 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Silicon Angle and theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect a significant noise. We're here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit, Amazon Web Services there. They go out and they go out all the different major areas and do their learning and training. It's all free, thousands of attendees learning about Amazon Web Services. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe McCose, Jeff Frick with theCUBE, General Manager of theCUBE and co-host Jeff. Welcome back to our next segment with Luis Arez, Director of Tech Alliances, Al Fresco. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much and it's Luis Salah by the way, but that's it. I won't tell anybody. It's a good safe with me. Okay. We have Luis on last year at AWS Summit 2013. So I guess first off, what's really changed in the marketplace in the last year? Well, so last year I spent a lot of time talking about well a little bit about Al Fresco with you guys telling you how Al Fresco manages documents and both on-prem and in the cloud with hybrid technology and so forth. And what's changed since then is that while we've been building a very good business, we've been around for a long time, but a very good business with Amazon and collaborating with Amazon on joint sales, joint deals and basically delivering the value of the cloud and the value of open source document management to our customers. And this has just yielded tremendous results over the last year. It's been really incredible. So talk a little bit, because you guys didn't start out on Amazon. Like I said, you've been around for a while, so talk a little bit about kind of how the Amazon relationship got started and then how it's really grown and what that's been to your business. Sure, so we started off as a commercial open source technology, so people would download our product, install it on-prem and use it to manage their mission critical, business critical documents, workflows, metadata and those types of things. And what we've been discovering over time is that number one, our architecture lent itself very nicely to being deployed to AWS. And number two, people were catching on to the idea of deploying our product to AWS. Here's what's beautiful about AWS. We've got compute, your servers, right? You've got storage like S3 and you've got the database, right? Those are the three main things that Al fresco requires to function. So- As do all applications. Right, exactly, as do all applications and that's the beauty of it, right? And just happens to be that our product works really well there. So great, so what we've been able to accomplish is we realize that we can easily integrate S3, which has its own proprietary interface, right? We started demonstrating this to customers, people started deploying this and it just took off like wildfire. Now did you have any type of a SaaS offering before? No, we built our SaaS offering using these same cloud technology. So we built it and run it on top of AWS, but what we're seeing is a mix of customers that use our SaaS offering and others that deploy our product, whether on-prem behind the firewall or more commonly now, AWS. Right, and don't tell me anything that you've been in trouble for, but in terms of growth within your business, the on-prem versus the SaaS offering, what can you share with us in terms of market uptick and market adoption or are there specific types of customers that prefer one over the other? So customers, the customers that tend to use our product are the ones that care about the security and privacy of the data. And they want to be very selective about how this data gets exposed outside of their environment. And so what we need to do is build a lot of credibility and best practices in order to demonstrate that a customer can go to the cloud while still respecting those policies. And so our business has been a lot, has involved a lot of that, right? So it has grown our SaaS customers do tend to use us primarily for more lightweight collaboration nowadays, but we're building a whole new suite of SaaS products that are going to deliver specific business functionality. And I'm going to use contracts management as an example here that will be delivered explicitly through the cloud, but also work on-prem and behind the firewall. Interesting. So you're happy with the 42nd price decrease that Andy announced earlier at the keynote? It's incredible. I mean, this helps us, it helps our customers, right? Now we have a secure place to store the data that is even more affordable than it was before, right? And it's just incredible. And you know what? I expect to see this happening two to three times a year. We're going to keep seeing more price drops. Amazon is about the only technology company that I'm aware of that drops prices, right? Even our own product, I hate to say it, sometimes goes up in price, so yeah. So we were talking off camera before he came on and you shared a really funny story. And what's neat about Alfresco is you're kind of at the intersection between technology and kind of the new age and old school paper, right? And how that is transitioning. And the specific example that we talked about involved the oldest of the old, which is government with stacks of paper. Exactly. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about that application. You know, we know that government is, there's a bureaucracy, there's a lot of, there are a lot of paper based processes out there. And this one example, there was a large government organization that handles certain classes of claims and benefits and whatnot for citizens and other constituencies. And they had a very, very tedious paper based process that would take over a year to process a claim and deliver the service to the citizen that required it. And so this. A year. A year, a year to do the process. And it got so bad that Comedy Central's John Stuart got into the picture. And I mean, this was all over the news, but John Stuart basically did a whole series where he would, where he was essentially pointing out these problems with paper and a lot of processes and how it could benefit from the digitization, right? And that's what we're good at. And guess what? They're now using a fresco to solve this problem. The situation was so bad. John Stuart was making fun of this, but they had stacks of boxes that were weighing down the floors on their warehouses where you could take a leveler and see that the floor was sagging. But putting all the humor and sarcasm aside, this organization clearly wanted to deliver better service and better value to the constituents. And so they invested in this and they are deploying a fresco along with, scanners to scan documents into a fresco. They get stored inside AWS's GovCloud, so it's secure, it's safe, right? And the whole idea here is that as this deployment continues to progress, we're going to shorten, excuse me, that lengthy one-year process down to three months and eventually lessen that. And this is the government trying to do the right thing and I think they're succeeding at it. So I want to ask you about the joke on Twitter right now on our crowd chat is, Amazon is a price drop as a service, which is great, right? I mean, who doesn't like price? That's a new one. We heard that. Exactly. I brought it up. Always adding new stuff here in the queue. So obviously that's cool. They're lowering prices, they're adding new stuff, seeing the SSDs finally come on board. So that's all great. We're a big customer of Amazon. We love it 100% on Amazon on our crowd chat. But the question that everyone's asking is, where are they in the enterprise? So you start to see that now all in with in four, you've got these guys going crazy now. They're changing the game. So they're not going to put the lipstick on the pig and say we're going to be enterprise like the other guys. You seeing them do things a little bit differently. That's their style. So I got to ask you, as someone who's out there on the cutting edge on the cloud side, as well as having a peek into legacy business structures, you're dealing with a lot of legacy, which is enterprise. What is Amazon doing right and what do they need to do better to be enterprise ready? Because they're not there yet, but they're getting there. Yeah, I think we know that Amazon, when they started, when AWS first launched, they were doing a pretty thriving business, building a thriving business on startups, right? But the problem with startups is that they're much like the restaurant business. Nine and 10 are going to fail. And so in order to build a long-term sustainable business, you need to start looking at traditional enterprises. And as an Amazon partner, I have firsthand knowledge and observations of how Amazon's whole organization is oriented towards building a stronger enterprise business. So let's- And that train is coming down the track, but the question is, when and how long will it take? They're pretty fast. Oh, they've essentially done it now, but I was president at their sales kickoff this last January. And I can tell you that, that this is what's coming out of their executive leadership. They've hired like crazy. Their team has effectively tripled in the last several years. So I think they have the field organization to support the customers that they're going after. And I think the technology is very, very credible, right? It's ready for these kinds of use cases. They take security so seriously, and that's a big thing for enterprises. The price model, CapEx versus OpEx, right? That's also very appealing to large organizations. So it's working. It's happening now. One of the things about Amazon has been impressive is that, and this is a double-edged sword for them, right? I mean, at one level, and they don't do a lot of grandstanding. They pretty much stick to their knitting, their geeks, they're working on stuff, the cloud, it speaks for itself on the product side. But now you have competition. The war for the developer has been full swing. Not just like startup developer, enterprise, cloud operations, you got IBM with BlueMix in the cloud. You got HP trying to copy Amazon. Cisco just launched a billion dollar cloud initiative. Internet of everything, what the hell do they call it? It's basically Internet of Things. So you get the DevOps culture going on, and you got all the big guys trying to put that sea wall off to stop that wave in the enterprise. Some say, I say, it's going to be hard to do. But now you have Amazon has to compete. What do they have to do? I mean, do you think they're going to change course in terms of how they do things to react to the competition? Do you think it just heads down and just keep the rear view, everyone in the rear view mirror? It would be falling out to react, right? I think, but they're so far ahead that that gives them certainly that first mover advantage. Now, I would say that they need to keep an eye on the competition. They need to continue to innovate. They need to listen to the customers, which once again, they demonstrated consistently that they listened to the customers. And I think they will always have that leg up in terms of scale, which leads to the economies of scale, right, those are the cost factor, that innovation keeps coming from them. And they just have that advantage. And as long as they keep doing what they're doing and demonstrating those, that ability, that flexibility to adjust with changing market conditions, I think they're going to continue to be in a very good position. So Jeff, you've got IBM, Oracle, HP, all that cloud, Pivotal VM, where it's the enterprise cloud, never mind the Google stuff we saw yesterday, and you got Microsoft. I mean, that is some significant. These aren't like, they're saying startups. Right, right. It's like bottom resort. This is like IBM's all