 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. My co-host for this segment is Brian Graceley, also with wikibon. And we're really happy to have Stephen Gardner, who is the VP of Cloud at Corp Info to the program. Stephen, you've watched the program many times, but first time on, thank you for joining us. Absolutely, I'm a big fan of the show and thank you for having me today. All right, so you were telling us that it's the first year that Corp Info has sponsored at this show, your second year at the show. Can you just give us real quick, a little bit about your role at the company and tell us who is Corp Info? Absolutely, yeah, so Corp Info, we're a 30-year-old business. We're established all around the concept of bringing value and bringing insight and understanding around technology to our clients. And right now we're setly focused on the cloud and Amazon Web Services is our strategic partner and we're here today sponsoring and helping to meet clients and talk about the value of AWS and help clients with that journey to Amazon. Okay, and what does the VP of Cloud do? A bit of everything, to be honest. So around about two years ago, we established the relationship with AWS and I came from understanding a bit about Amazon, AWS, having worked with some clients in that space and I really took on a broad role to help build out the right technical skills within our business and the right sales and the overall balance for the organization that's allowed us to be reborn in the cloud, basically. Okay, so company's 30 years old. Can you give us the pain for us kind of before and after partnering with AWS? How big you guys are, how big of an effort was this to kind of get engaged with AWS? Sure, so yeah, we're based, despite my accent, we're actually based out in the US, we're on the West Coast, Los Angeles and business is around about 100 people. Like I said, a big 30 year history of delivering infrastructure, IT solutions to our clients and two years into our partnership and our relationship with Amazon, already it's pretty clear that it's just, it's changing the business very dramatically. The cloud is now accounting for close to 100% of our growth, our new client acquisition, the people that we're hiring, that we're bringing into the business. It's very exciting, it's keeping everyone interested and enthused around their roles, which is fantastic. Great, so was the move to AWS, was that a customer or was it some internal business planning? What kind of led to that journey? Absolutely everything for us starts with a customer, so to survive 30 years in the consulting business, we've had to focus on bringing value basically and unlocking value and when we started looking around for the right cloud partner to work with, AWS was a clear choice because we wanted to be able to unlock and do amazing things for our clients and Amazon has given us the tools to make that happen, so it was a pretty simple choice for us really. Yeah, so what does that growth look like? What are your customers asking you to do, both in terms of the types of applications but also the types of services, is it help us get started, is it retrain our people, what's that growth look like? It's kind of a combination of a few factors really. When we started, the cloud was a little less well known and trusted and it was a sort of educational piece and we found that a lot of people would look at AWS or the cloud as just another data center. Really that view is starting to change now and people are realizing that they can unlock a huge amount of additional value through re-engineering some of the applications, making their systems work in a different way through embracing the wide portfolio of services that AWS offers, so we started out advisory, education, now we're moving into much more deeper conversations around re-engineering and re-platforming different business applications. Yeah, a lot of times consulting partners and so forth will have a number of partners they work with, we've been talking all week, the pace of innovation here from AWS is incredible, I mean every year it's 20 new products, it's 30 new products, does it get to the point where that's a broad enough portfolio you don't really need, I mean you can go all in, is that kind of the feeling with you guys? Oh yeah, I feel like the all in option has been very viable for a while now and you've only got to look out over the expo hall today to see the amount of great solutions that have been brought to the market to help complement the AWS suite of products and services and we partner with a number of people in this room to help us more effectively streamline that process for migrating to the cloud for our clients. But yeah, I feel especially for digital media businesses, web-based organizations, startups, all in has been an option for a long time and more increasingly, probably the last 12 months or so, we've really seen a big change in the enterprise space where enterprise clients are now very seriously investing lots of time and understanding how it's applicable to their business and how they can embrace AWS. So Stephen, to say from a customer standpoint, how much visibility do they have in that you're using AWS? How much do they touch some of the individual kind of new things that you were just talking about with Brian? Yeah, so we have a very sort of co-managed model. We'll typically work with clients, developers, the people that are, the brains behind the business really for our customers, the people that are building their products that generate revenue. So they really, they're curious. You know, they want to learn about AWS, they want to learn quickly, but really they want to focus on adding value and building applications. So they let us help architect, design, create the solutions in AWS, ensuring that there's good interfaces and links with what they're actually, how their application wants to function basically. Okay, one of the big questions we came into this week was trying to understand how many customers are using kind of the basic building blocks, AWS, and how many are going up the stack to leverage some of those higher level services, which is a lot of the focus that Amazon's had over the last couple of years. What can you share as to kind of your customers? What are they comfortable with? What are they looking for? And you know, where are they in that spectrum? