 Live from Washington DC, it's CUBE Conversations with John Furrier. Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here in Washington DC at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from DC. Our next guest is Robert Groves with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronics, a service provider in cloud and in IT. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, John. So we're in DC, the CUBE's getting the lay of the land. So much innovation happening around cloud and disruption. You got one group going, discretionary heads wondering what's happening. Some groups saying what happened and then you've got people making it happen, right? So what's the big aha moment that people might not know looking into DC now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it? What are they doing? Is it cloud? Is it mobile? Is it data-driven? Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time. The contracting process has been a mess. Some of the things have happened and some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the aha moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronics has been working with the public sector and cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers. And we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing in terms of an aha moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler. We're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the cloud from a security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to do managed services and managed security services and it's really disrupting the way that the federal government's done business in the past. You know, I've said, we were at this public sector summit last June and we were commenters. The first time the queue was at an event and you know, we haven't been to the other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no excuses government at this point because there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one connected social media and everyone's like, hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring my iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? Exactly. Now you have security looking down the barrel and IOT happening and everything. So you have Swiss cheese called malware attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. Exactly. So security is forcing and we're at cyber war. We are. You can't deny that. Why isn't the Congress emergency funding for security or is it happening? Well, they need to be, but if you look at the way traditional data centers were built and all premise infrastructure was built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing. You had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at cloud services or be able to look at a green field environment and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the cloud is enabling. You're actually. You mean programmable infrastructure. Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually every single thing that happens in a cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged. And when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment and you can apply some of these new primitives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about to protect critical infrastructure really in ways that you couldn't do before. And you can actually with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you program programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events and it's repeatable. Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you I did an interview with, I think with the CTO or CISO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor. And we were talking and we were totally geeking out like the complexity of the cloud actually is an advantage in security. And I said, what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item. And that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up. It's just like on the battlefield, the surface area of attack matters. I mean, you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack there's no way for them to be able to 100% agree with that. How does that, how do I turn that complexity obviously there's management tools to make the cloud easier but complexity of scale. How do I turn that as an IT person or a manager or an executive into a security advantage? What do I do? So the security advantage is that every time you build a role, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure. So when we develop one thing as a managed service provider to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space and this can start to really help create that sec DevOps infrastructure. So you scale more observation space to get more data. That gives you also an advantage. It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advanced persistent threats are you can then really start to do things this was the province of really large organizations only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use all of these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing. Oh, you're kidding me? The cloud isn't unsecure. Turns out cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than build it on site because of human error and or other force majors or any kind of other. That's exactly right. I mean, anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment. And that's what you get when you start to utilize cloud services. Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this is like 2011 timeframe. We're like, don't discount multi-tenant cloud. Exactly. They're like, okay. And Dave Eliza, I haven't been tracking that. Okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth? And what are the headwinds? What's the blockers? Well, the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact that they're seeing the cloud first is probably the strategy that they should take. And we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology. I think what they're seeing now, especially in the department of defense and in some of the federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the cloud. Maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. Well, Rene had a different approach. They automated actual code bases, so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly. So it's interesting. That is one of the fundamental things that when you start looking at infrastructure as code and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software stack, whether it's SharePoint or Oracle Stack or authentication, it all gets repeated. Once that gets quantified and done right with the right subject matter experts, then you could start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. This is an open source ethos built on the shoulders of others. Why replicate something that's already in service, throw it into a service catalog, make it a microservice, make it an API. And that culture is finally transformed in the federal government. That didn't used to be the culture, right? It used to be. People must be like, finally. I have to have my arms wrapped around this. I have to be able to understand everything that's happening. And you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now, sometimes you'll see it a little bit. I don't want to go with maybe AWS because I'll have vendor lock-in. Yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open source. You speak in our language. We talk about this all the time. The lock-in is always a lock-in spec somewhere. If it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs and choice, right? So the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that have been successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in. If it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that's going on around the DOD is interesting. We've been reporting and out in the field. We've been getting the data coming in saying, hey, this DOD kind of overtures interesting because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government. Because that CIA is kicking ass and taking names with the Amazon. Now you get the DOD looking down, potentially a single cloud option. Other vendors are crying foul, calling, we need to spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud as a requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be a requirement or should it be a jump ball? For one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in a space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete. And that's not a bad thing. It really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud or even to consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got 10s and 10s of years of legacy technical debt in your data center. There's not a reason to pull everything into the cloud environment. There might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. They're like the mainframe. Like the mainframe stuff. For them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the cloud, it's a lot of rewrite. It's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. And some people will choose to have COBOL code running banks right now. And just because they have that process. And it's working. And they'll inevitably come to the time where they have to do the migration search. Great commentary. Great to have you on. Great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing? How do you guys fit into this trend? Talk about, take a minute. Talk about what you guys do and your opportunity. Sure. Smartronix is about a 20 year old company. We talk about, some of our competitors will talk about being born in the cloud. We were actually pretty much born in the enterprise. We helped the Marine Corps establish their network operation security command 20 some years ago. We were first to lead virtualization technologies to help the forward deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that they can move into theater. So we've always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cyber security and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology in government dealing. The battlefield is an instant case of how to deploy. Absolutely. The wireless environment. All steer environments, low power. I mean, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data centers. And we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, the two.0 days. You've got to push the envelope. You have to. Your job is to push the envelope. And that's really where I think smartronics has done a really good job is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly regulated, compliance driven environments utilize technology in innovative ways more securely and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009 to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced Recovery Act. They needed a website to track $750 billion worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this. You're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon web services capabilities. We're going to build out the test and dev while we build out the data center environment. And we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. We absolutely did. What was another website that they didn't actually, the deadline done, they had to bring in. Yeah, that had to do with the healthcare. Oh, the Obama. So this one was recovery.gov. Very well documented success. It ended up being the very first cloud first initiative for the federal government, the first government property running on a public cloud infrastructure. And then from there, we migrated to much. Obama does not get the credit he deserves on open government. He opens up data sets, he changed the game. He did. And again, that was, I think when you look at, historically when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the federal government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government. How you could get that agility and innovation and speed of business of commercial and do that in the federal government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on. And we were kind of on the leading edge, the leading edge sometimes of delivering those kind of capabilities and services. So you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized because this is the problem. No one can hide it anymore. There's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. You've been sitting around not innovating. Now our cyber war is attacking. You've got cybersecurity. IT needs to transform. They got to do it really fast. You've got all of these competing pressures, the security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor or partner to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars. And these are very simple pillars, but it's really, really required for really looking at cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments. Help them think through what that roadmap and strategy is to get there. And then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud native, to utilize cloud native services, that also when you get to the implementation of migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage. And that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have a more effective organization and better services in your environments. Robert Groves, second vice president of technology at Smartronix. Thanks for spending the time with me. Thanks John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here in Washington DC, actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services, public sector headquarters. Thanks for watching.