in on the cloud. They got the big data thing going on. I mean, they got to be scared. There's telltale signs on this. Yeah, but what's interesting on Jassy's keynote, they had the Gardner Magic Quadrant with 14 cloud providers. And he said they've got five x according to Gardner computing power of the other 13 combined. The other thing I thought was really interesting in terms of listening to customers and changing their business is he talked about adding people resources, a phone number, somebody to call when you need support. Exactly. There's a couple of names in that list that you mentioned where you can find a phone number. They're not in the yellow pages. So that's interesting in that it's a different model for them, but if you look at the tremendous customer service in terms of a culture that you get with Amazon from the consumer side and to really take that point of view and just constantly listening to their customers, I don't know that they're looking at the competition as tightly as they might, but they certainly listen to their customers, sounds like, and keep responding to those needs. I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. But they continue to innovate, they continue to do what they're doing. I think they're doing okay. Yeah, it's just not a lot of talk about test and dev. They've got 14 of these summits shows, John. 14 summits, there's 4,000 people here and it's free. And it's really just about coming in, learning about the applications and learning about the infrastructure, hearing about best practices from the Amazon people as well as your peer group. So they're pretty much heads down, they look at customers. Yeah, I mean, to me what's impressive about Amazon is that they're launching so much new stuff at a rate that's alarmingly amazing. It's just like, it gets your attention. And it's almost two over the top. I mean, I'm sitting there listening to Jassy. It's just like, we have this, we have this. We have containers on EEC to optimize for the government, for the security. So you're seeing, you're seeing cash container with elastic bean stuff. It's phenomenal, elastic cash, the Redis stuff, the Node.js stuff. I mean, the DevOps culture is the new modern era that's the printing press kind of impact. It really is so phenomenal. And I'm not sure the other guys can compete. And I got to ask you, Louise, what do you think is the big disruption? Is it the app side of it? Is it the code agility? The fact that they're interested in new stuff? Is it that they're constantly changing the game and moving the goalpost, if you will, every day on the competition? What is the key thing? Agility is at the core of everything that they're doing, right? And it's agility to a variety of different constituents. So there's the DevOps, the CIS admins, et cetera, who are deploying infrastructure using Amazon's virtualized infrastructure, right? Capabilities. They're the actual engineers who are writing the code, writing the applications and need a quick way to develop, test, iterate, write, fix bugs, et cetera, and then push it off to the DevOps guys who then deploy to production, right? So I think it all hinges on making sure that these audiences are agile while still addressing the other factors, as I said before, cost. The other one is the scale, right? I mean, what made X86 win over everything is that Intel had such massive scale on the PC side that that just pulled the development and the pricing, which is going to be interesting as X86 goes against the sea of arm processors that are now in phones, but Amazon's got such scale that they can leverage. What they're also doing is they're bolting on an ecosystem, and I think that's critical. If you look at all the success you need to have on a platform, you mentioned the X86, you had some scale, you had an ecosystem up and down the stack from chips to apps. Now it's the same thing you've seen with Amazon. Just the uptake and breadth of customer base is impressive, but I got to ask, at least about OpenStack and these other alternatives, because one thing that OpenStack has provided great hope for enterprise guys is the composite capability of this cataloging, you know, where you're about cataloging APIs and finally getting to service architectures, finally, right? Or will that lose to you? So people want to go where the signal is, right? So what's your take on OpenStack? So OpenStack is, it's formidable what they've accomplished over the last few years. The problem with OpenStack is it's only half of the equation, right? You don't get the scale, if you don't have the, well, the data centers to deploy this to, right? You don't have, you can only create essentially many clouds, at least this is the way I see that small organizations or more traditional enterprises are going to be able to leverage the technology. Will they be able to derive a benefit from this? Absolutely, they can, because the fact is that programmatic virtualization essentially, right? The ability to, for a few lines of code, deploy your infrastructure is beneficial no matter whether you're doing it in your own data center or in a public cloud like AWS. But the long-term prospects, I, at this moment, I'm not particularly done whole about it. But you see many clouds certainly as the future environment, you know, having multiple clouds, cloud for this, cloud for that. Well, I think we overuse the term cloud, I'm sure you would all agree, right? But, yeah, there's going to be, you know, Resources. Yeah, exactly, I mean, it's, these are resources as a service, you're right. It is overused word, so. Exactly, it's very much so. So, yeah, I think it's got a life and we're going to see a lot of, you know, vendors in there. I would put my money on, of course, Microsoft and AWS and Google for sure. I think IBM, you know, with SoftLayer, et cetera, they're going to make an impact. Rackspace is, of course, a player in here. So. What about Pivotal and Cloud