 Here you are and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. John, we have two live sets. It's a dueling set right across from us. Two remote studios, over 100 guests on theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2021. Amazing, been great. We've had great conversations. We're talking about the next generation of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program, Lisa Brunei is here, the CEO and co-founder of DLZP Group. Lisa, welcome. Hi, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and John. It's a great opportunity for me. And John's lucky he gets to Lisa's for the price of one in one second. Yes. Talk to me about DLZP. This is a woman and minority-owned company. Congratulations, that's awesome. But talk to us about your organization and then we'll kind of dig into your partnership with AWS. Sure, so DLZP Group, we found it in 2012. And for us, we were, at the time, we were just looking for a way to offer a value-added service to our customers. We wanted to always make sure that we were giving them the best quality. But what I also wanted to do is I wanted to create an environment for my employees where they felt valued. And we kind of built these core values back then about respect, flat hierarchy, team learning, mentorship, and we incorporated, so everybody can do this remotely from around the world. So we've always made sure that our employees and customers are getting the best value. What kind of customers, what target market, what kind of customers do you guys work with? Well, we've actually made sure that we're diverse. We make sure that we have 50% in public sector and 50% in private sector. But it's been a very interesting journey for us because once we started in one sector, like we started with cities, then a number of cities started contacting us to do more business. So it's always been this hurdle to make sure we're diverse enough to make sure we offer the best solutions. And you jumped in with AWS back in 2012 when most folks were still, to your point, I saw your interview earlier this summer thinking about Amazon as a bookstore. Why AWS, what did you see as the opportunity back in 2012 with them? Well, when we first heard about AWS, my first thought is, well, it's amazon.com. What is AWS? And then once we started talking to them, we saw the capabilities and the potential there. We saw what it could do. So we partnered with them to actually have the first working PeopleSoft customer on AWS. So that's a large ERP application and that helped build the foundation to prove what could actually run on the cloud. And since then, we've been able to prove so much more about the technology and what AWS is accomplishing. Was it a hard sell back in the day? It was a little bit hard, but it was interesting because we were speaking with one of our customers. They're on-premise and they're like, well, you know, we're going to have to redo our whole data center. We're talking about millions of dollars. We don't really have the budget to redo this. And that's when we're like, well, we have this great partnership with Amazon. We think this would be the perfect opportunity to let you try the cloud and see how successful it will be. Lisa, I want to point out, you're one of the pathfinders that Adam Sileski pointed out because back in 2012, getting people soft onto the cloud, which is really big effort. But that's what everyone's doing now. I just saw the news here. SAP is running their application on Graviton too. So you start to see in public sector during the pandemic, we saw a ton of connects. So you were really on this whole ERP. ERPs are big applications, they're not small. But now everyone's kind of going that way. What's the current, how do you feel about that one? And what's the current update relative to the kind of projects you got going on? Well, we've evolved quite a bit. I mean, PeopleSoft is always going to be in our DNA. A lot of my employees are ex Oracle employees. They helped develop a lot of the foundations for PeopleSoft. But since then, we've worked with serverless technology when that was released a number of years ago. We asked our team, okay, AWS just talked about Lambda serverless technology. Go figure out what is the best solution. We ended up running our website serverless. We were one of the first. And from that, we brought our website costs down from hundreds of dollars to pennies a month. So it's a huge savings. And then we started about two years ago, we spoke with our utility company. They were saying how with machine learning, they were only going able to get a 75% accuracy for their wind turbines. And we said, well, let us take a shot at it. We have some great solutions on AWS that we think might work. We were able to redo their algorithm using AWS cloud native tools, open source data to get a 97 to 99% accuracy on a daily basis. And that saves them millions of dollars each day. John's right. And as Adam was saying with some of the folks, customers he was highlighting on main stage the other day, you are a pathfinder. How did you get the confidence, especially as a female minority owned business? I'd love to just get maybe for some of those younger viewers out there. How did you get the confidence to, you know what? I think we can do this. I think for me, I don't like to take no for an answer. There's always a solution. So we're always looking at technology, seeing how we can use it to get a better answer. What do you think about reinvent this year? A lot of goodies here. Oh, yes. Every year there's always new creative juices flowing because it's a learning conference, but it also feels like a futuristic kind of conference. What's your take this year? I don't know if you happen to attend Midnight Madness when they were talking about robotics and the future with that. I mean, we've been talking about that for a number of years, of what could be created with robotics. Like even my son back in middle school was talking about creating a robot butler. He just, everybody knows what the future is. And it's so great that we finally have the foundation technology to be able to create these things. Well, if you're someone that doesn't like to say no, does your son actually have a robot butler these days? He's still working on it. That's a good answer to say, hey, sorry, your mom's not going to be there. Get the robot going. Exactly. The latency thing, this is the robot. First of all, we love the robotics thing. I think it's huge. We just had George on who's the prod PM for EC2 Edge and the wavelength stuff looks really promising for the robotics stuff. It's super exciting. Yes, we can't wait to start playing with it more. I mean, it's something that our team has