 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day one of AWS re-invent 2017. This is their sixth event, our fifth time here with theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin along with Justin Warren, my co-host. There are upwards of 40,000 plus, I've heard even 50,000 people here. Incredible three-day event, and we are excited to be joined by another guest from BMC, Daniel Nelson, AVP of Product Management, Security, Compliance and Automation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you here. So one of the things that I'd love to understand is when you talk to customers who are in the enterprise on this journey to cloud, as that term has used a lot, what are some of the biggest challenges that they face? Knowing they have no choice but to do this, what are some of the biggest challenges that they face that BMC can help to mitigate on this journey? Oh, absolutely. And so one of the things about us is that for the past 20 years, we've been helping large enterprises help keep their environment secure, fully automated, be able to have greater efficiencies within their data centers. And as our customers are transitioning to a multi-cloud world, everything that they had to do back at the data center, they still have to do in the public cloud. It still has to be compliant. It still has to be secure. It still has to be governed. And so what we help our customers do is to make that transformation and be able to bring together those two worlds. So while they currently are looking as a goal to use AWS, to use public cloud, to use private cloud, they still have to manage their internal systems and be able to provide one platform to do that as what BMC is all about. Yeah, I've been a longtime user of BMC products back in the day, you know, Control-M and some of the things that people, it's still a great product, lots of people use it. Absolutely, it was a great product and we used it a lot. So I know that BMC has that rich history and experience of being able to automate things, particularly at scale. So how is that translating across into the world of cloud? Because to me, it actually seems like it's basically the same problem. Oh, and it is, absolutely. So what it used to be, scale was a measure of number of servers that you have. Now it's much more the number of applications that you have, the number of developers you have, the number of configurations you have to keep in touch with, the number of policies you have to enforce. So the scale problem is exactly the same, just the physical mechanism of what scaling has changed. And that doesn't add a complexity to it. Yeah, so if it's basically, so given that level of similarity and what you've been able to translate from the on-site world across into the cloud, what is it that's different? What is the thing that people are struggling with and that customers are really challenged by in this journey to cloud? Well, in one word, it's speed. So everything that you had to do in the past was at a particular cadence. And so if you're releasing applications once a year, once every six months, even once a quarter, there was a certain amount of slack in the system where if something went wrong, you had time to adjust, you had time to keep up with it. Well, now that you're down to hours, minutes, sometimes even seconds, pushing out code all the time, updating your applications all the time, you can't operate, it's beyond human scale. And so that's where things like automation, being able to tie back to your core systems, be able to have all that automated governance control really helps all of our customers. Speed is one of the things that AWS has done extremely well, continuing to what last year, I think it was 1,017 new features and services. This year it's over 1,100 already. And Andy Jasse has been very vocal about speed and customer focus is what's helping them. So with that focus on speed and accelerating the pace of innovation, how is BMC alike AWS in getting what customers need faster than your competitors? No, absolutely. And so what AWS does really well is providing the core primitives, the underlying building blocks of what you need and allowing you to assemble those very quickly to have you realize your own vision, your own dreams. What we do very well is keeping some guard rails on those building blocks and making sure that we've seen it all over the place. One developer makes a mistake and suddenly you've got a data breach. One piece of code doesn't get updated the way it should be or you have a password in GitHub somewhere and now all of a sudden, all your data's out there and you're in the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What we help our customers do is to keep out of that news and into the news of satisfying their customers and going fast. So while AWS helps you build things really quickly, we help you do that in the right way. That keeps you safe, keeps you compliant and keeps you within the normal corporate governance. So what's your favorite example of a customer doing that where they had this issue and then they came to BMC and you were able to help them to actually solve that problem? What's a great example you've got? We obviously do a lot of business with a lot of big banks and we had one of our customers who's a very large bank was hesitant about the cloud, was experimenting with it and they started with just five projects and within six months those five projects have ballooned up to 65 projects and all without really governance control or oversight and then want to cry hit. And our customer was so nervous, so scared about it that their only response was, since they didn't know what their exposure was, they just shut them all down. They just pulled the plug and says, we're not going to do anything. And so what we did is we came in and provided them the ability to do that to provide those innovation products, to provide the ability to go quickly but also know where you are, how to be safe and can continue to update your clients and security posture with new information as it comes in. So it gives them that safety factor that they can't go safe. One of my favorite examples and one of the best metaphors I've had is one of my customers came to me and said, Daniel, look, I love to go fast but the last thing I want to do is put my problems on roller skates. Like that doesn't do any good and like that's what we're here to do. We're here to provide you those bumper rails on the bowling alley so you can go fast. I do love that problems on roller skates. I do. I'm going to use that. I'm stealing that one. Go ahead, I use it all the time. So we talk a lot about a lot of buzzwords, a lot of hot terms, right? Multi-Cloud. I'm curious about what BMC is doing in Multi-Cloud. How does an enterprise understand what Multi-Cloud is? What's Hybrid Cloud? How