 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Amazon and Trend Micro. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at re-invent in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out and extract the seeds from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Jeff Kelly. And our next guest is Bryce Nicola, who's the EVP CTO and CIO of the Weather Channel. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, glad to be here. We appreciate it. Obviously Weather Channel is known by all geeks and anyone interested in weather, certainly when the tornadoes hit. I love to turn the snow storms and blizzards. Even though I live in California, I relive all the East Coast action, especially those nor'easters, my favorite. But welcome theCUBE, I know you're super busy. Big data in analytics, visualization. This is your business, I mean you're living this. We are. Give us a background on what you guys are doing. That's cutting edge right now, it's a little history. A little bit about the Weather Channel operation. Sure, so the Weather Company actually, which is the parent company for all of our operations. The Weather Channel, obviously our TV business, most distributed cable network in the US. Great outfit, really unique in the data localization we do. People love the Weather Channel. The rest of our business, Weather.com, Weather Underground, our big API platform that powers mobile apps on almost a billion devices around the world. iOS 8 being the default widget on Apple devices. Any Android device that is Google now enabled. 170 million downloads of our own apps. Our B2B platform, which powers 48 of the top 100 airlines around the world. We're the number one energy and insurance forecasting company. We're in over 500 local broadcast TV stations. So we are all about taking weather data and finding ways to visualize it and create. Was that the big master plan? You know, I watched MLB and I was involved in some early days of MLB when it spun out to a BAM media unit. It was like just get that parallel on there, get the website going. But really you see what they've done at the scale. They are now the definitive platform. So you guys are the definitive platform for weather, stuff, data. Yeah, MLB, they've got now businesses coming to them and they're running streams and doing things that have nothing to do with baseball. Yeah, and so you guys are in the same boat with weather data. I mean, GE, for instance, uses weather data to look at all kinds of risk management around how they look at their power stations. Absolutely. Weather impacts over a third of the GDP around the world every day. And so the beauty of weather is that there is nothing that isn't impacted by it at some point along a journey. Whether it's a person or a business. Or sales, I mean, umbrella sales are hot when it's raining. So the weather channel started in 1982 and yeah, the evolution of the business now becoming a big data technology business, really helping understand the intersection of consumer behavior and weather. Weather was the original big data problem. The first computer program on an INEAC was 25,000 punch cards and it was a weather forecasting model. And ever since then, computer scientists and atmospheric scientists have been coming together to figure out how to make a better forecast. So it's safe to say that that whole notion of being a platform and serving other businesses is clearly what you guys are doing. That's totally at the core of our business. Okay, got it. The weather platform. So talk a little bit about how some of the infrastructure, the technology you're using to support all this data and the analytics and then getting that data out to your different customers, service customers. How do you actually support all that? So we've gone through a massive transformation over the last several years as we've really transformed ourselves from being kind of a cable TV media business into what is really one of the leading big data technology organizations. That transformation started with a pretty deep hole, technically speaking, and we've had to dig out of it to be able to build a platform that would enable us to grow and do all of the products and services that we've been talking about. We chose AWS as our core partner for providing that. I didn't want to run 13 data centers. It's not the business I wanted to be in. You're in the weather business, not the data. I want to be in the weather business. I want to be in the atmospheric science business and I want to be at the intersection of consumer behavior and weather. And I want to help consumers and businesses make better decisions based upon the weather. And so choosing the right tools, clearly Amazon Web Services provides a suite of tools that we can leverage, whether it's load balances, load balancing, storage, compute, redshift, workspaces. I mean, you name it, we are consuming it and using it as parts of our business. Bryce, how does that change your job? I mean, let's just go back to reality where it was 10 years ago. So, I mean, because that's awesome. You just want to be in that business. It's your business, data centers are off your, well, not off your plate, but if it wasn't off your plate, right, what would your life be like? Would you be in meetings like discussing power bills and generator replacements? Why there was water in the generator, gas tank, why the UPS room had a leak in it? You would be stuck in those. Exciting stuff for you, right? That's not your, yeah. Exciting stuff, right? Look, as a geek, I love data centers. Data centers are cool. You get a vibe walking through a data center, but that's not our business. And I wasn't hired and I don't get paid to do that. I get paid to build technology that enables our business and our product teams, our business teams to go out and create new revenue opportunities for the company. And that, for us, is a big data platform. It's the ability to ingest, store, process, and distribute vast amounts of weather data. The world's best and most accurate forecast, and then you can build businesses on top of that. Well, talk about the agility that AWS provides you in terms of being able to attack new opportunities when they arise versus maybe a more traditional approach and how much more difficult that might be. Because, of