 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Welcome everyone to theCUBE live and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. It's good to have you. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Mira Vaidyanathan. She is the product leader for Amazon Honeycode at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Mira. My pleasure to be here. So tell our viewers a little bit about Amazon Honeycode. This was a product that was announced in June of this year. What was the impetus for? What were you hearing from customers that made you realize there is a need for this? Yeah, so Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows customers to build powerful mobile and web applications without the need for any programming. So customers today have a growing need to manage data over time, manage workflows that involve multiple people that facilitate complex business processes. And today we're doing this through spreadsheets and mailing these spreadsheets via email. And what ends up happening is you have a whole lot of spreadsheets with different data and it usually falls to one person to consolidate all the information and create a source of truth. Organizations that have the resources to build custom applications do so, but quite often these applications just don't get built and employees in these businesses are managing with these band-aid set of tools that I just discussed. And so what we wanted to do was to build a no-code app-building platform that customers can use their existing skills to build the apps that they need for their day-to-day lives. So no programming required. You bring the skills you have, just those are using spreadsheets to be able to build apps to manage all of your productivity and collaboration needs. So what has the right to do with Honeycode? What has the reception been since you launched back in June? What are you hearing from developers about how it's changed the way they're doing their business? Customers are very excited that AWS now has a solution in this space. And from the very first day, from the day of launch, we've just seen a lot of interests from organizations of all sizes, both domestic and international. And customers have been building apps to solve various problems. In fact, the very first app that a customer shared with us was a COVID tracking app for a childcare center in New Hampshire, where parents had been standing in line for tens of minutes waiting to drop off their children and filling out a form at the entry point. And this customer built an app over a weekend and was able to deploy it, reducing the drop-off time to minutes. We've also seen a great deal of activity in our community forum, where customers are exchanging ideas and learning from each other. And what they really like about Honeycode is how easy it is to spin up an application without needing to think about databases or servers or deployments. And they also like that by building just one app, it's immediately available in both web and in mobile. And of course, the best of all is the fact that all of the data is up to date and they're able to make informed decisions based on the data in these apps. Customers have also been very forthcoming about feature ideas and requests and that is continually feeding into our roadmap. So I want to talk about some other use cases. You mentioned the Child Care Center in New Hampshire, which sounds as though you helped save these parents a lot of time and alleviated some of their stress. What other kinds of use cases are you hearing? Sure. The types of apps that we've heard about include like leave and vacation requests in organizations. A team has built a hotel management booking system, contracts management for an unemployment center, sales opportunity tracking, status reporting across distributed teams, which is a reality that we're all living today. More specifically, we know of a customer who has a 6,000 person team and they built an app to manage service costs requests. So this is a systems integrator and they're using this app across 10 partner teams across the world. We've also heard about a coffee trader who has built an app to manage their coffee orders across both domestic and foreign markets. And previously they were doing this via email and through spreadsheets. So those are the different cases that we've heard about. What kinds of internal interest are you having within AWS for Honeycode? I'm told that there is a great deal of interest within the organization itself. Absolutely. Yeah, there's been a lot of interest at Amazon. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't hear from a new team that has a use case that they need to build an app today on Honeycode. And these are usually use cases that customers have been solving with spreadsheets or our internal ticketing tool because they haven't had the resources to build their own custom app. There are HR team, one of the HR teams at Amazon in fact has built an app that is consolidating across four different tools so they can get an accurate picture of what is going on with any particular team, a headcount, how many roles are still to be filled, et cetera. Another example is a marketing team that is managing all of their marketing campaigns through a Honeycode app. So they can see how many campaigns have we already executed this month, how many still remain, what are the results from these campaigns, all of this in one place. And in fact, in the Honeycode team itself, we use Honeycode for managing all of our internal processes from our product roadmap to program management, to managing and tracking our goals. And because we're also distributed these days, we seem to be spinning up an app on a practically daily basis. In fact, today the team is running a hackathon and all of the ideas for the hackathon were gathered on a Honeycode app and then later today we'll be doing demos and voting on the best hackathon project. So it's given rise to a lot of new ideas and a lot of new ways in which we're able to work together collaboratively. Well, an app a day, I love it. So it does sound like the kind of collaboration you're describing and the ways in the transparency, particularly during these COVID times when people, as you say, we're working dispersed, teams are remote, there's a lot of isolation. It does seem like it's really a revelation what you're doing here. Yeah, it's been a learning experience for us as well, working remotely and trying to figure out how do we keep each other up to date on what we're doing? How do we make sure that we find ways to replace those hallway conversations, those water cooler conversations as we like to call them? And so we find ourselves interacting via these apps a lot more, trying to keep everyone abreast of what we're doing by updating project status and so on. In addition, of course, to meetings online on video. It has certainly helped us all stay on the same page. In fact, Honeycode, the product launch itself was managed via Honeycode app. And normally that's something that most other teams either build a custom