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's very natural, most people start out with things like S3 storage, put some information in the cloud, EC2 obviously there, is a service that is quite similar to running a physical server or a virtual server on-premise, so they're comfortable with that. But we saw a lot of clients wanting to kind of extend and almost pass AWS more and more of the responsibility for the stack. So Amazon RDS is a great example of that, where people are now passing the management of databases to Amazon, and that's unlocking a lot of benefits. And then obviously you get the other extreme examples where clients are very, well they recognize that the value that things like Lambda can bring to their business to actually change the way that they operate and deliver their applications today, and that's a good piece. But for us, we're very focused on helping clients that want to start out from the basic components and move up in a gradual, steady process as they transform their wider business. Yeah. Did you have any metrics either kind of from yourselves or from your customers from that operational standpoint as to how much of the kind of complexity can I shift to Amazon rather than having to manage myself, what it does to staffing, processes, training and the like? Sure, yeah, I mean, usually what it means is that the individuals on the client side kind of are able to re-profile their jobs. I'd say that's very common in client situations where they'll be able to pass away the undifferentiated services that they were delivering for their business and actually then just repurpose their job to finding out ways to fix and change and grow and break things and experiment, Richie, which is really kind of what I think if I owned a digital media business, that's what I'd want my team to be doing is focusing on that value add. So I'd say at least in 50% of the engagements, we're seeing people come back to us six months later and they hold a different role in the organization and their work has completely changed over a short period of time. Yeah. So one of the things that Andy talked about, Werner talked about as well, talked about builders, right? Do you feel like your customers are identifying as themselves as being builders and they feel like this is unlocking new creativity for them? I do, yeah, and I think people are wanting to, especially the engineering role profile, people really want to build their careers as well. So they're investing a lot in the Amazon certification program and these things are high commodity now or high assets to have in the market. If you've reached those levels of certification in different components of the Amazon ecosystem, that's very sought after thing to have and I definitely think people resonate with wanting to build something new in the cloud and that's the important point is that this is new. This isn't just building another data center. I don't think people really consider themselves builders and enjoy just building new data centers. I think the cloud is a more interesting project and that's really building in my sense. Yeah, top line visibility for the business and differentiating history. Yeah, transformational things, ready. So Amazon's done a great job rolling out a lot of new features but is there any white space, anything that either your company or your customers are saying that would help them accelerate this journey even more? Yeah, I think there were some announcements in Andy's keynote which we were very welcome the announcement of the Snowball product, for example. That was an area for a while where we struggled just to get people into the cloud as quickly as they want to embrace it. I think that's a great leap forward in helping a lot of our clients get their data and their information in. I think there's probably more things in the pipeline around streamlining that process. I like the announcement about the database migration service. The quicker we can help clients with that sort of seamless adoption and move to Amazon Aurora from Sequel and other products like that, the more the merrier basically in that sense. So I'd love to see more products that we can take advantage of to help clients embrace things more quickly. Yeah, there's a lot of new databases. MariaDB got announced, new languages like Python. Are there any gaps left that you see that your customers are asking for? Because every time there's one of those new ones announced we kind of get a big war in the marketplace. So just anything left that you kind of, on the checklist that you'd like to see coming soon? We feel pretty good with, I think, Amazon, one of the things I like about AWS is they listen to clients and they work on things that clients tell them are the most important issues. So when I look sort of broadly across our customer segment, I feel that we're very well serviced with how AWS is choosing to deploy its innovation assets. All right, well, Steven Gardner of Cloud Info, really appreciate you joining us. Welcome to being a cube alum and I hope to have you back on sometime soon. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from AWS re-invent 2015 in Las Vegas right after this. Thanks for watching.