been dabbling. We spent probably about 30% of our time on R&D. So we're looking at the future and what we can invent next. Because you guys can affect such dramatic changes for customers, you talked about that wind turbine customer going from 75% accuracy to 97, 98%. Where are your customer conversations? Because are they at the C level with showing organizations the dramatic reduction in costs and workforce productivity increase that they can get? We talk with everyone. It could be the solution architect. It could be an intern and we're just sharing our ideas with them and we also talk with the C level. It's just everybody is interested and they have different ideas that they want to share. So with the solution architect, we can share with them the code and how we're going to architect it. While at the C level, we just pointed out black and white. This is your cost now. This is what your cost is going to be. And everybody is happy. They jump on board with it. Lisa, you mentioned 30% R&D by the way. That's awesome by the way. That's well above most averages. What are you working on? Because I totally think companies should have a big R&D play around budget. Get a sandbox going, get some tinkering. Because you never know where the real discovery is. We had David Brown on who runs EC2. Nitro came out of a card on the network. So you never know where the next innovation comes from. What are you guys doing for R&D? What's the fun projects or what endeavors do you have? So there's two of them. One is actually a product which is a little bit out of our comfort zone. But we're looking to develop something that will be able to help NASA. So that's the goal. We've been working on it since they released their mission to Mars projection. So it's something that we're very passionate about. But then we're also building a software. We've been working on it for about three years now. And we actually have two customers prototyping it. So we're hoping to be able to launch it to the public within the next year. You mentioned NASA and I just about jumped out of my chair. That was my first job at a grad school was working with the space program. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're helping them do? I love how forward thinking that they are, obviously they always have been, but tell me a little bit more about that. So I can't share too much because it's, one of those things is a common sense thing. Once you think about it a little bit more, it's kind of like, why didn't anybody never think about this? So we're using new technology and old technology together to combine the solution. Ooh, I can't wait to learn more. Talk to us about the Think Big for Small Business TB SB program at AWS. How long have you guys been a part of that? And what is it going to enable you to do in 2022? So the Think Big for Small Business program was the brainchild of Sandy Carter. And I am always going to be grateful to her. I met with her in 2019. I shared our journey with her about how we started out being a premier partner. And then over time, because there's so many other partners, we were downgraded. And just because we're a small business and even if I had every employee, even my admin staff certified, we would never have enough employees to be to the next level. Even though we had the customers, the references. So she listened to us and other small businesses and created the program. And it's been a great opportunity for us because we're gaining access to capital, funding for opportunities, we're getting resources for training. For us, it's been a huge advantage. Sounds like a part of that AWS flywheel that we always talk about, John Sandy Carter being one of our famous CUBE alumni. She was just on yesterday with you a couple times. There's so many opportunities for all businesses because you can tackle these problems. You don't have to be a large partner. You can have specialty and AI works really well in these specialized environments and even technically single threaded and multi-threaded applications, which is a technical CS term, is actually better to have a single threaded. If you have too many cores, it's actually bad, technically. So the world's changing like big time on how technology. So I'm a huge fan of the program. And I think like it's just one of those things where people can get up from cloud and be successful. Yes, and that's the goal. I mean, there is so much opportunity in the cloud and we bring interns on all the time just so they can learn. And what resonated with me the most was we brought a high school senior in. He goes, I was with you guys for three months. I learned more in three months and I did four years of high school. And he's like, you set me up for the future. Oh my gosh, if there's not validation for what you're doing. Yeah, that's great purpose. In that statement alone, my goodness. Well, some of the things that are, so many exciting announcements that have come out of this reinvent, so great to be back in person one. But also being able to help AWS customers become data companies, because as we've been talking about the last couple of days, every company has to be a data company. You got to figure it out if you're, if you haven't by now, there's a competitor right back here who's ready to take your spot. Talk to us about what excites you about enabling companies to become data companies as we head into 2022. Well, for us, everybody has so much data nowadays. You know, I mean, even think about your cell phones, how much data is stored in that. So each device has so much information, but what do you do with it? So it's great because a lot of these companies are trying to figure out how can we use this data to improve the experience for our customers. So that's where we've been coming in and showing them, okay, well, you can take that data, you look at Lisa and John's cell phone, you see that they love to look up where they're going to go on their next vacation. You can start creating algorithms to make sure that they get the best experience, one, for their next vacation, two, make sure it's not, it won't rob the bank. Awesome, I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so I'll be expecting some help from you on that. Lisa, it's been great to have you on the program. Yeah, congratulations on the success, the partnership, and where can folks go if young or old viewers are watching and are interested in working with you, what's the website, where can they go to learn more information? Sure, so they can go to dlzpgroup.com. dlzpgroup.com, awesome, Lisa, thanks so much for coming back on the program, great to see you. Thank you so much. All right, for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.