course, with big data and analytics, it's not about building, finding some insights, trying to operationalize those, and then you wipe your hands of it. It's always got to iterate and continue to find new ways to use that data. How does AWS help you do that? Maybe ways you couldn't otherwise. So just take the weather forecast. We're the world's most accurate forecaster. We get graded every month. And to continue to maintain that lead and to continue to be the world's most accurate requires constant innovation. New data types are constantly evolving. The internet of things is providing new data types for us to be able to ingest and bring into our forecast. We have to stay on top of that if we want to continue to have the world's most accurate data set for weather. And Amazon Web Services allows me to focus in on those innovations around the algorithmic science of understanding these data sets and how they equate to a better forecast, and allows me to not focus in on racking and stacking servers and running cables and deploying all of the normal things. And so I can take my engineering talent and shift it to building these great platforms and doing things that are scientifically advancing the company forward and not doing things that are kind of commodity table stakes. What have you guys done on this? Be specific on your investment. So you got a lot of burden off your shoulders. Now you're investing in some of these algorithms and science and apps. What are you guys building? What's your new cutting edge, bleeding edge area you're investing in to move that forward? We have a product called Weather FX. And Weather FX is a real time decisioning engine that helps businesses understand how their customers are influenced by the weather. So if you were to take 10 years of historical weather data and 10 years of point of sale data and mash them together and look at what was the impact of weather last weekend in Chicago on beer sales so that you could help an advertiser understand where's a good place to spend money and where are you not going to be able to change consumer behavior because weather was overpowering. Weather's like the most primal decision maker. So Weather FX is our real time targeting engine. So do you have companies that build on top of that like the stats application MLB has like don't slide in the first base the numbers are all there. You guys must have similar companies you're working with saying here, here's the data. Absolutely, so sometimes we provide the raw data sometimes we provide a tool or an application. It depends, so the airline industry we work differently than the insurance industry we work differently than the energy trading industry. There are different needs. Sometimes people just want raw data and sometimes people want a system around them that can kind of tell them exactly what they need to do. And you sell the data to us you just must get the data. We have a very large data API built on AWS handles somewhere between 100 and 150,000 transactions a second with over 100,000 developers around the world that build applications on top of this data API platform. So we absolutely sell the world's best data. So what's the coolest thing you've seen here obviously you're up here in the big stage with all the mucky mucks up there, you know pressing poms, all the big parties, VIP. What's the coolest thing you've seen here you go you know what, this is awesome. This is badass stuff. I love this, I love that. What's your top three favorite things here that you're jazzed about? My number one thing is the culture. This event reinvent is just an amazing group of people because you have folks whether you're a startup or you're a Fortune 50 company and everybody in between here with a lot of very common desires around change and transformation and agility and speed and kind of blowing up the old and creating the new. And it's just fun to get that kind of a group together because you get these awesome conversations clearly around us here on the trade show floor there's amazing startups that are doing great things with data analytics. It's so democratizing, it really is so awesome. So look to me there's nothing better than the culture that is created to reinvent. All the Silicon Valley VCs that's around from all here they're all like, they're not even advertising no one's tweeting AMN, it's not a marketing show they're like they're doing deals and there's some serious business being done there. Okay we got a break, thanks for taking the time I want to get your perspective what's your vision for a weather company? You know you got the keys to the kingdom you got the shackles off your ankles you got the creativity juices flow and you got to have some fun really building some innovation into your plan. What's out on the horizon for you? What do you see evolving? Where do you see this going for you and your company? I'm really excited about the internet of things. I'm really excited about crowdsourcing of vast amounts of data because we want to improve the forecast and keep people safer and help people make better decisions for themselves and for their family and the vast amount of influx of new data types over the coming years is really going to transform how we do forecasting and so my vision is we have a open data platform that enables us to capture all of this rich information in the spirit of making a better forecast to keep people safer and that we do that across the globe better than anybody else. You know I got to say I really applaud you with the weather underground bringing that in full because that really teased out that the whole contribution open source ethos. 35,000 personal weather stations. I mean I use that. I've got one, do you have one? No, I don't. I have too many kids to take care of. We'll take care of it. I live in California, microclimate, huge issue. So like it could be different. Desherman's Wharf and Knob Hill are very different places. So I go right to those stations, man. So but you guys have a great business model and it's really going to help society and businesses all across the world. So congratulations, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We are here getting all the weather data in technology, sharing that with you here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break.