 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. This is theCUBE virtual, we're not there in person, we're remote because of the pandemic. I'm John Furrier, your host, Aaron Kelly, the general manager of product marketing with AWS is here with us. CUBE alumni going back to 2014, I think. It was the year after we started covering re-invent. Great to see you remote. And I know you did an interview with Lisa Martin on Connect, one of your areas, but thanks for coming on. Great, it's great to be here, John. It's great to join theCUBE, the virtual CUBE, it's exciting. Virtualization has come to theCUBE, we've done more interviews, but it's been great. We've gotten to talk to more people on more stories. So it's been great. I want to get to what you're doing now at Amazon. You have product marketing responsibility for AWS, compute, storage and networking, which is the corporate and butter, well-known building blocks, but also apps and app services. This has been interesting. You did an interview on Connect, it's been talking to show how fast that turned around in terms of helping your customers and helping people get these new services up stand up quickly. What are the things that you see going on that the pandemic's driving? Can you talk to this new trend that's coming out? It's kind of like the goodness of these Amazon services that are just coming out of the woodwork and providing great value. Yeah, John, what we're seeing the pandemic is a real focus on customers needing to have that kind of agility, scale and flexibility that cloud provides. So we certainly are seeing it in the core assets like in compute, storage and networking, customers like Netflix and Peloton are just really surging and taking advantage of that scalability. But we're also seeing, as you mentioned in some of the apps part of our business. So if I take Connect as an example, Lisa and I talked about this net last week, customers are rapidly moving their agents to remote working scenarios. They need that scalability of the cloud. They want pay-as-you-go pricing because they wanna pay only when they're using it not prepaid for large license fees for agents or employees. And so the overall scale, the ability to be remote, the ability to have better security when people are remote is just a huge part of the cloud surge that we're seeing. And even Andy mentioned it in his keynote. He said, hey, I think that the pandemic's bringing the cloud adoption forward a couple of years. So talk about specifically some of the services that are jumping out at customers. You know, I know you have Chine, which is essentially Amazon's version of video conferencing and collaboration. You got workspaces. How is the work at home and the shift and the pandemic impacted some of those capabilities? Are you seeing more uptake, any new features? What are some of the signals you're seeing from customers and the developers? Yeah, great. So we're seeing, you know, a lot of adoption of the Chine meeting app. As you mentioned, it's been kind of a core, almost the light blood of Amazon itself and many of our customers. Customers really like Chine because again, that pay-as-you-go pricing, I'm only paying for it when I'm using it as well as time has a nice feature where it calls you to start a meeting. So you get started earlier and you end up starting your meetings on time, which as you know, during the pandemic can be a challenge. But what was been really interesting about the Chine business has actually been the SDK. And so we're increasingly seeing customers in particular ISVs using the SDK to video and voice enable their applications. So Slack was one big ISV earlier this year that announced their move to the Chine SDK as their primary video and voice platform. Salesforce followed up with a similar announcement for their Salesforce Anywhere product that comes out next year, that'll be based on it. But we've also seen more traditional ISVs like CERNR and healthcare, video and voice enabled patients. And so now patients and doctors or care providers can communicate in context of the app. And I think that's what's really been an interesting trend is we've seen surge in usage where take care monitor as an example. There are another telehealth solution where historically it was around heart patients. And I might in the morning through the app update you with my blood pressure or my heart rate or those kinds of information. Well, now with the Chine SDK, I can escalate that to a voice and video call if the caregiver needs to provide me more information or if I'm not feeling well. And I want to do it in context of the app. I don't want to jump off into another app and have to worry about whether or not we both have the clients installed in the latest versions. I really want to do it in context. And so we're seeing so many examples of that with the Chine SDK and it's really taken off. So talk about the SDK, how do people get involved in that? Does it download? Is it free? A quick overview of what it entails. Sure. So it's easily accessible through the AWS to go to our website. You can start using the SDK and we have really low pricing based on number of video minutes used or voice minutes used, et cetera. And what we're finding is that cost model is also, again, pay as you go. You're only paying for it when you're using it. It's really aligning well with customers as they sort of transform many of their core businesses to be video and voice enabled in this era of remote work. Yeah, and I think the trend is with Connect, you saw that integrating stuff easily and fast is going to be a key feature. We're going to keep an eye on that. I'd love to have you back on to talk more about Chine. I think it's going to be one of those dark horses. You're going to see much more action on that in my opinion. Let's talk about workspaces. Give us the update on workspaces because that's something that we've been hearing about and give us the quick pandemic and how you see it evolving post-pandemic. Yeah, so workspaces, it's a fully managed desktop as a service application that we just saw a huge surge starting in March and April around usage. So many of our customers, who maybe were using a handful of seats, moved their entire employee base online over a weekend. So Grubhub's a great example. As you can imagine, they had a lot of business and a lot of energy in the early days of March and April, and they moved their entire employees, 1,200 employees to workspaces and moved them all remotely over the course of two days. And so we saw stories like that. Another one is Maximus, which is a kind of a business process consulting firm that helps in the healthcare area. And they would provide in some cases, agents to the CDC to help during the pandemic. They had 25,000 employees. They went all online using workspaces. And it really did a great job of enabling remote work, but it enables remote work for all of your applications. So it's not just your cloud-based applications, which is what people think about initially. It's all of your applications you can make available in a very secure way using workspaces. And what we're seeing now in Grubhub was a good example. Customers are starting to say, hey, this is accelerating my bring your own device strategy because now you can bring whatever device you want. I have a secure workspace fully managed in the cloud. If you need more horsepower, you can get it with a different workspace, but you don't have to constantly looking at updating your laptops as part of that