 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the stands. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE of day one of AWS re-invent 2019, to show bigger and better than ever. Tough to say, because last year it was awesome. This year I think they've been gone up a little bit higher on the notch. Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Brendan Walsh, who is the SVP of partner relations at the 1901 group. Brendan, good to see you, sir. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. All right, now I can't imagine anything in tech dating back to 1901. All right, so I'm trying to think, what was the origination of the company? First off, to tell us a little bit about what you do, but what's the name all about? Well, real quick for the name, our CEO Sonu Singh came up with this idea for automation of IT, routine IT management. And 1901 was the year the assembly line was invented. So a gentleman named Ransom E. Olds from the famed Oldsmobile gets credit for that. So Sonu named the company after that automation breakthrough of an assembly line model. And we have built an assembly line concept, what we call an IT factory, or a cloud migration factory into our operation center. And that's part of our managed services offering that we sell, promote, provide to our customer set. And of course, you're doing that with the help of a company called Cohesity, a software-defined data management solutions provider. So let's talk a little bit about Cohesity as well and your relationship, how that works and what you're, I guess, deriving or extracting from their services that you find that great value in that. Absolutely, and maybe this is a little different for today in the show. We actually are a customer of Cohesity. We consume Cohesity. So in our managed service offering portfolio, one of the things that we've been using Cohesity for is helping our customer set create or start up disaster recovery or backup services capability. And 1901 group has been packaging, marketing, selling that DR as a service and that BU or backup as a service to our federal, state and local customers. As a long-time fan of the Toyota production system, I am very pleased that you are turning an assembly-line concept into IT. I think it's vastly overdue, so it's great to hear. Now you focus a lot on the public sector, is my understanding. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit more about what, the public sector is a very complicated beast. This is a tricky market to deal. Complicated is putting it politely. Yeah, so talk, walk us through how you're using Cohesity to help public sector organizations transform themselves to use this kind of as a service backup and disaster recovery. Now you hit on a really good point. It's sort of two points. One is the term is IT modernization. So in order to modernize a very large, complex IT environment, assets, systems, services, multi-locations, various data centers, multiple data classifications, that complexity with the Cohesity product, what has allowed us to do is to start incrementally by doing a disaster recovery or a backup on-premise. That gives the agency a sense of confidence. We get to show success and progress, and that's sort of a win-win for everyone involved. Where the growth with the future and how those agencies will modernize is once you start getting the data backed up properly, prepped for disaster recovery properly, you can also start migrating data toward data cloud, and particularly we've been working with AWS, AWS GovCloud in particular, but also AWS's commercial cloud. I like how you mentioned that building trust part with the agencies to begin with, because it's not so much about the technology, but about the human part of the process. And we heard that in the keynote this morning with Andy Jassy talking about how data transformation happens and it's a lot to do with the humans. It's not all about technology. The organizational change management is as important as the technology change management. And incremental shifts toward the cloud and migration toward the cloud allows for both time and reallocation of resources, both by the agencies, the contractors supporting the agencies, and managed service providers like us who are really providing more as-a-service models, meaning we generally consume the technology for the client, which is a little bit different of a model from the past. But that is the trend of the future. Yes, it's not purely incremental though, because you have to change the way that you're doing things to be using it as a service, as distinct from the way that you would have done it as purely on-premises type infrastructure. So explain a little bit about how you help these agencies to change the way they think to be able to use this as a service approach. Well, one of the reasons we selected Cohesity is because of their ability to scale out and their pricing model that allows us to better forecast cost and because we're a managed service provider price to the government. So the scale out capability that Cohesity provides allows us to buy technology capacity nodes as we need them. So we don't have a large capital expenditure upfront. As orders come in, as agencies purchase, as we grow, we can add to that capacity incrementally. That's a lower risk for us, lower risk for the client. So again, it's a win-win. And their pricing model, their licensing model allows us to work with our agency customers and predict costing and pricing for next year, two years out, three years out, which in the federal budget