 Hello, and welcome to this CUBE special presentation of the AWS industry tech partner showcase. This is season one, episode two, kick off the ongoing series covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem. And this session is about enabling global collaboration in game development. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. And today we're excited to be joined by Duncan Huffman, who's the director of product marketing for Incredibild. They're building a great product at a great cloud and on-prem solution around making those build times great and making developers productive and actually making them more creative and more, give them free time. Duncan, great to have you on theCUBE here. Talk about game development. John, thanks for having us. So, you know, obviously cloud, everyone loves the cloud, what it did, democratizes more access to code. Now, next gen cloud, you're seeing a lot more things happening with AI and other things and the velocity of code, the velocity of new features are coming out all the time. And in game development, you're seeing that same trajectory going on for this used to be a complex, hard thing to do to be faster and looks a lot like traditional classic CIC to pipeline development and more, right? There's a lot going on in game development. So set the table for us. You guys are in the market with a product that serves game developers, C++ and game engine developers that are building large products and engaging products. Take us through to what you guys do. What's your core product? Yeah, we've focused down on one problem, which is the long build times. So long build times are a pain and have been a pain for since there've been build times. And so we free up developers to do other things. We crush those long build times down sometimes as much as 10X or more. And we, obviously for large projects like games, that can be the difference between getting out on time and having a delayed project. How did it all originate? What was the motivation behind it? Was it just, you guys stumbled upon the fact that C++ and game engines were heavy. What was the initiation? It started with a small team about 20 years ago. Incredible was actually one of the first partners that got embedded into Visual Studio because build times were such a problem for folks even back then. And now we've grown much different and we've got a platform or products that help with distribution and caching and with speeding up builds on the cloud, on Linux, on Windows, you name it. We've got the build times covered. So we're the leading platform for speeding up development. We're deeply embedded in the Unreal Engine. We work with the engineers there at Epic and we can crush those times by about 80 or 90%. That's awesome. And I can imagine that the people must be having a parade for you guys every time. They roll this out because you can see the benefit arduous task of these build times can be big. I got to ask you, can you just describe how it works? How does Incredibill for the cloud reduce the build times so dramatically? Yeah, so we take a couple of strategies there and actually you don't have to pick the strategy, which is good. You can use both. We do sort of standard distribution which is using spare processes, laptops, servers, obviously cloud instances to expand the capabilities of your machine at build time. But we also do caching. So we enable your system to store data so that you don't have to build more than once. You only build what changes. So this combination of distribution and caching at the same time is really the advantage of using something like Incredibill. And you can use any part of the platform. You can use just the distribution if you needed or both, we have some on-prem product as well as bursting to the cloud, for example. So depending on where you have those extra resources or where you need to spend that time, we can speed up your builds. I like that kind of intelligence aspect to it. Can you, this introduction of caching and distribution strategies as cool, how do developers benefit by not having to choose between the two? Can you talk about what that means to the developer? Yeah, I think for existing products, if your product was already ready to be parallelized, that's a very hard word to pronounce. So if you're ready for parallel distribution, we're ready to help you there. And if you're already built for caching, we're ready to help you there. And we can help with distribution there as well. So the idea is if you've built your project with that sort of strategy in mind, we can accommodate you. One of the big advantages of Incredibill is that you don't have to change your code. You don't have to change your tool chain. You don't have to change your processes. We actually work the way you work. And so that's what this is all about, not having to choose one or the other and then bring in a tool to help you build it. It's wherever you are, Incredibill can help you. That's awesome. Agility, no code changes. You can use existing tools and processes workflows. That probably hits a lot of seamless integration hot buttons there, right? I mean, that's one of the core problems is how do you seamlessly integrate tools in these complex environments? Is that kind of what that addresses? Absolutely. In addition, I mean, since you mentioned it, we do integrate tightly with TeamCity, with Jenkins, with all of CI-CD tools that you can imagine so that we're not forcing you to change your processes or learn something new or stop your team to go into training for a whole new set of