 Hey everyone, welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with theCUBE here live, covering the AWS Summit NYC 2022. This is about, there's about 15 different summits going on this year, John Globally. We're here with about 10,000 attendees. Just finished the keynote, and two guests from Software One. Please welcome David Torres, the Director of Cloud Services, and Asim Khan, a North American AWS Services delivery lead at Software One. Welcome guys. Thank you for having us. Talk to us, David, just kick us off. Give the audience an overview of Software One. What do you guys do? And then tell us a little bit about the AWS partnership. Sure, so Software One, we are one of Microsoft and VMware's largest resellers. We help customers with our IT asset management services, managing their on-premises licensed real estate. But we're definitely a company that's undergoing a transformation. And when I say that essentially, we're focused on three key pillars with our go-to-market. Supporting the hyperscalers. So we do support AWS Azure GCP at modernization because we do see this with a lot of our customers. You know, they're moving from on-premises to AWS. They have a lot of technical debt and they're looking at options to modernize that. And mission-critical workloads like SAP, Windows, Oracle. And we offer a suite of professional services, managed services, migrations. Quite a bit of services. Asim, can you kind of double-click on the services that Software One delivers to customers? Maybe some key use cases? Yeah, sure. I think in the Amazon space, I would say they're currently focusing in the era a lot of funding programs that Amazon currently has. For example, the Migration Exploration Program, which is a map of supporting customers basically with the entire cloud journey that they might have or helping them define that cloud journey. And then we can help the customer in any phase of that journey as well to basically take them a step above. So that's what our area of focus is right now to basically help enable customers. So on the Microsoft AWS, you mentioned Microsoft, you've had the enterprise business for years and developers was their ecosystem. Back in the day, developers, developers, developers, as Steve Ballmer once said, and that was their crown jewel. But then .NET now has Linux, they got a lot more open source. So those enterprises, their customers are changing. A lot of them are on AWS. So talk about that dynamic of the shift to AWS. And now that Azure's out there, what's the relationship of those hyperscale? How do you guys navigate those waters? I mean, it's always the concept of work backwards from the customer, right? What are the business outcomes they're trying to drive and define a strategy from that? And it's still a function of change management for a lot of customers, people, process and tools. So in a lot of cases where their customers are evaluating what's the skill set of our people? Do we need to upscale them? The tools that we're using, how do we use those on the multiple clouds, right? And then the processes. So for us, you know, we have some customers that prefer one cloud over another. We have customers that run across multiple clouds. They deploy different workloads. And then we have some customers that transformation and modernization are really big top of stack for them. So in some cases, those customers are going to AWS and we're helping them kind of with that journey. It's interesting, the developers, Amazon literally won the developer cloud market early on, going back 15 years. But not all developers, enterprise developers who have, you know, in the enterprises, they have their stuck in their ways but are changing. This is a digital transformation moment because cloud native applications, the modernization piece is developer centric. It's key to developers. So I'm interested in your perspective and reaction to what's going on in that developer market right now with DevOps exploding in a great way. The goodness of the cloud coming more and more to the table. Sure, no, absolutely great question. So I think with enterprise developers, you know, we see just the businesses driving a lot of the outcomes, right? So the modernization aspect of needing to get to market faster, needing to apply applications faster, having a more efficient operating model, more automation. And for your point on the .NET modernization, you know, we work with customers too as well. We actually have a, we made an acquisition a couple years ago, a company in a Grupo. They actually specialize in this, in .NET modernization. So, you know, we're seeing some customers that are moving to Linux, right? And they want to go .NET core and they want, you know, they're kind of standardizing on Linux. So we kind of see, you know, wide spectrum, but yeah, maybe. Where are your customer conversations? As things have changed so much and accelerated dramatically in the last couple of years. Sure. Obviously we were talking about the developers talk to me about, you know, business imperatives for businesses in every industry to digitally transform to be number one to survive the last couple of years, but two to be, to be at a competitive advantage. Sure. So, so I think with the, with, with businesses, you know, there's obviously 2017 innovation, 2022. It's a little bit different, right? There's obviously macro conditions. You have COVID. So, you know, we're seeing where customers are essentially really doing their due diligence, right? When they make their choices more than ever before and they're trying to maximize, right? Their spend and their ROI when they, when they move to cloud. And that involves, you know, the licensing advisory, what they can move, what they can modernize, the migrations and just, just the roadmap and what strategy. But what I see is just, it's, it's the business outcomes and what they're trying to drive. And, you know, we're seeing some trends too with maybe your more conservative segments like healthcare, public sector, right? Utilities that they are really investing in moving towards cloud. Yeah. I see, I got a