaries and saying as each tenant is trying to access a resource or trying to interact with the system in some way, you've put these extra walls up to ensure that you can't cross those boundaries. Todd, I want to get your thoughts on this well-architected SaaS lens piece. What is this all about? Well, AWS has had for a long time the sort of the well-architected framework, which has been a really great set of sort of guiding principles and best practices around how to design and architect solutions on top of AWS. And certainly SaaS providers have been using that all along the way to sort of ask foundational questions of their architecture. But there's always been this layer of additional sort of SaaS considerations that have set on top of that or that are SaaS specific architectural patterns. And so what we've done is we've used this mechanism called the well-architected lens that lets us essentially take our SaaS architectural principles and extend the well-architected framework and introduce all these concepts into the SaaS and to the architecture pillars that really ask the hard SaaS architecture questions. So security, operations, reliability, all the sort of classic pillars that are part of the well-architected framework now have a SaaS specific context added to them to really go after those areas that are unique to SaaS providers. And this really gives developers, architects, consultants the ability to sit down and look at a SaaS application and evaluate its alignment with these best practices. And so far we can really positive response to the content. Great job, guys, doing great work. Finally, there's something new that you guys are announcing today to make life easier preview. Building SaaS on AWS, what's that about? Sure, so you can imagine we've been working with these SaaS providers for a number of years now and as we've worked with them we've seen a number of different themes emerge. And we've run into this pattern that's pretty common where we'll see these customers that have a classic sort of installed software model. They're installing it on-premises or in the cloud but basically each customer sort of has their own version of the product. They have one-off versions they have. They're potentially have customizations that are different. And while this works for some time for these businesses what they find is they sort of run into this operational efficiency and cost wall whereas they're trying to grow their businesses they just really can't sort of keep up based on the way that they're running their current systems. And this is sort of a natural draw to move them to SaaS but the other pattern that we've seen here is that these organizations are sometimes not in a position where they have the luxury of sort of going away and just saying, Hey, I'll rewrite my system or modernize it and make all of these changes. There could be any number of factors, competitive pressures, market realities, costs that just make that too much of a difficult process for them to be able to just take their application and rewrite it. And so what we did is sort of try to acknowledge that and say, what can we do to give you a more prescriptive solution of this that sort of turnkey easy button if you will to say, take my existing monolithic application that I deliver in this classic way and plug it into an existing pre-built framework and environment that is essentially includes all these foundational bits of a SaaS environment and let me just take my monolith move it into that environment and begin to offer a SaaS product to the universe. And so what we've done is we've created something and we've introduced this thing called AWS SaaS Boost. So AWS SaaS Boost, it's not an AWS service. It is an open source reference environment. So you essentially download it, you install it into your own AWS account and then this installs all these building blocks of SaaS that we've talked about. And it gives you all this sort of prescriptive ability to say, how can I now take my existing model with a environment, lift it into this experience and begin to offer that to the market as a SaaS product. So it has billing, it has metrics and analytics, all the things we've been kind of talked about here, they're all baked into that from the ground up. And we've also offered this in an open source model. So our hope here is that this is really just the starting point of this solution, which will solve one business case. But our hope is that essentially the open source community will lean in with us, help us figure out how to evolve and make this into something that addresses a broader set of needs. Well, I love the SaaS Boost. Firstly, I want to take the energy drink business there right there. It sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that SaaS Boost by the 7-Eleven. Craig, I want to get the final word with you. You've been in the SaaS business for over 20 years. You've seen this movie before. There are a lot of people who know the SaaS business and some people are learning it and you guys are helping people get there. It's different though now. What's different today because it's not just your grandfather's SaaS as the expression goes, it's different, it's new dynamics. What is the most important thing people should pay attention to whether they have a SaaS legacy kind of mindset or they're new to the game? Take us home. Yeah, I think certainly getting to SaaS is not the end of the journey. We see really successful SaaS providers just continue to differentiate. And then one of the things that I think we've seen successful SaaS providers do is really take advantage of AWS services to go faster. That's really key. I think in this model is to really find a way to accelerate your business and deliver value faster and just sort of keep that differentiation innovation there. And I would just say now that there's more information out there available than ever. And not only from our team, but from a host of people that really are SaaS experts in all this space. And so lots of resources available to everyone. All right. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on great insight, great segment on getting to SaaS, SaaS Boost, just the landscape. You guys are helping customers get there. And that's really the top priority. It's necessities, the mother of all invention during this pandemic more than ever keeping business model going and establishing new ones. So thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us, John. Okay, it's theCUBE's virtual coverage. We are a SaaS business now. We're virtual, bringing you remote SaaS, CUBE and more coverage in re-invent next few weeks. Thanks for watching.