 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. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas and theCUBE for live coverage of Amazon re-invent 2019. I'm John Furrier, here, extracting the signal from the noise. We have an amazing guest here, the founder of AVA trick, I'm coming as CEO of AVA trick, Steve. Melanie, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, good to see you. So, first of all, I want to get into your experience, because I think it's notable of having you on, because you've been on the industry for years. You're CEO of a multi-cloud software, a new kind of company. And this is what Andy Jassy was talking about on his keynote today, that there's new kinds of companies. There's the born in the cloud, then there's enterprises reborning in the cloud, my word. They're essentially pivoting or re-platforming, re-imagining, whatever you want to call it. This is the new game. And if you're not on that side of the street, you can be out of business. Yeah, no, we're definitely seeing that. And I think that's the thing that really got me excited about a year ago, was watching enterprises make that transition and say, you know what, the center of gravity has gone from architectures inside the on-prem data center, is now moved to in the cloud. I mean, that shift has happened. People talked about it five years ago, but they didn't mean it. And now when you talk to enterprises, they are actually moving into the cloud, not just talking about it. And they're saying, that is the center of gravity. And what's interesting to me was, I think even just the tone of Andy Jassy today and what he was talking about was, it's once you define what your architecture is, you push it everywhere. So cloud 1.0 and 2.0 was really more about taking my architecture that was on-prem and pushing it into the cloud. So let me take a virtual appliance, a virtual router, basically my hardware router, package it up, put it on the cloud. That's not cloud native, it's cloud naive as we talk, right? And so what's, the change that's happened is now everybody realizes the center of gravity is in the cloud and you start seeing things like outposts. You see things like wavelength, you see things like, you know, TGW network manager, things getting pushed out, the architecture of the cloud, now actually pushing out and extending out into on-premises. Well, I want to give you a prop for a couple of things. One is for the folks watching and read my post about, with my interview with Andy Jassy, I did two, I said two things in there that I borrowed or stole from Steve. One was cloud native without the T is cloud naive and T for trust, T for IT. That was clever. I'm going to get into that. I stole that from our sales guy, Harold Hildebrand. So you know what? Harold, shout out to you. The second thing that I heard you when we were talking, we were talking about transitions versus transformations. I think that is so on point because I think that encapsulates what Jassy's saying and what the industry's feeling right now. Transitions are for incremental improvements. Transformations are for flipping the script. This is really happening. Can you share what you mean by transitions versus transformations? Yeah, so when you're in a computing model, so there's been really three computing models. There's the main frame, which was 50s or 60s to 80s to 90s. There's a 20, 30 year period where IBM, DEC and so forth. That was the way you did enterprise computing. Then this PC client server thing came along, which was viewed as a toy at the beginning. It was for print sharing and work groups and people said, are you kidding me? PCs, servers are just PCs with two power supplies. I'm not running my mission critical infrastructure on PCs. But in the 90s, with the internet, IP protocol, it shifted and that became that transformation. And so incumbents never win transformations. DEC, IBM, and what happens is they're never in the conversation because it's a transformation. So incumbents always win transitions. So for the last 20 to 30 years, Cisco, great, fantastic company, very respected company. John Chambers will talk about transitions and talk about how we would pat himself on the back and how they would win market transitions. You're supposed to win a market transition as an incumbent. Don't pat yourself on the back. The customers will force you to win the transition because they don't want another leader when you're in that same model. We are now entering that third transformation, that third, this is a model of computing change. This is from the top down business transformation Andy was talking about, which is true. You have companies redefining who they are and they're leveraging cloud technologies to do that. This is not a cost thing. This is not a bottoms up technology thing that IT guys just say, ah, I want to learn something new. This is top down business transformation, existential threat to the survival of my company kind of stuff and we need to move fast and enterprises all move together and that is now happening. Transformations, that confusion creates opportunities because it moves so fast that the legacy vendors just don't have time. They have the innovators dilemma. They can't move to the new way quick enough. Yeah, and one of the things I want to get your thoughts on and I want to get your reaction to is that as we go to all the events in the cloud and this business, we see everything. The one tell sign to me is the security market. Security got unbuckled out of IT in the board conversation and the jewels are on the table for security. You get hacked, you're out of business. So talk about threats to the