 Well, we extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests that we can find. We like sports analogies. We like to bring you tech athletes. And we're here. We're surrounded by tech athletes at the AWS Summit. We're here in Moscone. I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. Jeff Frick and I have been at it all day, wall-to-wall coverage of AWS Summit. Saje Krishnan is here. He's the general manager of the AWS Marketplace, a very interesting story here. Not just an app store, much more. We're going to hear about that. Saje, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, David. Jeff. Nice to be here. Welcome. So tell us about the AWS Marketplace. It's been getting a lot of buzz here at the event and in the industry. So what is it and why does it matter? Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. So it's more than an app store. You can stop by thinking about it very simplistically as an app store for business software. But there's a lot more to it. So it's certainly a place where customers can come and find software, purchase it easily. But that's where you take the next step. You can actually deploy and run the software in the cloud. So if you come to Marketplace, you see 25 categories of software. So business software across the spectrum. And you're able to actually select, see the pricing quite easily. One click, and you're ready to launch. Five minutes if only your software is running in the cloud. So when you say ready to launch, you configure all the infrastructure required and essentially purpose build that infrastructure on the fly. Am I getting that right? Absolutely. So the beauty of this is you don't have to understand the nuances of AWS. You are used to say SAP HANA software on your server in your local data center. You can get the same experience on the AWS cloud. And you don't have to learn about the nuances of just one click. And five minutes later, you see, welcome to SAP HANA. So in theory, you're not actually purchasing an app. You're just lighting one up. That's sitting there next to the other stuff. You already have lit up. So you're almost configuring your delivery of your AWS solution rather than buying and piecing things together. It's just sitting there, right? It's sitting there ready to go. That's essentially renting it. It's utility-based pricing. You're pricing by the hour. The price is right there to see. You don't have to negotiate with or a month over complex enterprise terms. It's pretty easy. The price is up there. It's a buck an hour. And there is, you know, for the software, say. And then there is a couple of bucks for the AWS infrastructure. And it's all transparent and one click. Five minutes later, you're ready to use it. Who is the enabler to allow you guys to launch this? I mean, obviously, you have to have a transaction system. But you guys are obviously good at that. But you also have to have knowledge of the application and the workload requirement. So you just build that up over time and then now have enough data to identify those patterns so that you can accurately deploy those systems or where there are other sort of enablers there. So on this, you know, we are looking at, today we have just under 800 listings of products. So it's hard to claim deep expertise in all 800 products and 300 sellers. So the seller actually will test the software. They've got a whole spectrum of AWS instance sizes in a small CPU configurations, more memory, it spans the gamut, less storage, high performance storage. They will recommend configurations and they may choose to have seller, may choose to have a small configuration, a medium configuration and a large. And they have different pricing by that. So they will actually set up the configuration and the customer, based on whether they're a small business or a mid-scale department or looking at 2000 seats, they can choose the appropriate size. So the expertise is in the field. Again, it's the classic self-service model. You got the building blocks. We just quote-unquote bottled it. So Sanjay, let me ask you, one of the dirty little secrets of enterprise sales has nothing to do with the technology. When I used to sell stuff, we always get mired in the legal, right? We always get mired in the vendor setup and the T's and C's and the liability clauses and all this stuff that has nothing really to do with the business guy trying to get a problem solved. How, I mean, one click and implement implies that people are, you know, chicken in the box and purchasing. I mean, how are you finding that uptake within what traditionally would be the, oh, you got to talk to my vendor setup folks and you got to negotiate this paper and that paper and that paper before we can get to the agreement? So, honestly, there is a standard agreement. You know, just as if you were purchasing consumer software, there's like, let's say Intuit or QuickBooks or what have you. You know, there is an agreement that you have to go through. We also have a standard agreement. But the point is that the variances are not a whole lot. It's standard. It's right there. Now, if you had to negotiate that, there's not opportunity for that. It's, you know, what it is, is all there. Right, right. But you're finding people they're good with. The value exceeds the, I mean, the pain was never worth the value to have to negotiate with the lawyers anyway. But you're finding the uptake, you know, the value exceeds the... The uptake is enormous, right? That's terrific. So what you're finding is over the last quarter, like from the beginning of the year, we've had nearly more than 100% growth in our customer base. And people who have actually been using, customers who have been using software, 53% more usage on average. So customers love this stuff. And another interesting statistic is that over 95% of customers, whether they are, you know, current users or have used in the past, would happily recommend AWS Marketplace to their friends. We are humbled by that. But it's a very gratifying agreement. Totally. Exactly. Wow, fantastic. So now, talk a little bit more about what types of software are available. Really, what's hot right now? So two questions there. What is available? We have roughly, as I said, about 800 listings, just under 800 listings over 25 categories. We want to provide software across the spectrum. So in three broad buckets, you know, we have business software. So whether it's CRM or ERP or business intelligence, we have the second category is infrastructure software. So networking, security, storage, et cetera. And then, of course, you know, we have a lot of developer customers. So we have developer tools about tracking, testing, and so on. Now what's popular? And by the way, you know, we are always looking to hear back from customers about, you know, what exactly they want. So this is a constant quest for us to invite more sellers and products. And if customers come to our site and they don't see some software, by all means, you know, please tell us. We would love to get those sellers and products on board. Now what is popular? Basically, a glance at our gateway or our homepage will give you a snapshot of what's popular. So for instance, amongst our larger software vendors and their products, SAP HANA, Jaspersoft, Riverbed, Citrix, those are all pretty popular. When you look at open source, a whole spectrum of open source products are particularly adopted by our