question from Twitter, DM. I want to ask you guys on the front line. So you see the customers, which is really great because it's primary data. You guys are right there. And you're, you're not biased. You work with whatever hyperscaler, so it's really good. So the question that came up was, can you ask them the following? What's going on in the data warehouse front, cloud warehouse front? You got Redshift competing with Synapse, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and then you got Snowflake and Databricks out there. So you got this new data provider, but it's not a data warehouse. And you got Teradata refactoring on AWS, for instance, as well. So, you know, this whole new level of data analytics with how you're doing cloud data, right? And then you call it a data warehouse, I guess for categorically, but it's really not a warehouse. It's a data lake or some sort of, and you got Lakefront Foundation. What are you guys seeing on the front lines with customers as they try to squint through how to deal with the data and which cloud to work with? That is a good question. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time. I've worked for some major financial institutions as well. And data or big data was big for that industry. So I've seen how the trends have changed, but from our perspective, because we are an agnostic services company, as you mentioned, we basically can work with any hyperscaler. We initially see what the business needs are for the customer. If the customer is already, for example, using Amazon, we initially want to have the customer use native tooling available within that hyperscaler space. If the customer is open for us to give them any recommendations, of course, we look at the business needs, we look at what type of data is going to be stored, what the industry is. Based on all of those inputs is when we basically give the right recommendation. It could be a third-party data warehousing solution. It could be an 801. It all depends on what the business needs of the customer are. So for example, and most companies do this, they build on, say, AWS, it was one of the first big clouds. And then they go, hey, we got customers over there at Azure. That's Microsoft. They got thousands and thousands of customers. Snowflakes done and everyone else is kind of doing their, and they have marketplaces as well. So you guys are kind of agnostic. It sounds like whatever the architecture is on the stack that they choose. Correct. So that's what makes us special. I think we are one of those services companies which is quite unique in the industry. And I don't say that just because I work for Software One, that is a fact. That gives us a very unique perspective of giving the customer the right piece of advice because we've seen it all and we've done it all. So that's, I think, what puts us unique and regarding technology, all the different hyperscalers, they might have a very similar backend technology stack, but what the front end services each hyperscaler is building are very unique. Amazon being the leader in this space, they've been ahead of the curve by a few years, they will always have certain solutions which are above the rest. So I mean, I myself have, I've always been an Amazon person, so I'm slightly biased. But hey, the good news is the customer has a choice. Right, absolutely. And we do see customers that want to be agnostic, right? With their technology choices. And actually, it's a good segue about our partnership with AWS. We recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement between both parties. So there's going to continue to be big investment from us, scaling out our professional services, our practice areas, and then also key focus area for us, FinOps, because we do see customers that are already is that your number one area? It's one of the areas, yeah. We are top three areas, practice areas. It's top three mission critical workloads, so enterprise workloads like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, two, out modernization, and three, definitely FinOps and the hyperscalers, right? Because we see a lot of customers that have already heavily adopted Cloud, they're struggling with that Cloud Financial Management aspect. What are some of the key business outcomes that they come to you to software? Want to say, help us figure this out, we have to achieve ABC. Sure, so depending on the maturity of the customer and where they are in the journey, if they're already very heavily adopting Cloud, AWS or Azure, we see in a lot of cases that the customers are unsure if they're getting the most out of their Cloud spend and they're looking at their operations and their governance and they're coming to us and basically asking us, hey, we feel like our Cloud spend is a little bit out of control, can you help us? And that's where we can come in, provide the advice, the guidance, the advisory, but also give them the tooling, right? To have visibility into their Cloud spend and make those recommendations. And we also offer a managed FinOps service that actually, well, we'll end and do this for the customers to help them manage their resell, their invoicing, their marketplace buy, as well as their Cloud spend. So obviously the engagement varies customer to customer. What's a typical timeframe? Like how long does it take you to really get in there with the customer, understand the direction they need to go and create the right plan? Sure, it again comes back to the Cloud journey. If the customer is still very much on-prem and maybe more conservative, it may start with licensing assessments just to give them an idea of what it would cost to move those workloads, right? And then it turns into migration modernization so that it can be anywhere from one to six months of just consulting, right? To get the customer ready. And then we help them with obviously with their migration plan. But if they're already heavily adopting Cloud, we do remediation work, we do optimization. So I mean, it really just depends on what their, obviously SAP, that's a longer cycle, so. So I got to ask you guys, what