systems. We work with whatever processes you have. You know, I mean, developers, I can see in the old days used to rely on local hardware to do their builds. What's the benefits of the distributed teams getting into the cloud? Because I can see all kinds of benefits popping in my head here. Can you just take us through? I can see the transition. What it's been like. Can you take us through what it means from being from the local hardware too? Now I got distributed teams and you got the cloud on AWS with IncrediBuild. Yeah, I mean, you highlighted it there in the question. You don't have that kind of hardware laying around. So think about infinite power in the cloud that's available at your fingertips and we can scale that appropriately. So you're not under provisioned or over provisioned for what you need at any given time. So when I hit build and I'm in a team in Brazil helping you build your game, for example, as long as I have just a hundred megabits of bandwidth I can hit build. And that experience for me is just as fast as it is as if I had 10 or 20 or 30 servers in my room or as many as we need. So that's the difference. I don't have to distribute those, that hardware around the world to teams who need to act nimble and fast and get things done. Can you give any kind of order of magnitude throughput or performance gain or what's the with credit build? What have you seen? Let's give us a feel. I'll give you an example without and with. Yeah, no, it's a good question. We've got, so just to anchor on some things that folks may have already used. So if you're working in an Unreal Engine on Unreal Engine 5.3 there's a sample game in there called Lyra. And without in credit build on basic machines we're running at about 96 minutes for a build. So it's about three hours that'll push you through to build, it'll take about 96 minutes. With incredible, we can take that down to about 19 minutes or less. So around an 80% time savings just on that sample game. And that's pretty simple. Things like source code compile we can go even faster, 89 or 90% increase in time. So down from about an hour to about seven minutes. Okay, you guys have a smart compatibility layer piece. And I know that's a big part of what you do. I got to bring up the whole cost side because you're seeing that come up a lot of people with AI conversations that were like, oh, it's cost too much. Yeah, always cost is an issue. With Cloud you obviously got variable costs, it's elastic, it's all great. What's the cost savings? What's the impact on the dollars? Yeah, so we have two strategies there. One is that our smart scaling, our auto scaling already helps not over provision or under provision what you're trying to build. So it automatically scales spot instances for example, for just what you need and then spins them down when you don't need them. So you're not spending any resources to spin up long-term instances or over provisioning for a build. The other thing that you mentioned though is a new feature of our product which we're going into a closed beta right now. I would love to invite anybody listening who wants to experiment with that to join us. And that's our smart compatibility layer. This is really exciting because for those of you who know Windows instances can be more expensive than Linux instances. So what we'll do is with the smart compatibility layer we can take your Windows instances and run those builds in the cloud on Linux instances which are significantly cheaper. Automatically, you don't need to know anything about Linux. You don't need to get new administrators. You don't need to change your strategy. You don't need to change your code. It will just spin that up and run that on a less expensive Linux instance for you. And you can cut down about 40 to 70% of the expected cost there even above where we are with Incredibles. So that's a pretty significant new feature. We're actually just announcing it here. I wanted to take advantage of the microphone to say, hey, we're doing this in closed beta. We'd love for some folks to come and join us on that. And as we get into open beta later in the year. There you go. We've got an Easter egg here inside the video. If you made it this far, you got access to the closed beta which is really a great privilege because you're being to be part of a really kind of an intimate group of design partners with you guys. So it's a really benefit. Take advantage of it. You heard it here in the cube. Smart compatibility layer beta for Windows instances which you can be a challenge. And it sounds like you guys have a good, good solution here with smart compatibility layer and love the auto scaling. Super excited. I mean, everyone just loves the cloud. That's one of the benefits cloud is, is auto scaling and managing all that infrastructure. So that's awesome. Just in general, how do you see your customers going forward with you guys? What's the current state of the art with Incredibles? Obviously the task that the big task of building large C++ and game engine projects is a key thing. Got that check cost effective in the cloud, accelerating key. What are they working on now? What are the key things that your customers are going to take us through the day of a life dunking of your customers? What they feel, what they go through and some of the benefits? It's funny because some of our customers are AWS, for example, Epic is not just a partner of ours, but Epic is one of our customers as well. Microsoft is also one of our customers. So these are folks who are building the future of technology and they rely on Incredibles to speed them up and to free up their teams. I think a lot of big dev teams are focused on developer productivity and developer velocity. And that is something that we can help with very directly. So rather than cracking the whip and telling devs to be more productive, this actually gives you a toolkit that gives you time and business value back in your day. I mean, obviously a team getting three hours back in their day. Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible, credibility. I mean, you've got the revolutionary approach this takes, I mean, it turns any machine you have on your network and the cloud into a supercomputer powerhouse, unlimited course. I mean, basically it's like unlimited compute. Yeah, and that's how we feel about it. And I think the move to the cloud, not just because I'm talking to AWS, but that is what I'm seeing in the conversations with our customers is they're really interested in getting off-prem and more distributed teams. So they've got teams all over the world building different parts of gigantic games, for example. And how do we enable those guys and empower them to get the kind of productivity that a team sitting in the same office would have gotten last year or the year before? Yeah, I mean, Duncan, you know, it's been incredible to see this next gen. I call it next gen cloud. I'm going to see Adam Sileski a couple of weeks before reinvent for my exclusive. Last year I kind of tried to poke him on this and said, hey, you know, next gen clouds. Yeah, I wouldn't call it next gen. It's just sass. Well, it's kind of next gen. You got ecosystems, all kinds of new environmental impact teams. And so, you know, this year you're seeing a lot more impact of solutions like yours that change the team configuration. You got remote work, for example, taking center stage. Developers don't need to be hampered by all this prolonged build time. So that's going to free up more creativity. You're seeing more creatives being on teams, less dev because of automation and AI. So you're starting to see that change over where things like bandwidth, build times, all those tasks are going to be intelligently automated to change. What are you seeing on remote teams? You're seeing some team changes because we're hearing a lot in the game world that it's looking a lot like traditional development and cloud scale and a lot more creatives on the team emerging because it opens up the aperture of talent of developers. What are you seeing? Yeah, it's actually one of the big reasons we went after the caching feature of our product is where our build cache really does enable you to empower your teams to really work remotely and get that work from home angle covered because we saw that move in the industry, obviously during COVID, but now sustained and distributed teams are the norm. So building something over and over again and even in the cloud that has already been built is sort of unnecessary and a lot of wasted time. So our build cache feature enables you to just cache the entire build and then just build what has changed collectively as a group and really empower that work from home. And the cloud really gives you guys that innovation layer. I got to ask you real quick. I know that Windows thing is a great announcement to close beta, check it out. Windows users, Windows servers, Windows instances has always been kind of a challenge. The other challenge has been bandwidth, right? Those are areas you guys are tackling. Can you just quickly talk about how you guys take on those challenges? Yeah, so the core bandwidth we're looking for is ideally about 100 megabits. Now, you can definitely do things with less bandwidth and many of our customers do, but if you got about 100 megabits of throughput, you should be able to get just as much speed as anyone else. So that's the first thing that we try to keep things throttled to that level. But the other thing I got to go back to our build cache technology, you're only pushing up the pipe what changed. So if you were just changing an asset and hitting a build to see how that asset impacts your project, you don't have to push the entire project up the pipe and that's really where this comes in handy. That's really intelligent too. That's key value and a lot of data is moving through the data, so there. So all right, great. So final question for you, reinvent. You guys got some specials. How do people find out more with you guys? How do people get involved? People watching here want to take advantage of the closed beta, give a quick commercial on how they can get in touch with you guys and anything you guys got for features, any credits, how do people get involved? Yeah, so we do have all of those things. They should get ahold of our sales teams and our incredible teams are standing by waiting to catch the folks who are listening to this. So incredible.com is the place to go and to get information on where we're gonna be, when we're gonna be there. And there are a lot of matching credits from AWS, you guys are super generous. So if you guys have been hesitating to go to the cloud, worried about going to the cloud, incredible it's here to help you and we can facilitate that entire process. Thank you so much for taking the time coming on the showcase. Really appreciate it. Episode two of season one of the tech focused tech partner showcase. Thanks for coming on. John, thanks so much. Okay, we'll be back with more coverage here at theCUBE. This is the presentation of season one episode two. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.