customers. So whether it's Drupal or Joola in content management, a whole spectrum of operating system stacks, lamp stacks. When you look at startup offerings, a lot of database products are very popular, longer DB, couch based, scale arc. Most recently we had, you know, Burst as a business intelligence popular who joined Market Close. Yeah, so you mentioned HANA. That's an interesting one because, you know, a lot of people, whether you like HANA or not, it doesn't really matter. I guarantee if you're an SAP salesperson, you're incentive to sell HANA. You're not going to make it to club if you don't sell HANA. Bill McDermott will stand by that. The point is, if you're selling HANA and you're an SAP sales rep, and you got to get a proof of concept spun up, this is going to take a long time to get server infrastructure. You're making phone calls, you're bagging, you're borrowing, you're horse trading. You're talking about one click in an AWS marketplace that proof of concept is up and running. That's huge for the sales teams. For enterprise sale, you know, I would be disingenuous if I said that in two minutes enterprise software is up and usable and done. So a great example for SAP HANA is a Japanese customer who went from first exposure to through proof of concept to signed contract in two weeks. Now the systems integrator sat with the customer. But the point was that a lot of the extraneous blockages were taken out of the equation. You didn't have to wait for servers. You didn't have to wait for the scheduling, the storage admin to kind of carve out the storage and then link the storage to the servers, et cetera, et cetera. All you needed to do was have a HANA expert and a customer who has a need jointly set together. And it took a couple of weeks, more than five minutes. Five minutes you can get the first instance of. But now you need to populate it. You need to kind of set up all the analytics, et cetera. The whole point was it was enterprise use ready in two weeks. Yeah, I mean two weeks to go through the proof of concept, whereas you're lucky to get a server up and running in two weeks on premise. Totally. I mean in storage devices. Yeah, absolutely. You can get servers down in two weeks. Yeah, you're doing pretty well. Get good processes. Yeah. So you bring up an interesting point. You said the SI was there the whole way and during the keynote this morning, Andy talked about now you guys have people services as well, professional services, et cetera. Are there non-software assets being sold in the marketplace? Are you seeing some of the people's services come into play? So we are starting to see that but we're not yet selling that as a product. We're just learning to walk and then run to something that we look at. But certainly in terms of resellers and systems integrators, they are looking at marketplace products and taking it, the expo mile, customizing it for customers. So we see that all day long. Now this is exclusive to AWS customers, right? Is that correct or no? No, it's for definitely long time AWS customers will happily use marketplace. There are several of them that are firing up hundreds of instances of operating systems for instance simply because it's so convenient. They're experts in marketplace, in AWS infrastructure and they could very well configure this any which way but they chose to use marketplace because it's so easy. Now it is especially relevant for new customers, for new users, first time users to AWS because it really takes away the requirement of learning any of the nuances of AWS and regardless, you know, AWS is easy to use but there is still certain idiosyncrasies you have to learn. Well I couldn't use it, right? But I could go to the AWS marketplace. Absolutely and you can run, let's say your website, go fire up an instance of Jula and if you know how to use Jula you can go ahead and use that for your website. Right, there are certain apps that I might, as a business person, have expertise in but they don't necessarily have to be a developer to take advantage of that. You said it, that would be great. Now what's the business model, Sanjay? Are you selling, obviously you sell the infrastructure, are you taking a vig on the software piece and how does that all work? So for a dollar of software that's purchased by the buyer we take 20% off the top and 80% off the collections is sent to the seller. So very friendly for the software, for the ISV. Very friendly and this is particularly relevant to say a startup, right? So they come to marketplace, the customer gets to buy using their Amazon account. So it's familiar, they don't have to worry about is this software coming from a new and untested vendor, it's curated, safe bits, it's through their AWS account with the standard Amazon customer service and for the seller they're able to just focus on their innovation. They don't have to worry about billing and collections and so on, we take care of all that, right? And if you're a startup, launch this on Marketplace and you're selling the software globally. Are there any exclusive Marketplace kind of software startups now that you're aware of where you can speak to who went that route and things just clicked and why go with traditional distribution? If you are a software innovator, you'd be remiss if you're not actually pursuing multiple channels and as with any business you want to be in multiple channels. And AWS Marketplace is certainly a strong channel for them but today I can't think of anyone that's using it exclusively. We hope that will be the case in the future. That'll be an interesting day though. I mean, it's kind of like the arbitraging on the computing resources. There's these kind of second order effects that are really indicative of the maturity of the market and how it's grown and really seeded and that will be another interesting one. I think it's an interesting goal line to set for us internally. However, I think as a software entrepreneur I probably want to be in a couple of different places. How did you end up here? Just a personal question. I mean, you've got a background running a few storage companies, where you've got NetApp, Parascale, and there's a lot of storage disruption going on. How did you end up as the general manager of the AWS Marketplace? Yes, that's an interesting question from bottom of the stack to top of the stack. Really? Shot right up to where the top of the value chain is. Yeah, I think it is the time of the cloud and AWS is really delivering possible value in unique and differentiated ways and I just wanted to be a part of that and it was a long conversation but I was impressed with all that AWS is doing and wanted to be a part of the team. Yeah, awesome. I mean, the storage is interesting too. There's a lot of disruption obviously going on with the flash coming in and the cloud storage. You were a core part of that and you still are, but less directly. Thank you. Yeah. So, all right, Sajee. Well, thanks very much for coming to the Cube and clarifying some of the questions that people have about the AWS Marketplace. Very exciting. Congratulations on all the progress and good luck going forward. Appreciate your knowledge about Marketplace. Thank you, Dave. Oh, pleasure. Pleasure. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We're right back with our next guest. We're live. This is the Cube. We're at Moscone and we're going wall-to-wall all day. We'll be right back.