business. Security is the leading indicator and what's going on in security? They're building their own stacks. They're hiring developers in-house. They are really changing the game on how they use technology. That's just in one area. You're talking about complete reset or reconsideration of everything as Jassy said. Yeah, it's the business, right? Your applications are your business, right? And all the infrastructure underneath that is there to service the applications and the data. That's why it's there. But when you talk to different people and you talk to customers like NBC and CBS and content people they're moving to the cloud. They're now having channels that are 100% hosted on AWS for the first time. Why are you doing that? I asked this of CBS because we need to move faster. Guess what? They're competing with Netflix and Amazon. They can't do it the old way. They're going to die. So they're moving all of their channels, hundreds of channels to be now cloud enabled because it allows them to deliver it in months as opposed to years. You're a really interesting background. I want to share with the audience. You have a networking background. The old wealthy became Bay Networks. Early employee at Cisco and then went to Early Employee at Palo Alto Networks. A lot of networks. Security company, CEO of NYSERA, which seemed to be a pioneer. So I'm going to find networking. Which at that time evolved in, this basically became the Crown Jewel Save VMware. Yeah, in a sec. You would say I would agree with that. And now you're on AVH where it's got a multi-cloud abstraction. So you're kind of riding this new wave. So the question I have for you is, and I coined the term being reborn in the cloud. Not born in the cloud. People were born in the cloud. Clean sheet of paper. They can scale up. But an enterprise who's got to transform has to become reborn with cloud architecture. This is a fundamental, almost look in the mirror moment as an enterprise executive saying, are we being reborn? Yes. How do companies do that? So we have a number of companies, enterprise companies that are 30 year, 40 year old enterprise software companies that honestly were left for dead, right? Where people thought they weren't SaaS. They missed out on the whole, you know, Benioff, SaaS movement. And they were on-prem. They had all the features, all the functionality, but they didn't have the delivery model of SaaS. And they were hurting. They were going to die. People left them for dead. And now what they're doing is they've reborn themselves in the cloud. They're pushing themselves in the cloud. Informatica, Varen, Epsilon, Ellucian, Teradata. We've got tens of these companies that are, I've reinvented themselves. And now they're actually really doing really, really well. Because they have the functionality that they've always had. But now they have the delivery mechanism. And they're not SaaS actually. And the customers like that. Because I get my own three or four VPCs. It's my own network. It's not multi-tenant. It's hosted within AWS. And now they're just migrating as fast as they can. All of their on-prem applications and customers into AWS and other clouds. All right, so how do I answer about multi-cloud? Jassy didn't use the word multi-cloud. The critics are kind of tweeting away on that. But of course they're not going to say multi-cloud. He's the cloud. So he's the one cloud he wants to be. Multi-cloud is a reality. He did point out in my interview, and I think he might have mentioned on stage that people are picking a primary and a secondary. And then it's not 50-50, it's 70-30, it's 90-10. Whatever the ratio is, it's pick one. Amazon gets picked a lot through the leader. What's your vision and how do you see the multi-cloud playing out as people start becoming more cloud operations based? My view and people, we are in the first pitch of the first inning of this cloud. And people say AWS is a $40 billion run rate. How can that be? Because the money has always been and always will be with large enterprise. They are now just starting to move into the cloud. There is trillions of dollars of spend that's coming into public cloud. So first off, it's very beginning early days. Second thing is AWS has done incredibly well with the developers and the born in the cloud people. Enterprises, you know. Not so much. Not so much. And you know what? Microsoft kind of understands enterprises. So I think we're going to be set up for a little bit of battle here. And it's by no means over. And so I think AWS recognizes that. And every single enterprise I've talked to says, yeah, it may not be a third, a third, a third across all three of the big clouds. So maybe I'll have one primary. And I think kind of, Andy Jassy says that, which I kind of agree with. I think people will have a primary, but I don't think everyone's primary is going to be AWS. I think there's going to be a lot of Azure primaries and even some Google primaries, right? Probably more, I think it'll be a two horse race for that. And then, but then they're going to use the other clouds because, you know, I was just talking to a customer today, the signature recognition software runs better in Azure. They're an AWS customer. They're moving to Azure for this. Why? Because that app runs better in Azure for some reason. I think people, particularly enterprises will make that decision. All right. So I got to get your take on that. First of all, I agree with you. So I think that's what will happen. All right, so I would agree with that. So let's just take the scenario. Amazon wins on capabilities. They're constantly adding new stuff every day. So if you're a builder, it's the