engagement. And again, all the content lives in the cloud, so it's more secure. You're not worried as an IT team now about things downloading onto local machines. What was the workspace's use case? And why was it so easy to move to remote? I mean, is it because people aren't bringing their laptops home? Is it because it's the application side? What was the problem statement around workspaces around the pandemic? Can you just quickly highlight that? Yeah, it's a combination of a couple of things and you've hit on it. One of them is new employees. So I'm a brand new employee, but IT's not open. So how do I get started? Well, let me give you a workspace. Now you can use your own laptop. And Amazon itself during the early days of the pandemic, we were creating 5,000 new workspaces every week to onboard new employees. And so it was an easy way for you to as a new employee day one, you get a workspace, you can use your existing computer or laptop, and then we'll ship you a laptop later after you picked your one versus historically, day one at Amazon is you go to your orientation, then you go to the IT shop, you pick out your laptop. Well, you couldn't do that. So a new employee onboarding was a key use case that we were seeing as well as this notion that let me just move everybody remote. I can, you can use your existing hardware at home, but it's very secure and all of the, your assets remain in the cloud. And it was easy to move everybody very quickly. So those are some of the big drivers. And in particular, the new employee employee onboarding has been a powerful scenario. You know, this is one of the things Andy Jassy talked about in his keynote around global IT changing. And I know you do product marketing on the core stuff, the ISN paths, which you guys are a leader in clearly. This whole new global IT area is interesting. And, you know, I love, you know, all the pundits of the future of work is going to be this and that the other thing, you can think about the word work, workload, work flows, workplace, work workforce. All of these things are impacted by the pandemic. How are you seeing the notion of work evolving? And how are you guys thinking about it as you put the product marketing requirements together and try to, you know, shift in real time because it's playing out as Andy said in full display right now in the industry. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things. I mean, obviously the first and most obvious trend is you've got to have a hybrid flexible environment where employees can come into the office and they can work from home in a seamless manner. So that's certainly one trend and we're seeing it across all employee types. So not just your kind of classic office workers but contact center agents and everybody is really moving that. So that's the first major trend. And this is where the cloud really provides a great tool to allow that level of flexibility. I think the second trend that we're seeing is the need to support employees in all their applications which is where Workspaces has been kind of a key and we see that moving forward into next year is it's not just my email or my cloud-based applications today. It's all my applications even those ones that I may only use once a month I still need to make those available remotely. And so Workspaces has been a key there and we see that trend continuing throughout next year. And then the last one is machine learning is becoming increasingly a core part of that experience and using machine learning to improve productivity to suggest when employees should be focusing on certain projects or to give them advice on how to answer calls. And you saw that as you mentioned a few times in our contact center solution that was on Connect machine learning is now becoming just a core part of that to improve the caller experience, improve agent productivity and help customers overall deliver better customer service. You know, you and I have talked once in the past we've seen many ways of innovation. I mean, you were just go back to 2014 when you were first on theCUBE, what has changed? Talk about your vision here because I think, you know if you look at the opportunity around just productivity I mean, you mentioned productivity. It's been kind of more productive with the pandemic. I mean, you know, the silver lining on all this is you can do, we do more video interviews because one click we're in but you know, events are changing to going virtual. I was just talking to a CEO he's like, I'm talking to more customer I don't have to travel and get on a plane to fly to Europe for a sales call as a CEO of a big company. So he's doing much more face to face Andy even mentioned that more people are collaborating in you know, they lose the riffing piece of it but I get that, but I'll come back as you look at the productivity piece what's the biggest change in your opinion that's impacting developers and companies as they think about how to refactor their applications because you're going to see the need for more video more group gatherings you're going to see the need for more collaboration that's different, not written in 1998 or 2005 software. I mean, you're starting to see pre-cloud, cloud and then kind of post pandemic patterns of development and productivity. What's your vision on that? Yeah, you know, I think we've talked a little bit about it John one, you got to be able to access your software, your application from anywhere. It's got to remain incredibly secure. I mean, some of these are kind of meat and potatoes it's got to be able to scale up and down. I think customers are increasingly looking at business models that are pay as you go even for productivity solutions. They don't want to pay for features or capabilities that their employees are not using. And then I do think the big trend that we're seeing that is different from the pandemic that we didn't see ahead of time was this idea of being able to voice and video enable applications and have these kinds of collaborative experiences in the context of that application. So telehealth is some obvious ones. MindBody is another example of a customer that provides software for personal trainers. And so think about that industry where gyms and personal training, okay, you go from zero to from busy scheduled almost nothing. So being able to now have a streaming session with my clients through the same software that I use to manage my schedule and their time and keep track of their performance. Like, that's what I want. I don't have to worry about finding it, making sure we both have the same clients or everything's up to date. I can just use the application that I'm using today. And so I think we're going to see increasingly video and voice enabled applications across a broad spectrum. And it's going to introduce new business models and new opportunities that we're just scratching the surface on. And it's so exciting. Again, new patterns are forming, new expectations from users which drive new experiences. So I think it's super exciting and more than ever, there is a silver lining in all this pandemic stuff. So Aaron, thank you for coming on. Aaron Kelly, general manager, product marketing for AWS for compute networking and stores, as well as applications, Chime Workspace Connect. Congratulations on all the success, especially Connect. You guys done a great job with that. And continue. Thanks, Sean. It's always great to be on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're theCUBE virtual. Thanks for watching.