 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online, their virtual conference. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE studio for a conversation with Matt Garmin, Vice President of Sales and Mark of AWS. We're here with our quarantine crew. Matt, thanks for joining me. I know you're remote as well. We're living in a virtualized world. Thanks for coming on. AWS Summit is now online. You're running sales and marketing for the company. This has really caught a lot of companies by surprise, this situation, sheltering in place. It's highlighted a lot of at scale problems. One of them is events. So we're here at the AWS Summit Online and you guys are still pulling it off. A lot of content, great to see you. Matt, great, thanks. Thanks for having me. So before we get into some of the announcements and the customer focus, things that you guys are doing, you and I both met when we did an interview when you were running the EC2. You've been with Amazon for a long time. You got a story, history. You were there from when EC2 launched, saw Amazon grow. This really kind of ties into some reporting that we've been doing where cloud native at scale of what AWS became really was a game changer. And that showed the at scale opportunities for startups and now the enterprise. This COVID-19 is really showing companies and individuals that are living it of being disrupted where the internet and large scale tools and technologies can help them but also exposes gaps in their lives or in companies cases, things like provisioning VPNs. Maybe they didn't figure out 100% would be at home. But then going forward, the applications are now thinking about this new virtualized world. Even when it comes back to normal, it'll be some more of a hybrid integrated world. This will put pressure on you guys as Amazon to build more capacity like you did with EC2 but at a whole another level. So I want to get into that and more but this COVID-19 really has changed the game for the world. What are you guys seeing your customer base? This is a big part of the conversation. What's going on? Thanks, Sean. And you're right. This is an unprecedented time for us and AWS as well as our customers are all trying to figure it out. I think part of what we've seen from our customers as we talk out there, whether they're public service or private customers is really that the demands that they're seeing from their customer bases are rapidly changing. Some customers have their businesses have seen much fewer lower demands than others before but others are seeing 10, 20, 100x more business than they were before. And what we're seeing is that those customers that have their business running in the cloud are able to handle that and quickly are able to adapt and change and grow with their changing customer base. And sometimes that's internal, sometimes like you said that's because they're needed to scale up their VPNs or they're needed to scale up their virtual workstations. Other times it's customers who maybe they run a large call center business but their call center folks are no longer able to come into the office and they need to quickly spin up a virtual call center. We've seen our Amazon Connect business really, really take off as customers have quickly managed to figure out how they can manage the actually increased call volumes they're seeing but in a virtual location. And finally, we're just seeing some customers whether they're from entertainment or from communication or online education. Many of these businesses that are scaling rapidly wouldn't have been able to do it if they're running in their own data center but because they're in the cloud they're able to quickly spin up more instances spin up more storage and meet the demands of their customers. So I think it's been nice to see. Fortunately for us we've had many years as you mentioned I used to run the EC2 team and we've been thinking for over a decade about how do we really manage that supply chain? How do we ensure that we're able to handle rapidly scaling? And so we've really optimized our supply chain and fortunately in a good position where we can continue to operate, continue to scale and continue to handle the demands of our growing customer base even in unprecedented times like this. You mentioned that I want to get into that concept. You wrote a blog post the other day on the Amazon day one blog keeping organizations running during COVID-19 and you kind of teased out this point about average connected time. And if you think about this crisis this really is the true test for scale and elasticity and having that cloud model and some of the clouds have not done as well as Amazon and there's been some stories out there Google and Microsoft hasn't had the uptime you guys had but this really has been the future pulled forward. So you guys have a lot of customers like Netflix, like Slack that are really taking advantage of this. This is the true test of cloud and only the beginning again, like I said this is going to show a lot of gaps in most other traditional enterprises but this highlights the test that you guys were waiting for I won't say that you were waiting for a crisis but cloud this was ultimately the test your thoughts on Netflix, Hulu, Slack and a bunch of other names and Andy throws the slide up at every event but they're big customers. I think like if you look at obviously we have we're all at a lot more time at home, right? I'm at home here in Seattle a lot of us are spending more time at home and so a lot of those streaming services like you said the Netflix is the Hulu the Disney pluses of the world also games, think about how many kids are playing Fortnite or playing EA or the video games a lot of those businesses have really seen an increase in their demand and they've been able to just seamlessly scale along with AWS. On the work side, think about everybody from Slack that runs entirely on AWS to Zoom who runs the vast majority of their infrastructure on AWS to all of these communication and work from home capabilities these are all running on AWS and they've all been able to scale and we think all of our kids our kids are all trying to figure out what does school look like and you don't actually go to school I was talking from the team at Blackboard they've seen a 10 sometimes even a hundred X increase in their business and they're able to just seamlessly scale up as their demand I mean really overnight just exploded. I was on Twitter just the other day talking with some folks because the whole Jedi thing was going down and I was going to weigh in with my normal commentary and this is the public sector challenge as well you mentioned schools these are traditionally no IT or enterprise like chops they need scale now they need it fast they have to stand up I imagine this is the kind of scenario that this is also