do you guys help sort of break down some of these buzzwords into actions for your customers so they can be fast and competitive? So for me, if I were to sum up what Multi-Cloud really means is that you're choosing the best technology at the best price point for what the need of the business is. And sometimes that means running at the data center and there are a lot of things in the data center that run more cheaply, more efficiently, might have a much more cost-effective basis than they ever will in the cloud and those things belong in the data center. And I think over time you'll see the data center loads will actually increase as well. There are some things that you have to go very quickly. It can be experimental that you have to have a DevOps team attached to and the public cloud is great for those things. And then even within the public cloud space there are things that Azure does well. There's things that AWS does well. And individual enterprises, especially large enterprises which is our constituency need to be able to make those choices and be able to do that for the best underlying reason of that technology. Well, BMC then provides you with the ability to say whether it's on-prem, whether it's in Azure, whether it's in AWS, wherever you want to run that we can provide you the controls and the compliance and the governance that you can be safe regardless. You can get the same policies in place regardless of where that individual technology is targeted. Yeah, absolutely. When talking with large, particularly large customers as you point out you only have to buy one other company and all of a sudden you're multi-cloud. Yes. You might have decided, you know what? We're all in on AWS. A different company that you buy for business reasons may have decided, you know what? I want to have some Azure. I want to have some Google Cloud. I was like, kaboom, you buy them and now all of a sudden IT has this multi-cloud issue and they need someone who can help them to manage that. And really you want to be able to manage that in the same way across all of the different environments. And I can see that that's where BMC would be really strong. No, you're exactly right. And one of the great things, like this is a great show and there's so many vendors and there's so much great technology here. But if you talk to Gardner or Forster or IDC or 451 one of the main things they'll tell you is you've got to have not individual tools for every individual problem. You need to have a platform in place that provides you the breadth of coverage where you have the ability to be flexible across those technologies. And that's another thing that BMC is offering in the market. Yeah, so one of the challenges of building that platform though is that you've got all of these little different silos that tend to just sort of build up all by themselves. And then when you come and try like the central IT behemoth comes along and says, no, they'll shalt use the one true solution. How do you actually provide the right level of flexibility for individual solutions that can be tailored and niche but still provide that scalability and sameness across everything that it gives you those efficiencies at scale? How does BMC help you manage that? That's one of BMC's historical strongest parts of their offering is a breadth of content. Being able to support in the data center all the different operating systems, all the different applications. We do the same thing now by supporting all the different microservices within AWS, all the different microservices within Azure. Be able to then provide that breadth of content so that the developer himself can choose whatever. And then from a central IT standpoint, you know you've got the policies in place to be able to make sure that they're safe. Another one of my favorite expressions is that developers will argue with people but they won't argue with systems. And so if you then be able to incorporate that compliance and control into the DevOps pipeline, into the API driven approach where a developer does something else outside of those guidelines and they just get immediate response back and say, no I'm sorry that's not allowed or here's an error message in the log, they're like okay well I got to go fix that. Versus being on the phone or having to go through any of that process. Developers will be very argumentative about that. So what we do is be able to take that corporate IT perspective and just be able to get it automatically across all the different dev teams. Question if you want to pivot on the developer role for a second. You know AWS has done a great job of attracting a lot of awareness in the developer community for a long time now. Absolutely. They've never really had to advertise because this awareness was so strong, very sticky. We've seen them this year start advertising which as a marketer kind of signaled to me, interesting we know that their massive growth rate isn't predicated upon us startups alone. That the enterprise is also a major play for AWS and they need to get to know the CEO, the corporate board. I'm just curious as BNC seeing in like a customer like a large banker and insurance company for example, where are you seeing the C-suite help influence product development? How influential is that higher tier of management now as this transition becomes an absolute business imperative? Well it's interesting because you see not only the rise of the CIO as a digital transformer within the business, you also see the CEO being more and more involved in those and you also have the rise of the CISO. So being able to inject security into this conversation. So you've got a panoply of different voices that are all happening at the board level and that there's board visibility into some of these things as well. Now the board now pays attention to how are we developing our applications? Are they safe? Are they secure? Is there an existential risk to our business by the way that we're conducting ourselves from an information technology standpoint? So those conversations are obviously happening. We see them happening all the time and it's been really great for our business because we've been working with these companies for years and years and years to help them be safe and compliant to keep their banking licenses in order and things of that nature and now we're just extending that to the cloud as well. So we definitely see it and honestly it's one of the things that we feel like is a core competitive advantage for us is we have those relationships that have been placed today and have for decades. Yeah, do you see yourselves going into customers as sort of a partnering relationship with AWS? It's particularly for those enterprise. I can see that that, I mean, IT has been wanting a seat at this table for so, so long. It's