 All right, we are back at AWS Summit San Francisco 2014 in Moscone Center, the first of 14 AWS summits in 2014. They're going all around the world, all over the US. Australia, I think is on the agenda. South America, Europe, of course. I'm sure they're gonna be in Asia. We're gonna be in New York. We're gonna be at AWS re-invent in Vegas later in the year. And like we like to do, we go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We get the smartest people in the room we can find. We invite them on theCUBE and ask them all the right questions. So I'm joined here by Barry Russell. Head of Business Development for AWS Marketplace. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Pleasure, you've been on before it first time. First time, huh? Very good. First time caller, long-time listener, first time caller. It's what we like to have. Long time viewers. So tell us what's going on in Marketplace. A lot of big announcements today. Do you have some good announcements this morning? Yeah, we did. We had a session earlier where we covered both the APN run by Dorothy Copeland as well as Marketplace Business. We'll talk a little bit about the value for both AWS customers as well as the partner community and some of the products they were listing and why they list products on the Marketplace. So what is kind of the growth trajectory in the Marketplace from the partner perspective and the application perspective? What were some of the early players in there? What are some of the new entrants that you're getting and what's kind of the direction specifically from kind of an enterprise point of view? Sure. Yeah, when we launched in April 2012, we had a smaller population of applications, a couple hundred at that point and we've grown it to just over 1,400 applications today. 1,400. 1,400, yeah. 1,400 listings that customers can search using a search tool that we have, find and then of course buy, consume on AWS. In terms of the types of ISVs that list, it really ranges from some super interesting startups, some of whom are located in this particular area in the Bay Area, companies such as Jasper Soft, all the way up to large companies like Adobe, recently releasing their media server product on Marketplace Cisco, releasing a cloud router product on Marketplace this week, as well as a number of other larger ISVs that have decided to take advantage of a new sales channel. And how difficult is it for them to configure their application to work within not only the Amazon AWS infrastructure, but you've got such a breadth of applications of your own that those things potentially integrate to you. Are they mapped up one to one? Is there some universal API structure that they plug into? How does that work? Yeah, so we have a whole publishing process that they follow and my team walks them through. Believe it or not, even some of the larger ISVs, they package their software up in the format we call an Amazon machine image or an AMI. Even for some of the larger vendors, it takes them under a month. Most it takes about two weeks to package up the software in a format that we can load into the Marketplace. Takes us a couple of days to test it. The vendor provides us with some data, some metadata description about their product. And in less than 30 days, their product is up and available on the Marketplace for customers all over the world to buy off of AWS. Now are all of them like an Amazon instance of their core application inside of the cloud or are some of them simply kind of API connectors back to maybe an on-prem version or some kind of legacy version of the app? No, they're all predominantly products that are based in the AMI format, the Amazon machine image format. And customers can purchase an instance of it. And so what happens when the customer comes in the store and they find a product that they want to buy? For example, let's say the customer is looking for a network infrastructure product. They identify the product, they see a price associated with the software and the instance size that they want to launch, they choose the region they want to launch. And we have this feature called OneClick, which is pretty cool. It enables the customer to literally just hit a button and sit back in a few minutes later, the product is actually up and running in a production-ready mode, fully configured to run and optimized on AWS. So it takes a lot of the friction and error out of launching software that normally a customer feels on-prem and literally reduces it to minutes. I mean, customers are used to weeks, if not months, deployment cycles to launch a product, the procurement of hardware, all the cycles and testing. I mean, we've literally shrunk that to a few minutes. Now what about from a licensing point of view, your guys pricing is very granular, there's a lot of options. It's a Chinese menu, if you will, of kind of different types and sizes and scale and power. A lot of enterprise applications aren't priced that way. They're either by seed or by user or by enterprise. So how, is there a lot of morphing that you find from your partners to have to modify their pricing to fit kind of into the customer expectation or how does that kind of get down? They do. There is some modification that the product teams at the ISVs, the technology partners have to do. And we offer a couple of different pricing models. The vendors can charge by the month or they can map to how EC2 is consumed and charge by the hour. So as an example, we have some database products that map to a, for example, let's say you're charging 99 cents an hour for the software and then there's a charge by the hour for the utility computing piece, the EC2 piece as well. So, but to be fair, there is some math that has to be done in order to take what most ISVs sell today in term of a long-term perpetual license and convert that into an hourly rate. But again, it usually happens within that 30-day process. They're able to quickly figure out what they should charge and how they should charge in marketplace. And what we find is that customers like having some control over how they consume the software. Sure, I would imagine there's also conflict in terms of usually I sell an annual subscription, I get my 15 or 20% every year and now you're telling me people can spin it up, spin it down, spin it up, spin it down. That's gotta be an adjustment for some of these guys. For some of the sales channels, and one of the things that we've done to address that is we've rolled out a program called Sales Enablement. It's really the first step is deal registration. And what we're doing is we're working with a number of ISVs and their sales teams to register deals that their sales reps wanna close using the marketplace fulfillment. And I'll get in a second to why I think that's important. So, regular sales guys be using marketplace as a fulfillment channel? Right, because what ends up happening is they can calculate sometimes how much of the product their customer's going to use and they can work with their sales ops teams to get properly compensated. But when they register the deal, it does a couple of things. One, it gives them some visibility into how the customer's using their product. Two, it helps unlock proof of concept funds that we can give to those sales teams that the customer can run a pilot or a proof of concept and we can help inject some money to help make that sale and close that opportunity on marketplace. But some of the feedback that we're getting is that the sale happens much faster in marketplace. And the reason is because the customer already has an AWS account established. So there's a procurement vehicle already there. So the sales person goes in and sells the value of the software and literally the customer can go back to their desk and start using it and give it a try. So that's interesting, a proof of concept payment. So that's kind of a specialized structure of a commission, if you will, or like an MDF kind of thing. The sales rep at the ISV surfaces a few opportunities that they think would be a good fit for AWS. They work with our team on the scope of those opportunities and then we can evaluate and give some funds to help offset any of the costs the customer might spend in running on PC2 while the software is given for free because we built a free trial feature in the marketplace and it enables ISVs to give up to 30 days of their software free so that they can do those types of trials and put the concept. Interesting, I hadn't thought of that one. And so the sales people use that as a tool. Right, right. So we're getting the hook, we're short on time. So I'll ask you one last question. We've been talking about from the, your partner's point of view, from the customer point of view, clearly the benefits, it's easy. They've already got an account, they shop, they click, they buy. Is there some other hidden benefit that's not so apparent that people should think about when they go into the marketplace? It's really three things. It's a selection, it's the ease of search to find what they want, transparent pricing and how quickly and friction-free they can launch the product. Cool icons, too, in the store, maybe? Cool icons, yeah. It's a cool icon. Thanks for coming on, Gary. Look, we're just doing our mobile application right now so we've been working on our, we've been working on our icons. So we're very excited. We're ready for it. Great, so thanks for coming on theCUBE. Again, we're at AWS Summit San Francisco 2014. We'll be right back after this short break with our next guest. Thanks for tuning in.