 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas, 45,000 people here at Amazon Web Services re-invent. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guests are Barry Russell, general manager and business development of Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Growing like a weed and Chad Whelan, who's a global vice president of public cloud for F5. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Barry, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, I mean, just, you can kind of see it now that's clear as day. No more, I mean, Andy says I want to, we're okay to be misunderstood, that quote. Okay, no one's going to misunderstand the marketplace. No, I think it's pretty clear. You get in there and you make money. Yeah. It's pretty straightforward. Reducing a bunch of friction for customers. What's the current pitch? I mean, this sounds like an easy sell at this point. What's the real benefits? Cause more services are coming in. You got composability. What's the current state of the marketplace? Yeah. You know, I think it's a couple of things. It's about selection and customer choice. So we've really grown the catalog in terms of the number of listings that are available, now more than 4,200 listings in the catalog. And we announced three key features that we launched on Tuesday. AWS Private Link, which enables SaaS products to be run in a VPC. We announced Private Image Build that allows enterprise customers to run their own hard and OS underneath an image. And then we announced enterprise contract to reduce friction in the procurement process between large enterprise customers and software vendors. Okay, so I got to ask the AWS question. What was the working backwards document on this? Was it a main request from the customers? What was the main driver for some of these features? Because it sounds like they want to be cloud native, but yet they still got to get that migration over or was it something else? What was the driver? The driver was customer feedback. We went out and we interviewed hundreds of customers over the last 12 months before we started building some of these features. And without a doubt, they told us they wanted broader selection, broader deployment options, and to reduce friction around the contracting process. And then we just started building. And over the course of the last nine to 10 months, that's what we've delivered. Awesome. All right, step five, you guys are in the marketplace. You're partnering with AWS. What's your relationship with AWS? How's that going? No, I would say our relationship with AWS is fantastic. I mean, they're obviously the innovator in the cloud space. Public cloud is a strategic imperative for F5. They're at the vanguard of really the innovation of what's taking place in public cloud. And marketplace is a fantastic medium to reach market. And so we really have the premise around meeting our customers, how and when they want to be met. Marketplace is an excellent vehicle for us to do that. And we've enjoyed a lot of success as we've launched. How has your customer's consumption changed with the cloud? I can only imagine that as they look at the mix of how they're going to consume technology, they want some cloud. How did you guys hone in on AWS? What was the real factor there? Was it acquisition of the technology? Was it the performance? What was some of the key things? You know, I think it's all about really reducing the friction in the process, right? Our customers are moving to the cloud to have real-time agility and velocity in their business. What we get out of marketplace is a fantastic set of options from a commercial construct. This solved the customer requirements. If it's going to be app development, we do it on a utility by the hour. When you start to go into a production, we can do it in a subscription or a BYOL. So it's really about what application is there permanence and what's the best outcome for the customer. And we have all of that in front of us in multi-year agreements or otherwise, leveraging this vehicle. They're tailoring the products, basically. It sounds like customers looking at this tailored model, whatever their needs are. They don't want to be forced into a certain use case. They can just kind of mix and match. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, Barry, you know, I think networking security been spaces that I've seen really exploding in this ecosystem over the last couple of years. Building off of what John's saying, I mean, how much of it is, you know, custom stuff, you know, things that they're coming working with Amazon versus just, you know, oh, it's the everything store where I can go get pieces. Well, we work with each vendor that lists in the catalog. We have an SA team, solution architect team, to work with them on the optimal architecture, be that an AMI based, API based, in SaaS based. And then we give that vendor and their product development teams the ability to price those products in utility consumption model, metered, for example, on the amount of data or bandwidth consumed, multi-year contracts that are publicly priced or negotiated behind the scenes. So both in the innovation and the engineering and how the customer actually deploys the product, we innovate on pricing and consumption models to match those deployment options. And we give vendors all vendors that enter the catalog, whether they're open source or commercial products, like F5, the option to use all of those features. Yeah, Chad, I think back to, you know, there was a wave of like software, you know, happening kind of, you know, networking and security and everything. But, you know, you've always been in kind of the application delivery portion of this. How is, you know, cloud, you know, accelerating your customers, you know, journey and, you know, impacting how fast you need to change inside of F5? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, you know, because public cloud is such a fantastic vehicle for our customers, it was really customers focused, right? So when you work back from what the customer wants, both in terms of how you orchestrate, how you automate, and then what the commercial construct is, then they can use it in a best fit application. And that's really the grounding point for us. And when we get friction, anytime you have a new medium, there's going to be friction points and learning points. We've worked in concert with AWS, Marketplace in particular, about solving these ways, whether it's in private offers or custom negotiated offers, specifically for customers to meet their needs from an economic and a delivery standpoint. I got to ask the question, because this always pops in my head, especially this reinvent. The pace of service is being released. Lambda, serverless, you can just see it coming. It's going to put more pressure under the hood for automation and the heavy lifting that's DevOps as we know, right? So no news there. The question is, what does it mean for the Marketplace? Because now you're going to be under a lot of pressure to integrate a lot of these plumbing and door abstracted away DevOps like tools that the developers don't want to provision. So you got to automate. So that seems like a challenge. How do you guys dealing with that? How do you make Lambda sing? How do you guys make this thing go smoother? Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, one of the challenges that you get in when you get into what I would say cloud sprawl, within an organization, is how do you maintain the governance and compliance of those workloads? And so we're really looking at it from that basis as we want to give as much flexibility into the model while still maintaining what was designed from the beginning. And so our customers want to use the rules. They want to have that portability into public cloud so they have that assurance. The underlying technologies are just the delivery vehicles, whether it's containers or Lambda or whatever in a serverless architecture. We're focused really on making sure that we have that ubiquity of posture across the asset wherever the asset is. It's your services work together properly. Barry, what's the trends that you're seeing in the marketplace? I mean, obviously a lot of growth, a lot of data. And one of the things I love about this reinvent is that they're servicing this new playbook of, hey, use the data, your own data. We saw a new relic had a great report. Sumo Logic had a report. They're basically anonymizing the data, but they're using real data. And Werner talked about this in the keynote. What data can you share about the marketplace that shows some trends that indicates or allows us to read the tea leaves of what's going to happen next? Well, I think the customer growth stat that we shared in terms of active monthly customers, we've grown from a hundred active monthly customers. We announced last re-invent, last year earlier, to now 160,000 active customers using the marketplace. So we see steady growth. We see growth and adoption from the enterprise and customers like Shell and Thompson Reuters that we announced for part of enterprise contracts on Tuesday, really beginning to think about using the marketplace to go from traditional procurement, moving to a digital procurement model allows their IT organizations, DevOps teams, to move much faster when pairing with services like a Kinesis, like an S3, like a Redshift when they're matching third-party software with an AWS native service. Are you happy with things right now that are pretty much looking pretty good? I'm happy. Mill the fairway. It's been a fantastic show. You're happy. Yeah, I'm happy. F5 has been a great partner of ours in the marketplace, so we're, I'm going to have to camper. What's next? What's next? I think what's next for us next year is continuing to grow the enterprise contract that we deployed. So we started with a small set of customers and vendors that participated to help us arrive at that contract that they both could use. And I think over the course of the next 12 months, we really need to think about the types of customers and vendors that enter that program. All right, Barry Russel and Chad Whelan with F5. Barry will be back on our next segment with another partner, a lot of partner goodness here. Amazon's ecosystem is exploding, and there's a lot of value to be had by all. It's the cube bringing you some content value. On our third day live coverage, 45,000 people here this year at Amazon Webster's re-invent. More at this short break. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.