 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Welcome to theCUBE, this is our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 with special coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, I've got a couple of gentlemen from BMC software joining me. Please welcome Grave Bukowski, the Technology Solutions Director and Simon Blanks, Area Vice President. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on theCUBE virtual. Great to be here, Lisa. Thank you, Alex. Representing social distancing from across the country here. So guys, I'd like to just start, Greg, with you. Give our audience an understanding of your role, Technology Solutions Director, your role and responsibilities at BMC. Sure, I play the role of a field CTO, so I actually am aligned with our Strategic CTO office and I bring their message to our customers, all of our strategic customers within North America. And Simon, tell us a little bit about your role as Area Vice President. Well, first of all, thanks for having us. I have responsibility for our channels and our partners in the Americas. So I get to work both within our organization with our customers and with our partners to help them grow, to help us grow and deliver value to our customers. Speaking of your customers, Simon, the last year has been incredibly challenging and brought on a lot of challenges but opportunities. Talk to me about how that has impacted BMC's customers. Well, that's a great question. I think our customers are wanting to simplify. They're wanting to focus on what makes them win, right? And get away from the things that are not the competitive advantage. We see a lot of customers wanting to get out of the day-to-day operation of the data centers and migrate to the world of AWS. But it's not as easy as we would all like it. There's lots of challenges. AWS consulting partners are there to help them. One of the largest areas of challenges we see that they're having to address is manage these millions of IT assets that are constantly changing. And some of them they don't even know exist. And moving those to AWS, but moving them quickly, securely, and of course in a cost-effective manner. Talk to me a little bit about some of the speed. Like in the last nine months, say, have you seen an acceleration of those customers wanting to move workloads to AWS? Because we think of way back when the pandemic started and every business had to suddenly send workforces home no access to a data center or very limited. Is that something that you've seen speed up the last few months? Yeah, we believe it's not only gained in velocity, but will continue. We don't think that some of these changes to how a business is conducted are going to stop once the vaccine comes out. And the complexity of making this happen, it's difficult, especially in some of the very large organizations, be it banks or Cortella comms or manufacturers or retailers. It's not an easy chore. And we've experienced some great wins in that area in helping some of our most strategic customers make that happen. So talk to me a little bit about Simon, what's your elevator pitch? When you're going in, I know you talk with customers, you talk with partners. How do you describe BMC and what you guys deliver? Well, BMC is a 40 year old company with 6,000 employees. We help 93% of the global 1000 manage their IT infrastructure, right? In addition to that, we help thousands of other customers with the same problems. So what I tell organizations is we're there to help them be successful and to make things tick. Awesome, thank you. So Greg, talk to me about more about the BMC solutions. You said in your role, you're also field CTO. What are some of the BMC solutions that you recommended AWS consulting partners consider to help customers, especially in this time as you're seeing more and more migrations to AWS? Yeah, I think that's a great point, Lisa. I mean, with the pandemic coming in, there's initial pullback, right? That we saw from our customers. And now as the summer came on, not that it's gotten less, right? I'm obviously it's a big concern for customers, but the realization of how they're going to operationalize themselves and still be a tech driven company, a tech driven organization has really accelerated their digital transformation and it's driven more than anything, the adoption of cloud technologies. And to move into that cloud space, it's brought about understanding customers, how do they become more digital? And to do that, they have to connect their services. So underlying that challenge is really what we want to bring today to talk about is that BMC has an industry leading solution. It's called a BMC discovery solution. And it automatically goes within an organization's footprint and understands the dependencies between their infrastructure and their applications. That's really difficult, right? Typically we can just find assets, right? Most, a lot of solutions out there can do that. What BMC does and what our solution does that's unique in this space is that it understands the relationships so that you understand from an application viewpoint which ultimately ties back to a business service into the software that runs on those assets into the applications that are supporting that as well as the platforms of infrastructure. And that becomes more and more complex today when we see their customers as they have cloud services, they've got containers, they've got on-premise stuff. So we're working with customers today, right? We've got real largest retailers in the US working with them to actually transform how they're doing business continuity. So it becomes not only an acceleration but a risk version program for them as well as a cost savings effort of trying to adopt and understanding those services from both within their data center through the mainframe back into their cloud, right? And understanding all those interdependencies so that they can run their business more efficiently. So Greg, have you automated what used to be a traditionally manual lengthy process of that discovery? I think that is the key point, Lisa. I mean, when the partners look to us for what value we can bring to them, it's about accelerating that time. It's all about reducing the time through automation what used to be a manual effort of understanding how these things connect and being able to having to go talk to the application teams. We worked with