ultimate tool shed for technology. Azure isn't there yet. They're trying to catch up as fast as they can. They're pedaling as fast as they can. But there's a build out level and then there's a consumption level. So there's having all that capability, but also the customer's consumption has to be addressed. Solutions packaging, ease of use. So delivery mechanisms to infrastructure in the cloud. The consumption, how I buy and use is now a consideration or consumer experience we want to call it. What's your take on those two dynamics? I think you'll see from AWS. I don't know this, but it has to be because this is what enterprises want. The phrase go build is great for an early adopter. You go tell that to an enterprise. Here's the power tools. Go build your house. They go, I'm going to cut my hand off. I don't want to go build anything. I want to consume. So I think you're going to see them changing their tune a little bit because the market's evolved and I think it's caught them a little bit by surprise as well. And I think Microsoft, because they know the enterprise, they won't say go build. They're going to say, come consume. And I think that's going to resonate with enterprises because at the end of the day, they don't really want to do that. Now either way, I think it's going to be a battle. That's where Aviatrix comes into play. We help enterprises, no matter what cloud you're on, across multiple clouds, or one actually consumes services. So we abstract away all the details of those native services. Well, I would say if you're going to transform, you have to do some building, but it has to be the easy kit. You know, pay by numbers. I want the easy button. You know, pay by numbers, self-installing house. So I got your take on that. So you got a lot of buzz in the analyst community around a phrase I've heard you say. Which one was that? It's called there's no more food left in the data center. So, and the animals are leaving the data center. Food being the supplier, the on-prem data center. The on-prem money and the animals being the vendors. So if there's no food in the data center, what's happening? What does that mean? It's the center of gravity's moved into the cloud. That's where the food is. So you're going to see a lot of, you know, cloud naive legacy vendors put cloud on things, right? It's the same crap they had. They're just going to put cloud on it because, like I said, what do animals do when the they're out of food? They go find where the food is, right? And so, you know, and people get mad when I say that because they go, oh, data centers aren't going away. No, I know the data centers aren't going away, but they're going to get quarantine, like mainframes got quarantine. It's going to be an expense area. It's not going to be an investment. And what do you do in an expense? You quarantine it, you cap it, you hopefully keep it flat or you reduce it. But it's sure that data centers are going to be around for a long time, but all their market caps are all based on big growth. And where people are confused is for the last five years, everybody said we're moving to cloud, but they were talking. And so if you look over the last five years, all the people selling the on-prem have done very well. So clearly this whole cloud thing was a hoax, right? Because for five years, you've said it was coming and it hasn't. So therefore, I'm good. The problem is you're good right up until you're not good. And that just happened. And that's happening now in your opinion. And that's happening now. And you're seeing it in people's results publicly and they're washing it over saying it's a temporary problem. I compensated the field wrong. Bullshit. I know what's going on. And you know what? There's going to be no hiding from that. Yeah, and the expansion is going to be in the cloud where there's developers are building apps that drive top line. That's where all the investments going, 100%. So, okay, so there's a couple of major areas developing with the cloud dynamic. Cloud scale, and now data tsunami and data scale, diversity of data. And all those things are happening. You can see that in the announcements. Large scale data, the data layer now, data ops, data as code, infrastructure as code, large scale, all that's great. But networking still becomes the fundamental problem Jesse talked about on stage. Hops to the network. They got this wavelength thing for 5G. That's really cool. All the kind of important things that are going on is going on the network. Same concepts being applied to a new architecture. Your thoughts? Exactly right. One of our customers, I forget who it was, he said a phrase to me that I love. Again, I steal everything, John. He said the network comes first. I steal it from you. Yeah, the network comes first. I go, that is perfect. I'm going to use that. It's faculty, actually it's on our website. The network comes first. Because when you're building out that infrastructure in all of computing, compute, network and storage, what's the most important? Network, by far. Why? Because if the network isn't architected correctly, you're screwed for life. So you got to get that right. And so that's what everybody's doing right now, is they look and they say strategically we're going to go build a city. First thing I got to go and do is get the basic infrastructure and the network comes first. That is the core of my basic infrastructure. If you get that wrong, life is bad for a long, long time. That's what's going on right now. So you're right. You've had a great career. You've got the CEO of Aviatris going on. You've also been looking at startups. You've advised, been on boards. What's