 Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re-invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my co-host John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three, you're smiling, you're still radiating energy. Is it the community that's keeping your level up? It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great. And serverless wave is hitting, more and more serverless embedded like things like analytics. We're going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled, but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end to end. And again, the zero ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. Yeah, we are. And our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from ArcXP. Thank you so much for being here. How's the show going for you? It's been great. And you know, it's the end of the day, but there's so much great energy at the show this year. It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including the session. So it's been really a stimulating time. What do you do at Arc? What's your role? So I'm vice president of technology and product development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform. So in that platform, we have content tools. We have delivery tools. We have subscription tools. And it's a really exciting time in all those spaces. And your customer base is? Our customer base started with publishers. So ArcXP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago. And word got out about how great it was built on top of the AWS tech stack. And other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce, as well as enterprise scenarios. I think that's really interesting. And I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press broadcast newsroom tools, some of them that you have used for many years. And one of the things that was really exciting about joining Arc was they were cloud native. And they were cloud native from the start. And so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate. And now we see developers here at Reinvent be able to do custom lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that really no one else can do in the CMS space. Which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us. Are you back in office? We actually have a globally distributed team. And so if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office. But most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was Arc Week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face to face. And that same energy you see at Reinvent was there in person with our engineers. I believe that. So I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital, I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? Do you see more niche or industry specific? Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. There's a couple companies in that category. There's a couple big ones out there. And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling. And so solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, a corporate yard, a bar, actually everyone needs to get the story out today. And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong cloud based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. What are some of the challenges today that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes, omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? So, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well. But what I'd say is unique to ARC and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So it's not just about one channel. It's about telling a story and having to go across multi-channels, multi-sites. And having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. It's all data. It's an immense amount of data. How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends and what are some of the core issues you seek? Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets. And when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class citizen is really the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader. But beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AI ML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? Because remember, we're a digital page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You've got things like substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies, or change to the small ones, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming that a platform could deliver so that a company can value their content and their talent? For sure. I mean, this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades at least. I was going to say, we're out of the media. And so we've seen that play out as little softball for almost every format. It's a softball. You're out of day three. How are we addressing that? First and foremost, you got to do great storytelling. So we have tools for that, but then presenting that story in a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it. And so we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. 15 million plus registered users, correct? It's unbelievable to scale. Really, ARC is a growth story. And so we went from serving the Washington Post needs to over 2,000 sites today across 25 countries. How do we get to that? How do we get that audience? If we wanted to, can we join that network? Is it a network of people? People that are using ARC Xperia. Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community. So I think they actually had a meeting yesterday. And so that's one way to get involved. But as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. So we see a wide appeal for our platform. And what's unique about ARC is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS where we take care of all of the services over a hundred Amazon services behind the scenes built into ARC. We manage all that for our customers, including the CDN. So it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up. We've got teams to take care of that 24 seven. Great value proposition and a lot of need for this. People doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology, I think serverless is a big part of it. On the AWS stack, what's the secret sauce? I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that ARC has in the Washington Post. And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world. And I've spent a lot of time in many newsrooms. I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance to the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. Talk about understanding your user. I mean, that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used now by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get ARC up and running quite quickly, correct? For sure. So one of the things we've built into ARC XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks that our customers don't have to end up with a custom code base when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution of every site to be a custom code base. We're a product with extensibility hooks. They really enable someone to get started very quickly. And that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into ARC itself. So that journey of migrating to site is really smooth with our tool set. What's the history of the company? Did it come from the Washington Post or was it the original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So designed by digital storytellers for storytelling. And one of the largest DNA specials costs. Yeah, yeah. That's where that connection is. That really is where it comes through. Awesome, congratulations. Now today, you know, those routes are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in. Experts in understanding different systems for inventory management. So we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. My final question before we go to the challenge is what's next? What's on the roadmap? As you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing, what's some of the next milestone or some priorities for your business? So it is really about growth. And that's the story of ARC XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and the need to make sure we had an exceptional experience. But most importantly, that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So that's what I'd say next year is about. It's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business, but still provide great value on the roadmap. And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. Or the Cube. I know. I'm sure you've made it. There's this straight format stuff. This dev meeting goes, let's chat after for sure. Exactly. That's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this. That is great. Great to have you on. In a lot of different ways. So we have a new tradition here at ReInvent where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel Instagram video, 30 second thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you're thinking about since we're here at this year's show? I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration and how that's resulting us using new technologies. You know, the conversation is no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure. The conversation is about observability. How do we know what's going in? How do we make sure again the most value for our customers with that technology set? So I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So next year I think it's going to be a great year with that putting together these new technologies. I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. ARC is lucky to have you. And we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? Favorite place to sail. So I lived in the Caribbean for many years. None of us are jealous up here at all. And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during COVID but is now back open. So if any of you have had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Academy Rand. There's some great spots. Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation. Maybe a team off time. Bucket list item? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Let's bring everyone together. Here we go, I love it. Well, Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon. And thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here. Live from the AWS re-invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. 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