is the Pyra Cloud? Software one has a platform, Pyra Cloud. What is that? Here, why don't I answer that? It's pronounced Pyra Cloud. It's basically our proprietary. How do you pronounce it? A Pyra Cloud. Pyra Cloud, okay. I like Pyra Cloud better. With the Y in there. It's basically our spend insight platform. It gives customers a truly agnostic single pane of glass view into their entire Cloud enterprise spend. What I mean by that is with a single login, the customer has access to looking at their enterprise spend on AWS on Azure as well as GCP. And in the future, of course, we're going to add other hyperscalers in there as well. Because of the single pane of glass view, the customer has a true or the customer leadership, or for example, the CTO has a single pane of glass view into the entire spend. We allow the customer to basically have an enterprise level tagging strategy, which is across all the hyperscalers, as well as then allowing a certain amount of automated cost management as well, which is again agnostic and enterprise-wide. Can you share an example of a customer for whom you've helped them, given them the single pane of glass through Pyra Cloud and by how much they've been able to reduce costs or optimize costs? Yes. Mostly the customers who would be a very good fit for a Pyra Cloud would be a slightly more mature customer who already has a large amount of spend, or who's already very mature in their different hyperscalers. And usually what we've seen once a customer is mature in the cloud over a certain period of time, controlling costs does become difficult. Even though you might have automation in place, but to get to that automation, you have to go through a certain amount of time of basically things breaking and you fixing them. So this is where Pyra Cloud becomes very helpful to help control that and building a strategy which once in place is repetitive and helps you maintain and manage costs and spend in the cloud year after year then. One of the things I want to get your guys' reaction before we wrap up is this show here has got 10,000 people, which is a big number. Post-COVID, events are coming back. But in the past five years we've seen or six years or seven years since like 2015, a lot's changed. What's changed the most? Share to the audience what you think is the biggest step function change that's happening right now. Is it that data's now prime time? Everyone's got a lot of data. Has it figured out the consequences with it? Is it scale? Is it super cloud? Is it the ecosystem? Because this is not stopping. The growth in the enterprise on the digital transformation is expanding even though GDP's down and where gas prices are high and inflation. This isn't stopping. Now some of the unicorns might be impacted by the headwinds, the big overfunded valuations, but not the ecosystem. What's changed? What's the big change? I think what I see is this cloud is becoming the de facto operating model and customers are working backwards from that as their primary goal to operate in the cloud. And as I mentioned before, they really are doing due diligence to really understand the best approach for seeing kind of maybe some of the challenges other customers have had when they first moved to AWS. So in seeing industries that maybe five years ago, were not about moving to cloud like healthcare. I can tell you a lot of our healthcare customers, they're trying to get to cloud as fast as possible. It's a wake up call. It's a wake up call. Absolutely, absolutely. So. I see what's your reaction? In my point of view, with what's happened these last few years, with a lot of companies having their employees work from home and being remotely, I think end user compute was one of the big booms which happened about two years ago. We support a lot of customers in that space as well. And then overall, I think we actually saw that there was much more business focus with employees working from home for some reason. And we saw that internally in our own organization as well. And with that focus, the whole area of being more lean and agile in the cloud space, I think became much more prevalent for all the enterprises. Everybody wanted to be spend conscious, being availing the different tools available in the cloud arena, like auto scaling, like using, for example, containerization, using such solutions to basically be more resilient and more lean to basically control costs. So Necessity is the mother of all inventions that got forced. So you got a wake up call and then a forcing function till like, okay, but it exposes the consequences of a modern application, modern environment because they didn't, they're out of business. So then it's like, okay, this is actually working. Why don't we kill that project that we've doubled down on, move it over here? So I see that same pattern. What do you guys see? Yeah, I mean, I see that, we see that pattern as well, just modernization, efficiency. You can just move faster, more elasticity and again, the wake up call for organizations that people couldn't go to data centers, right? We actually have a customer that that was literally the reason they made the move to AWS. And I would add one more thing to that particular point. With the time available, I think customers were able to actually now re-architect their applications slightly better to be able to avail, for example, no server type of solutions or using certain design principles which were much more cost lean in the cloud. That's what we saw. I think customers spent that time, available over the past couple of years to be much more cloud-centric, I would say. Yeah, the forced march was really an accelerant and a catalyst in a lot of ways. For good, and there's definitely some server linings there as we're out of time, but thank you so much for joining. John and me talking about a software one, what you guys are doing, helping customers, what you're doing with AWS and the hyperscalers. We appreciate your time and your insights. Awesome. Thank you for having us. Really appreciate it. All right. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.