your view of the startup landscape? If you're advising startups to go at this market, this trillion dollar market, enterprise market, that's being, the money's being thrown in the air and the money's in the middle of the table. Everyone's like, how do they attack that money? How do they attack the marketplace? The first thing, number one, you got to be cloud native. Like you have got to understand the basic native constructs of Azure, Google, AWS. You cannot be just this thing that plops on top of it. You've got to be able to programmatically program that infrastructure and leverage it because all of the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, you want to use that, right? You don't want to have to go recreate that. So that to me is number one. And then number two, I think there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of opportunity in the cloud. Everybody thinks AWS will do anything and everything you need in networking. That is a bunch of crap. There's no, there's so many limitations that they have for enterprises. Like hundreds of limitations that the beautiful thing of networking is you push one area and 10 other problems happen. So we've got 20 years of things to do to make networking better. And so that's what we're going to do, but also at the edges, right? I would say where the interesting thing happens is the interface between on-prem and cloud. So BGP, iOS, Cisco iOS, all the things that, because it's kind of like the virtual to physical interface. It's the cloud to on-prem interface. There's still going to be an interface. It's going to be plumbing. You're still, and there's still going to be an interface. That interface is where a lot of complexity and friction comes. So there's, so whether it's IoT edge computing type things or things that we do of bringing that cloud in a seamless kind of simple automated way and bringing on the on-prem into the cloud world in a very, you know, seamless way. So I got to ask you a final question. You came out of retirement. You had the good life on boards. The all-fit clipping coupons going to the beach every day. Now you see you have a company grinding it out again. A lot of older ageism kind of coming back into business. A lot of people who have been in the systems business. Oh yeah. A lot of people coming back in the game. Why did you come back? What was the main driver for you to come out of retirement? Because this is a thousand foot wave, and it's 10 times bigger than what I saw in client server. It's the biggest opportunity of value creation and innovation that I've ever seen and never will see in my life. And what's also fun is every single one of the customers that we're dealing with are all old guys like me. They're all 40s, 50s, 60s. It's the IT guys from 30 years ago that everyone left for dead and everyone thought, oh, it's the developer. Developer-led infrastructure. The developers are going to do everything. Uh-uh. This is IT. IT is coming back and said, thank you very much, developer. We got it from here. This is serious business now. This isn't fun and games anymore. We're taking over. But it's serious IT. It's reborn IT. It's not the old IT. Not the old IT. They want to do it so they, it's the old guys, but they're enlightened guys and gals and they want to do it in the cloud way with the simplicity and the automation. But yet I want to bring the functionality, the visibility and control that I had on-prem. I don't want to do it the old way. I want to do it the new way. The guy today, we're just talking to a customer, said, I don't want to build my dad's network. But he's 50 years old, right? He's my age, you know? And so, but I think that's the king. They're enlightened. They're enlightened networking people, but yet they have the 30 years of history of understanding the subtleties of BGP and networking. It's our 10th year doing theCUBE. We had such a great time. Our team's awesome. It's our eighth, seventh year doing Reinvent, eight years totaled of this conference. What's your take of Jassy's keynote this year? Is this an inflection point? Is this one of those moments where you're going to look back and say, this was a time that Amazon made a change or gassed it extra hard or what's your take? My take is, like every year he says amazing things and every year is another step function. But I think this year we'll go down as the year that people will look back a couple years from now and say, that was the point that it got serious, like really serious. I mean, in terms of big enterprises coming in and I think it's going to send a message to the other public clouds and a message to all the other enterprises that say, hey, maybe I'm falling behind. Like when you see Goldman Sachs and you see, and banks are laggards to the cloud. They're not early adopters, they're laggards. And you see that and you go, well, wait a minute, maybe I'm missing out. I think it's going to actually accelerate because of what he said, because he's seeing it. So I think it will go down as a big inflection point. Steve Milani, president and CEO of AVH, who's going to, you'll be on Thursday, we'll go over some of the stuff you've got to do as a company. Appreciate the commentary and great experience riding the wave. How high was that wave? Thousand foot wave? We've been riding this wave for years. What a great, great time it is to be here at Reinvent, it's theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Here in theCUBE, Intel Studios sponsored by Intel. Thanks to Intel for your generous contribution to making theCUBE and supporting our mission. We really appreciate it. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.