cycle, appropriations are not appropriated. It's a pretty important thing. I don't know why you're in the business, frankly. It's such a, you know, just pull your hair out. I'm sure it's- Oh, they're wonderful. It's no- It's no straight to say the least. But we've heard a lot about the pretty big, major theme, is transformation versus transition. And in terms of government users. Yep. How do you get them into the transformation mindset when you have those obstacles you just talked about? That you do have a number of time cycles and funding cycles and development cycles. And so- Regulatory cycles. Yeah, I mean, and yeah, right. Those concerns, whatever, the hill throws their way. States, what they throw their way. I think that would be, I mean, just looking at it from the outside, tough to get into a transform mode when you almost are constantly transitioning, it seems like. Yeah, you bring up a good point and if I can make a comment about AWS. AWS has been investing in what's called FedRAMP. That's a federal accreditation program that ensures that cloud systems in the case of AWS have their security controls documented properly, documented to a standard, and then enforced. So continuously monitored and reported on. The investments AWS has been making and that the speed of investment has been increasing over the last few years has really helped managed service providers and IT providers like 1901 Group help the agencies understand how to transition and transform, but it's definitely a step, it's a step, it's incremental in nature. But I congratulate AWS on that investment of time and resources for FedRAMP. We also are FedRAMP authorized. We were going into our fifth year, so we were early on in being able to watch AWS grow, expand, helps us, helps our competition, but helps the agencies and helps in the end all citizens of the United States. So the missions are getting better, the adoption is speeding up. So I thank AWS for that investment. So tell us a little bit more about then how these federal agencies are using both AWS and Cohesity to work together, because you mentioned that your business is built on Cohesity. So where does AWS come in? Yeah, so we started out using Cohesity in an on-premise environment to support federal civilian agencies. That model has been growing. So that was a single tenant, meaning we had one customer on a single instance. We've expanded to a multi-tenant instance, and now we're expanding into a AWS cloud native instance. So being able to work with a complex environment, a complex data management environment, being able to go from on-prem to cloud, being able to go from AWS back and forth, being able to manage that seamlessly, ensuring there's encryption of data at rest and in motion, that just makes our job that much easier. All right, now we know that Cohesity is a software data management company. It's not just about backup and DR. So Cohesity is making some inroads into other secondary data management services and some other things there. So what are you looking at to expand into? What are customers asking you to do for them now that you've already proven yourself with some of this DR and backup capability? Yeah, I mean it really varies. It does vary agency to agency. Smaller independent agencies really may be looking at a Cohesity technology to manage fragmented data. Larger agencies and groups and programs within agencies have different asks, different requirements. It's really hard to say a single, what is the thing? I would say that the flexibility Cohesity gives us is the ability to go hybrid. So depending on what the customer is asking feature wise, functionality wise, architecture wise, we think that Cohesity is very flexible. And about the public sector market then, if you could put your headlight on that for the next two, three years, because you've talked about some cycles of that far out, what do you think would be a, I guess shift is the right word. Yeah, what would be a useful or valuable shift in terms of the public sector, in terms of their acceptance or adoption in your world? Well, so as applications are lifted and shifted or migrated, refactored, rewritten into cloud environments, we're going to see, you're going to see mission applications at the agency level move to cloud, reside in the cloud. So data for performance reasons is going to have to be right next to that application. So the data management, whether it's for production or test dev, Cohesity's got an emerging capability for dev test. I think I said test dev, but dev test. So all these pieces sort of go together as you said, going from transitioning to transforming and you start looking two, three years out. I do believe the agencies have a lot of momentum. There are some really interesting activities being done in the federal and state local realm around artificial intelligence, machine learning. So being able to do the compute, the storage, the networking and security, all within an AWS cloud, it's just going to speed things up and make cost and performance more manageable and transparent. Brendan, thank you for the time. We appreciate that. We found out earlier that Brendan is a Washington Redskins fan and a DC resident, as am I. And I thought 1901 was the last time we had a playoff team, but maybe it wasn't quite that far back, but it certainly seems like it doesn't. Hang in there, right? Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Brendan Walsh joining us from the 1901 group. Back with more live here from AWS re-invent with Justin Warren. I'm John Walsh and you are watching theCUBE.