going to hit to the small medium size enterprises as well as some of the big ones so the big guys have legacy problems data silos whatever we've had great conversations with some of your team members there but that's just one sector you got small medium size enterprises that don't have any IT public sector and education they got to be in market in months if not tomorrow. Public sector is a super interesting one and frankly our public sector team I don't know that they've slept in the past three months working to try to help governments both the United States and internationally everything from if you think about it our unemployment systems in states across the United States have gone from something like 3% unemployment claims to 15% unemployment claims within a two month period those systems are not meant to scale like that and they reached out to us pretty quickly to see how we could help them start to scale you think about some of the systems that are trying to send out checks to people the systems that are trying to send out small banking loans to folks we've been really working deeply with many of those government agencies to try to figure out how we can get the money in the hands of the individuals that need it as quickly as possible and really help those legacy systems sometimes that are built on legacy databases your oracles and your Microsoft SQL systems and those things just aren't scaling and they're trying to figure out how can they get to a more modern architecture that can really keep scaling within the needs of the new demand that they're reaching which is just something they didn't anticipate before yeah and I think your customers as you're now going to be overseeing the larger global organization sales and marketing it's not like you guys are preaching to the customers because you're living through the same crisis on an environment that they are you certainly can align with their empathy and certainly help them solve problems but now we're in a business climate where we're seeing unemployment numbers at massive numbers usually companies come out of these challenges and we think it's going to be highly accelerated on an upward trajectory flat or negative in 2008 that crisis we saw the winners come out of that one you guys rode that wave with AWS EC2 can you know that world now coming out of this next pandemic it's going to be hybrid or virtualization of meat of life how are you leading your team how are you talking to customers I mean I'll say this empathy but you got to run an organization you have to still sell services and market your products you got reinvent was a physical event I mean these are huge challenges you're living them too what's your take on all this part of I think in my new role and as you mentioned I used to run the compute team with AWS including EC2 and many of the compute services for about 13 years before coming and running now the sales and marketing for AWS and in that role a lot of what I would think about is how do we really help our customers understand how critical it is to be prepared the cloud gives you just so much more flexibility so much more agility and there's a bunch of the early adopters who would lean into that and really got it and once they got onto the cloud they saw their innovation level went up their agility goes up all those things but you know there was still a lot of folks that were interested I mean we obviously have a decent sized business today and many millions of customers that are using the cloud today but some of them have been slower to kind of fully adopt and really move all of their business critical workloads to the cloud I firmly believe that coming out of this crisis you're going to have two types of businesses you're going to have some that just go into their shell right they're just going to say I'm just going to try to survive I'm just going to try to get by I'm going to try to conserve every little bit of something I can and just protect what I have you know I don't think those are long term I'm not optimistic that those are going to be the businesses that thrive I think every time you see a crisis you have businesses that lean into it they're smart about it they think about long term what are the things that are going to help me compete in this new world and I think cloud is going to be one of those things we've talked to everybody from airlines to traditional Fortune 500 enterprises and they see that like they're still leaning into the cloud even even airlines no one's been hit harder than the airlines and even I've talked to several executives and airlines that are saying look my cloud initiative that's the thing I'm not cutting I'm going to cut everything else but this is the thing that's going to let me succeed when I really get into that new world and so I really think you're going to see some of those folks that maybe were hesitant before saying yeah in the next three, four years maybe I'll get to the cloud I really think that they're going to start to lean in because they're going to realize if my competitors are in the cloud and I'm not that is going to be a significant disadvantage and knock on wood hopefully there's no other global pandemic that they have to deal with but I think it just really highlights any uncertainty in the world there's going to be differences and they just are unable to deal with to the flexibility and the scale that they want both up and down by the way that they're unable to really handle whatever the world throws at them and I think we're going to be living in a continually uncertain environment Yeah I definitely would agree with you and I think it's going to get back to normal at some point but even it's going to have an impact into 2021 as many people are kind of figuring out and a few of the window people are saying oh spring 2021 maybe you know there we started to get some semblance of normalcy the way it was but still that environment and this brings up the whole summit online that you guys are doing your summits have been a great set of events we've covered many of them with the real key physical cube now we're doing the virtual cube they've been a practitioner end user the developer builder event it's a free event that you truly had now you have them all over the world they're going on virtual people still need to build out these projects there's still a demand and some projects are being cut some aren't as you guys look over the horizon with your customer base conversations are around what to fund what not to fund as you mentioned what are some of the things that you're seeing and recommending to customers that they should continue to double down on because smart managers are going to step back and say hey I can see some gaps we're going to double down on that and we're going to kill that we're going to move this over here there's going