like, well, you've got one now. It happened to come from security which is possibly not the best introduction ever but now that they have that seat at the table, how are you finding them manage that conversation to influence board level which is a far different conversation than what it would be when you're talking about technical things and even from developer land, it's like APIs and so on, that's not really a board level conversation or is it? No, AWS is one of our strategic partners and so it's very easy for us to go into customers together and be able to tell that message of go safe but be fast at the same time and so we're much more of an and world now than an or world that we were in the past and the ability to make trade offs was something that we all kind of took for granted but now we really don't have that ability anymore. Like we have to be all things to all people and that forces a lot of innovation and it forces a lot of the kind of, that the new things that you're seeing every day come out of AWS and other vendors as well. It's really an exciting time to be in invitation technology. Never a strong moment and I was, yeah, I wanted to kind of pivot on that symbiosis like how much business do you drive for AWS but also conversely, how much does AWS push BMC to innovate at their pace? Right, so we, you know, just being an AWS partner pushes you because you're now along for the ride and wherever they go and whatever they're doing, you know, your, our customers are looking at us and say, when do you support that? How are you going to support that? You know, we need to be, we want to be using these things and so we've had to put on ourselves a very strict SLA that as soon as AWS gets someone new, we have to support it within a very brief period of time because that's what our customers are demanding and that's great because it forces us to innovate. It forces us to do things in new ways and be able to actually have a lot of the technologies, a lot of the processing place that our customers themselves are trying to emulate. So that's been wonderful. In addition to that, if you look at, you know, how we're pushing AWS, AWS is definitely, you know, is already in the enterprise. There's a lot of enterprise that already uses but being able to think about things from an enterprise standpoint is different than a developer bottom-up standpoint and so we've always been a lot more holistic about understanding what are the needs of the business and especially from a C-suite communication perspective, like how do we articulate and how do we do that well and that's part of what we bring to the relationship. You mentioned a lot of customers are banks, insurance companies. I'm curious about healthcare. There's sort of an anticipation that Andy Jassy might be announcing a broader partnership with Cerner who has 25% market share and electronic health records. Healthcare being historically slower to adopt cloud, massive security challenges there. What are you guys seeing in the healthcare space? What are some of the primary concerns there that you're helping to mitigate? Well, so if you talk about healthcare, the first thing that everybody will talk about, especially in the IT space, is HIPAA, right? So it's, you know, what am I doing on my private data? If you talk about it from an AMIA perspective, you know, it's GDPR. You know, what are we going to do about private data? How do we keep it segregated? You know, how do we undoubtedly have those mechanisms in place, but how do we ensure that they're in place, we'll be able to prove that they're in place. And when our auditors come to us, we can provide them all that data. And that's exactly what BMC provides. So we have out-of-the-box content for HIPAA compliance, for SOX, for PCI, for anything that you want to do. And so we can just look at your systems whether they're in the data center or in the cloud, tell you exactly how they need to be configured, and then also I'll remediate them for you. So we can take that next step and provide the automation in place for you so that you can actually then just worry about running your business. So it's a really, really interesting vertical for us to go into, because of our history and because of our background. Yeah, there's going to be so much growth in that area. I mean, even from my part of the world down in Australia, we've got electronic health records. It's a big, big thing. There's a whole program of work that's involved in putting that in. Being able to keep that data safe, but also useful is going to be a big challenge, and I can only see it getting larger. Well, absolutely. And it's important for us not to lose sight that the in-person we're protecting is the consumer. The in-person we're protecting is the individual who that's their data, like they own that. And so it's our job and our duty to do the best we can for our customers to protect that. And ultimately, that's the value. Yeah. Last question for you. Some of the things that have come out already in the last day and a half or so, from AWS on AI, what are you seeing in terms of customers' comprehension of machine learning and what the potential is for them to truly become data-driven, leveraging advanced technologies like that? So we're definitely in the hype cycle with AI, right? I mean, I think we all kind of know that. I think when you talk about machine learning and Bayesian reasoning, and it's all predicated upon having the data in place to do the analysis on. And so just like we saw with big data, it's like, oh, I want big data, but then now what do I do with it? Now we have AI and machine learning that for the people that do have large data sets, they can start to do some interesting analysis. They can start to do some interesting things, but you have to have the data first before you start to apply the actual algorithms to it. Because the algorithm, if you just give it two data points, it's not going to be very smart. Give it two trillion, and it's going to be able to do some really interesting things. So what can people see and learn and touch and feel at the BMC booth here? So just this week, we launched a new product called Policy Service, which is policy and compliance for public cloud and for DevOps pipelines. So we'd love to show anybody who wants to come by a demo of that. We're very excited about it. Also it ties back to our core automation. And so if you have to do something also in the data center, we can bring those two worlds together for you. Excellent. Well, Daniel Nelson, thank you so much for joining us. You're now in the CUBE alumni. Welcome to the cloud. All right, that's exciting. I appreciate it. And I'm Lisa Martin from my co-host, Dustin Warren. We are live from day one of our three day coverage at AWS re-invent 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back.