Foundry, normal and real? Yeah, I don't know yet. I like the idea behind Pivotal. It's kind of a fat-pass layer. People are complaining. It's kind of bloated. It's bloated. Yes, I agree. You know, and I'm just not a fan at the moment, but that doesn't mean I couldn't be converted. I love new technology. So I'm going to try out whatever they give me and at least try to be as objective as possible with it. Yeah, and you want to see the meat on the bone, right? Exactly. You want to sizzle and steak, right? Exactly. Here's sizzle. Let's see if it's on the grill. Exactly. So what are we going to be talking about next year when we have young? What do you think is the big delta between now and then? Can you see that far in the future, or is it just way too scary? It is a little scary. But, you know, I know that for Al fresco, it's going to be more sass and more hybrid technologies that bridge the on-prem, behind-the-fire, while stuffed with the cloud in a sane way, in a way that makes sense. I mean, we hear a lot of people talk about hybrid and I just don't think they're executing on it in a way that actually is practical for the customers. So that's what I hope to be able to talk to you about is show and demonstrate that customers are using AWS, using our technology at Al fresco for document management collaboration to enable a real hybrid use case where data just seamlessly flows back and forth and work gets done, right? And that's what I hope to talk about. The end of the day, we're getting done. What do you think about the Google pressure yesterday of being a fly? What's your take on Google? They've been pretty quiet, very focused on their cloud, very high-end. They're doing the right things. And I was fortunate to attend the Google partner summit two weeks, three weeks ago, something like that. And I'm very, very impressed at what they're doing. They're building a credible business around not just Compute Engine, but App, what is it, App Engine and Google Apps in general. They're coming at it from a more platform angle, I would say, as in platform as a service stack of angle. And I think it's very commendable. And I like it. I still am not ready to deploy my workloads to Google yet, because I think they're still doing the kinds of things that AWS were doing in the earlier days. So the kinds of things that are interesting more to the startups. But I hope that in a year's time, they should be able to demonstrate that enterprises will be delivering, or excuse me, taking advantage of Google's platform, just as well as they're taking advantage of Amazon's. Okay, final thoughts from you, Luis, on this show. Why is it important to share to folks out there? What is going on? Why is this show so hot? What's the big deal about Amazon's summit this week? I'm gonna take, I'm gonna focus on education. You know, the best way to get in mind share is by educating your audiences. And this is what's great about these shows. They're worldwide, they're happening, well, you know, they're happening in the US, two locations in the US, London, Europe, I'm in Sydney, you know, we're gonna be in Sydney. So it's this opportunity to educate the potential users after how to take advantage of this technology and doing it for free. It's a great thing. And that's what I'm gonna. It's really putting the money where your mouth is. It's going after the development community, right? You should not charge them. They got a free lunch out here and there's a huge crowd that people can't see at home, but this is a packed pack. Yeah, I mean, it's a war for the developers, right? I mean, you're seeing all those names you mentioned with the IBM event. They're all wanting the developers, but it's the developer world's change. DevOps is the new way and the new breed of developers, whether you're old school, getting on the new school, or just pure, born on the stack, integrated stack model is no one downloads stuff anymore. No one wants to push patches. They want auto correction, they want auto scale and they want revision control, push it to GitHub, push it to the cloud, I'm good. And that's infrastructure is good. This is the new way. You don't see that stopping. No, I don't see that stopping. I mean, as an open source vendor, our business model initially started with the idea of encouraging people to download our product, take an hour to install it and configure it and then test it. Well, when SaaS came around, started really becoming popular, it essentially replaced that model, right? Now you get instant gratification. Take 30 seconds to fill in a registration form and boom, you're using that application. And so that just, it's a simple example of the kind of flexibility and power of basically cloud delivered applications and solutions. And that's not going to stop. I really is not going to stop. And I think what we're going to see is more workloads moving to the cloud and very few workloads remain behind the firewall. Right, and you brought that up in the keynote, right? Not which should go to the cloud, but which shouldn't. Essentially, yes. Luis Sala, thank you for coming on theCUBE. We got it right. Spreadsheet was updated. I apologize earlier on, usually. I never really blow all the news here. This is theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco. Doing what we do, we go out to the events. We extract the synlifers. We go where the action is. And here in our hometown backyard of San Francisco, all the actions about cloud, Google putting the pressure on yesterday with price drops. Huge competition lined up chasing Amazon, trying to copy Amazon. And boy, it's going to be very difficult if they keep on moving the goalpost, changing the game. That's going to be very hard to meet that kind of trajectory for these other competitors. But you know what? The enterprise is wide open and that's where the action is going. This is SiliconANG. We'll be covering it right back with our next guest at the short break.