app for or manage via a spreadsheet and probably hundreds of post-it notes. So the product is relatively new, but you had some announcements last week at AWS re-invent. Tell us a little bit about those. Yeah, in the last few weeks, we've had a slew of new announcements and they followed the three major areas really, integrations, identity and app building features. For the first, we announced integrations with Amazon Appflow and Zapier to integrate with external data sources, to push and pull data into and out of Honeycode. We also announced the ability to set up and log in with multiple identity providers, including Acca and Google, to make it easier for our customers to manage user accounts, as well as for single sign-on. And last but not least, we've announced several features to make it easier for app builders, as well as the end users of these apps, not only to make the apps more functional, but also more delightful to use. And these include features like border styles, conditional styling, as well as easier ways to sort and filter your data in your app screens. You use the word delightful, which is absolutely an adjective that so many of us associate with Amazon. Tell us a little bit about how you are working to make these, that the user interface more delightful, as you say. Yeah, we're continually adding new features to make it easier. So, you know, every business user doesn't have to think like a UX designer. So we're trying to think about the ways you look at all the productivity apps today. You want certain sets of data to pop up in your app. For example, if the status of a project is read, not only do you want it to notify the appropriate parties, but you also want that information to pop up in an app. So it's very easy just using a very simple expression. You can set up the rules, the conditional rules, to say, hey, if the status is read, then make sure, or status is delayed, then pop it up in bright red. So it catches my eye the next time I look at an app. So we're trying to find ways to, thinking about all of the business use cases, trying to find ways to help customers make the information pop better in their apps so they deliver more value in businesses. You mentioned Zapier and Amazon Appflow. What are the business use cases in terms of those? And what are available now? Yeah, so both integrations with Zapier and Appflow enable customers to build even richer applications because now previously they were building applications just based on the data that was sitting in Honeycode. And with these integrations, now they can bring in data from other sources programmatically. So these include integrations to apps like Salesforce or Slack, Jira, Amazon S3, et cetera. And this makes it possible for business users to use Zapier or Appflow to build powerful integrations. So I'll give you an example. Let's say a sales team can use a Honeycode to build an app to process their sales inquiries. And instead of dealing with emails and spreadsheets, what they can do is use Zapier to automatically pull in requests that come into their website. And this can be pulled straight into a Honeycode app which can then generate a notification to the sales manager to approve a quote and then the quote can be generated in email to the customer. All of this is made possible through an integration with Zapier. And you can integrate with Amazon Appflow to pull in data from Salesforce. So it makes it possible for customers to use more up-to-date information in their apps, making it driving better decisions and more informed decisions. And what type of new templates are now available? Yeah, back in June when we launched, we had about 10 templates for common use cases in businesses. And since then we've been regularly adding more to that repository. Our most recent additions to the template library include the ability to run meetings virtually, which we're doing eight hours a day these days, instant polls, a collaborative brainstorming template, as well as applicant tracking. And we'll continue to add more in the coming months. So there's just no question that this is such a high growth area. Gartner estimated last year that low code, no code approaches will represent more than 65% of application development inside companies by 2024. Foresters also projecting $21 billion by 2024. What, I want you to look into your crystal ball here and just tell us a little bit about what you're expecting in the next six to 12 months and what you're hoping for the future for Amazon HoneyCode. We remain focused on helping business users solve problems that were previously out of their reach because they either lacked the resources or the skills or support from IT. HoneyCode apps have the scale and security that customers expect from an AWS service. And over time, we expect to add more features that make it progressively easier for business users to develop without needing how to learn how to code. And we'll also expect to add features that are required by IT departments for adoption in enterprises. Mira, what are you hearing from customers about what they're wanting to hear from you? Just, I want you to close us out here and give us what you're hearing and then what your best advice is for managers who are thinking about trying to adopt some of these low code, no code approaches and are interested in what they're hearing in terms of what you're saying about the collaboration and transparency that these tools provide. Yeah, these tools make it possible for anyone in any business, HR, marketing, program managers, product managers, really anyone to build applications that are very specific and tailored to your business needs. And because these applications don't require the typical process of selecting a database, selecting the storage layer, selecting all of these things and they're deployed almost immediately. Like as soon as an app is built, it's available to the end users to use. It makes it possible for the applications to evolve with your needs. In fact, this is what I see every day with the apps that we build for ourselves is, it works this week, next week, we're like, what if we tried something slightly differently? Because we become more efficient, our techniques evolve over time and the situation changes as we're seeing every day in COVID times. So it makes it possible to just, to have the applications grow with you as your business grows and evolves. So that's what's really exciting for me with Honeycode is things that were usually, out of the reach of business users, now they're able to build these applications and they use the exact same skills that they might have used with spreadsheets. So that's what's really exciting and we're gonna continue to listen to our customers and we know that business users want to be more productive and want easier to use tools and that's what we'll be working on. Mira Vaidyanathan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a real pleasure talking to you. Likewise, thank you so much. And thank you for tuning in to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned.