 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Good to have you back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at AWS re-invent. Day one, we're here for all three days, so we have probably about three dozen guests lined up here, this particular CUBE set, and really a delight to be here once again, our seventh time at this show. I'm John Walls with Justin Warren. We're now joined by Milos Marjanovic. She was the Vice President of Product Management at ZEO. Milos, good to see you, sir. Good to see you too, thanks for having us. You bet, and Kevin Sheehan, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Siena. Kevin, how are you, sir? Very good, thank you. Good, nice to be here. Let's talk about your respective companies first, just to let folks who are watching know what you do and then what do you do together? So Milos, first off, tell us a little bit about ZEO. Sure, so ZEO is a communications infrastructure provider, primarily we own and operate fiber optic networks. Now, we're here to exhibit a product called CloudLink, which specializes in getting people into the cloud by bypassing the public internet. So there's some inherent values associated with that. Because we operate at the infrastructure layer, as you get up the stack and you add on software and other solutions on top of that, partners like Siena are important for us to have more holistic solutions for our customers that want to go into AWS. So Kevin, yeah, when do you come into the picture? Yeah, so Siena, our DNA, we're about 20 years old as a public company and we've become known as being the best at moving bits across the globe in terms of whether it's for your mobile phone, your iPad, whatever data is moving around the world. And then over the past five or six years, we dove in, in a big way, into automating the movement of those bits with software, open software, open software platforms. And that's really, you know, with Zail, we're partnered both on moving bits and at automating the movement of the bits as well. Interesting, yeah, because moving data around is actually really, really hard. And getting that data where you need it to be, when you need it to be there, is one of the really intractable problems of the multi-cloud era. So could you explain a bit more about how it is that you are actually helping customers to do that? Because everyone's been struggling with this for quite some time. What's the secret? So yeah, I can take the first part of that anyway. So you kind of hit it. It is difficult and I think ubiquity is key. So having a presence where our customers are. So with our fiber optic network, we have over a thousand data centers on our network. So customers that might have had a private cloud solution within a data center that are either in a hybrid model or looking to move holistically into the public cloud, it's kind of like, who are they looking to help solve for them for their connectivity needs? And that's where Zeo, I think, is uniquely positioned. They're also, their expectations in being in the public cloud is such that automation efficiency, things like scalability is also very critical. So that's not just within the cloud environment, it has to extend to on-prem services as well. And that's really where we come in. So we want to maintain that user experience end-to-end for customers where they can log into a portal on our end, configure a connection in real time, and have that turn up all the way up into their VPC environment with AWS. Yeah, and I think it's fairly complex to tie network services to cloud-based services. And then if you look at enterprise customers that have cloud services today, about 60% of them that have services now have services from more than one cloud service provider. And that's where it gets exponentially more complex and really where automation has a big play. So if you're an enterprise customer of Zeo, for example, and you want to have certain types of cloud services from one service provider, maybe AWS, and other types of cloud services from a different cloud service provider, you want the ability to move in an agile way as possible between service providers and ideally without having people involved in the middle and having it be a very slow and cumbersome process. So, software automation really enables the multi-cloud experience for enterprise customers. Yeah, doing that at scale, as you say, any kind of complex environment or at any kind of scale, it needs to be automated for it to be repeatable and reliable and make sure that it actually works every time. So, as a lot of engineering goes into making that work seamlessly. So, could you give us a bit of a flavor for what it is about the technology that you've created here that actually makes that work nicely and neatly across all these different environments? Yeah, so this is where Zeo, as I said, you know, we're an infrastructure provider and we rely on partners like Sienna to deliver some of that automation, at least parts of it. So, one of the demos we recently did, we did approve a concept where a user can log into our e-commerce platform. It's called Transact with Zeo. They can configure a service, a solution end to end. So, that's the e-commerce, the quote standpoint, and then we have open APIs between that platform and our SDN layer, which is powered by BluePlan, it was Sienna. And that rides across our infrastructure and so connectivity is configured on the network layer and then open APIs are on the back end with AWS to help provision it into the actual hyperscale environment as well. Right. Yeah, so Milo, you know, mentioned the open APIs. So really, to be successful at automating multiple platforms like this between multiple service providers, the foundation is open APIs. You have to be able to talk to everything in an open way and in a predictable way, especially when things go wrong. So, it's one thing to provision when everything's okay, but when things start to go wrong, you have to be able to adapt the network and adapt the services to things as they go wrong. So, we have that built into our platform and fortunately, events like this, you know, continue to promote openness of APIs. And then, you know, on top of BluePlan, in addition to working with open APIs, we become very good at creating an open DevOps environment. So that in a true partnership, you know, with Zeo and Sienna, Zeo can go in and actually participate in the journey and actually create the software inside of our scalable infrastructure in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors. So what kind of an impact are you having on your customers if you're providing this multi-cloud connectivity or at least giving them confidence, I assume, to make different kinds of decisions, right? All of a sudden, they have an opportunity to expand an operation or take on something new because you're giving them confidence that you could pull this off? Is that, are you saying that? Yeah, absolutely. So we were recently announced, we were awarded rather direct connect network competency partnership with AWS. And so I think that award isn't necessarily just kind of given out at random, if you will. So us being able to earn the trust of AWS and that being visible to our customers is certainly a value prop and gaining our end users trust. That also opens the door for us to springboard and other value add solutions for our customers to have more of a turnkey approach. We talk a lot about automation, security, ease of use. That needs to continue to extend. That's a value that AWS holds dear and they expect their partners to have that same approach to the solutions as well. So what are you looking for at this show as a signal for where the industry is heading? You mentioned open APIs. We're seeing a lot of conversation about more openness than accepting the idea that there might be other possibilities for deployment other than just one cloud. What else are you expecting to see at this show that will signal where the industry is moving? Well, of course, huge movement to the cloud. Enterprise customers moving more and more to the cloud. If you came here a few years ago, things were centered around certain singular applications. And now when you walk around this show floor, I mean, it's pretty much anything under the sun is tied directly into the cloud. And some things you never really imagined to be there this quickly. So I think, you know, openness, absolutely. But then more and more movement to the cloud and then having the multi-cloud choice, multi-cloud service provided choice for the end customers. Yeah, and just to add to that, I mean, it's all underpinned by massive workloads as AI, ML, 5G kind of take hold and really are more broadly adopted. That is a lot of data that is moving around. So having that underpinned by a strong network backbone that has high throughput performance, things of that nature is going to be critical to get data from the cloud to where the eyeballs are, to where the users are. Do you think enterprises are moving everything truly into the cloud or are they starting to, are they doing more of a hybrid approach where they're having some stuff goes to the cloud, some things stay on their own premises, some things actually move out to the edge? Where do you see the enterprises moving? Yeah, I think it depends on the application. So there's certainly some applications, depending on the type of enterprise, that are best if they're kept inside the four walls of the enterprise. And then they'll go with a hybrid approach. But I think whenever possible, the scale and the economics that can be reached if it's truly put into the cloud, definitely pays for itself very quickly. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think a hybrid approach is probably going to exist into the future now. How that split, 70, 30, 80, 20, whatever that might be is yet to be determined. But as Kevin mentioned, the scalability in the public cloud ecosystem and frankly, the immense resources that AWS is putting into some of their value, some of their products that you can bolt on to kind of vanilla solutions that customers are coming in with is very difficult to replicate. So there's, I think the scale within the public sphere is going to be quicker, but hybrid will always exist, I think. Before we catch a loose, what do you want to take away from here? From AWS renovate, from the show itself. When you go back to Raleigh, you head back to Denver, what is it that you take in your hip pocket that you think you can put to practice? Yeah, I think for me it's the seeing real time the rate of change that's going on inside of the industry. So it's the thing that we've learned over the past five years or so is that it's very hard to predict the rate of change that we're living in, right? And we're not even in, for example, a 5G world yet, but we're right on the precipice of it. And I think what we're learning and what we're taking away and putting it to practice is that the network really has to be as adaptive as possible because it's so hard to predict the amount of change that's coming and when the change is coming. You just know it is coming and you will have to adapt to the change. Yeah, and keying off the open APIs, I mean, we're not here to be vendors only. We're not here to be just partners or customers. We want to be all three. And I think the lines that used to divide that I think are now blurring and the folks that are exhibiting here, including ourselves, I think call into probably all three categories and just seeing that ecosystem evolve over time, those lines will continue to blur. Gentlemen, thank you both for taking the time to be here. I know you've got a lot of activity going on this week. Good luck with that. And again, we appreciate the time. Thanks so much. Thank you. Great to be here. Kevin, good deal. Back with more here from AWS ReInvent. We are live on theCUBE.