a large bank as well. They were using other solutions in the marketplace. They were taking six, nine months to map a single business service, which is complex, right? It's got about a dozen applications that support it. We brought in our solution and they did it in three hours with one piece of information from an application team. It was unbelievable, right? And these are the stories we hear all the time from our customers. And this is a great solution that we have that runs at AWS. It's part of our AWS migration competency that we have. And, you know, this is why we're here today on theCUBE. Well, that speed improvement is massive. As you just talked about Greg, and you think of organizations now that there is no time, there is no six to nine months to figure things out anymore, right? Especially because we've all learned, I think, a lot in the last nine months, professionally and personally, but there's competition out there that's ready to come and be nimble and faster and maybe with less legacy than any type of woods that there's a retailer or a financial institution. So being able to get in there and discover and align this business and IT services folks to discover what they have, where they should move it that fast is really something that sounds to me like not just a survival mechanism keeping the lights on during the strange time, but something that may even set apart the winners and the losers of tomorrow. Absolutely, right? I mean, you have to be able to tie in to your existing infrastructure for a print that traditional legacy or heritage as we call it, for a print that you have that still runs your core business, right? If you're a retailer, it's probably some kind of supply chain, right? If you're a bank, it's all the financial transaction stuff that you did. But then also adopt the technology and innovation that exists within the FinTech space for a financial services customer to bring that together. And when you're doing that, the native integration point, a lot of it comes into the cloud services, right? And that's really where they're gonna get the acceleration to attack new markets, grow their margin in that space and that's where they need partners to help them, right? To adopt and learn those technologies and integrate those. Additionally, right? We have all their advanced capabilities that we offer from an AWS migration competency standpoint around cloud optimization. So when those services are running in there, we also do a cost optimization that doesn't look at it from the infrastructure standpoint but actually takes the same discovery data and lines it back to the lines of business. So the line of business now has visibility into if they're gonna change what their operating model is, how that's gonna affect the cost in the backend services. They can optimize their resources. So Simon, looking at the capabilities that BMC is delivering, talk to me about the BMC partner program. Why become a BMC partner? I think there's a couple of answers to that. First of all, what Greg was talking about in terms of this massive, I'll call it reinvention of the amount of time it takes to perform some of these tasks, some of these tasks that are done in every migration from months to days or hours. That in and of itself can help the AWS consulting partners massively in their efforts. So that's one. But I think more importantly than that is the culture of BMC and the importance of partners and the focus that it's getting, whether or not it be from our board or CEO or down the management ranks. So the channel has become massively important to our success and we're committed to helping our partners be successful. We're committing to help them make money. We're actually as a part of AWS re-invent here, we're going to offer an incentive to partners to come and join our family. Traditionally there's enablement and costs associated with that and we're going to refund that cost. Plus we're going to invest our monies and refund any costs associated with the first co-marketing effort together that we can go out to the market and help them. So I think it's sort of the three legs of the school. The technology itself is impressive, the commitment of our leadership and we're also willing to make it very economically attractive. So that would be the reasons. Everybody likes that, especially economically attractive. So in terms of what you're offering, you said that around re-invent, with respect to interested perspective partners, how do they move forward with BMC to become an AWS consulting partner? What's that process like? Well, we have an onboarding team that Susan Duroff, she reports into me and helps me with that process. But the best way to do it would be to contact me directly. My email address is simon underscore blanks at BMC.com. And if you reach out to me directly, I'll make sure we get back to you promptly. We can have further discussions and facilitate it. And we really look forward to making that happen. It's pretty excellent personal service, I like that. So Greg, talk to me as we get towards the wrap here. As the field CTO, looking forward into 2021, which we all hope is going to be significantly better than 2020, what are some of the opportunities that you see that this time has uncovered for the IT folks and the business folks to get even stronger alignment? Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity for customers to realize that bringing together the IT organizations in alignment with their business organizations is a great opportunity from the Revolut to accelerate their adoption of technology, accelerate their migrations into adoption of cloud services, but then also look for the opportunities to take advantage of to grow revenue streams, right? I mean, challenges present opportunities and opportunities present growth, right? That's how customers grow when they recognize those opportunities and become agile enough to adopt them and then go after them. That's a great mindset because it's absolutely true. It's not matter of how we look at it and look at what's being uncovered to then kind of exploit for good new products, new services, competitive differentiators, all sorts of things going on. Well gentlemen, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE virtual today. Thank you for joining me. Thank you so much, appreciate the time and thank you. All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.