to be a reinvention and a growth strategy that they have to figure out quickly there's no yet playbooks emerging but it's clear obviously video virtual interactions but those projects are going to get doubled down your thoughts on the customer builders out there I think that that's absolutely right and it spans every industry you can think about think about I was talking to several customers in the healthcare space and how long has it been five years that people have been touting that telemedicine is really going to be that thing that eventually comes and eventually becomes a big thing this has really accelerated that such that now I've talked to probably dozens and dozens of people who for the very first time have talked to their doctors over via their cell phone because they don't want to go into the hospital for fear of getting, you know, sick or something like that then they just have a minor medical thing that they need to do telemedicine is one of those things that is really taking off and has been really enabling frankly that customers have been able to do telemedicine has really helped those that wanted to stay safe but also get good medical advice I think that's just one example where we're going to continue to see this go I think coming out of this the other thing a lot of our customers are thinking about and anytime you really go into an uncertain economic world you want to think about capital preservation now is not the time you want to go spend money to build your own data center or to buy your own servers if ever there was a time where the cloud made the most sense capital preservation is key particularly if we don't know if there's going to be an economic recession we don't know how long this is going to take all businesses whether they're severely impacted should be really thinking about that capital preservation but they've also got to be thinking about how they innovate I've talked to a popular ridesharing customer the other day and they were talking about how ridesharing is way down but they're still using this as a time to lean forward into innovation because they know coming out of this they want to be ahead of where their competitors are going to be and they really want to use this as an opportunity to take their own internal teams focus them on where they think the biggest potential is going to be and then once the economy turns around and people are out and about again they can hit the accelerator and really take off so I think that's really how a lot of our customers are thinking about the situation we're there right now You know you guys have had a steep learning curve over the years with cloud and cloud scale I think as the world comes in the human capital piece becomes interesting too not just on spending with money monetary the human capital, the work how people are contributing so this brings up the whole reinvention it's funny to watch as people are forced with these first generation problems of how to make things digital how to get scale going you have people who have learned it have a learning curve and again there's no compression algorithm for experience as you guys like to point out so this is creating this kind of like how do I change the roles of my company and so I want to get your thoughts because we're looking for proof points because a lot of the answers are not yet evolved and usually things are not understood before they become mainstream but people have to react really fast what are some examples can you give around how COVID applications are rolling up because that's truly an indicator in my mind of what people are doing with the cloud because COVID was an instant response I've already interviewed a few folks that are on Amazon around COVID solutions where they're standing up either analytics or doing some things could you use the COVID as example of how rapid deployment or reinvention of data or business models are rendering themselves? Yeah, absolutely I think there's a couple of different one is the very first thing that most people look at is how do we get data? Like we just need to find data around this space and so we've worked with a number of partners and customers on how do we really go help build data lakes in the cloud and kind of getting all that data in one place so that both governments as well as private enterprises can really start to think of that data slice it in different ways and then get to look at what is the actual data of whether it's what are the number of hospital beds available what are the number of tests that are happening what are the number of infections that we're seeing what are the rate of change, et cetera we also work with a number of our analytics partners and we have a wide range of analytics partners that are really taking this as an opportunity where they can rapidly then take that data and slice it in a number of different ways to try to help understand how they respond I think the first part of that was on the healthcare side where folks were saying where do we need enough ventilators where do we need to go build hospitals how do we start to identify hotspots where I see if you can really look at kind of second order derivatives of kind of changes and you can look at it close enough you can say oh there's a hotspot popping up in this particular area and eventually if we can get some better data on contract tracing and things like that where you can open up the economy and still have very quickly identify where a hotspot might be emerging those are the types of data pieces that you know with the right levels of security and data privacy but with access to that data we can get a handle on how some of these things are happening then I think you go and you look at so that's kind of some of the data analytics pieces right then you also go look at what are folks doing on the testing side and I think there's been a lot of discussion about how well testing is done and I think we all wish that maybe was a little bit further along than it is but there's a number of private places that are actually really spinning up testing and this is one of the big areas that Amazon's investing right and I don't know you know we'll see if we are able to get there you know faster than some of the other places but we see a real need for testing we think testing is one of those such a critical component if we could do rapid testing frequent testing both for our own employees but frankly for all the industries that we all rely on have come to rely on particularly in this virtual world we know that the faster we can get testing and the more reliable we can get testing the better we are able to then isolate get people to self quarantine and really kind of control that mass spread of the disease. Yeah, I know you're talking about health care is interesting one of the emerging things we've seen coming out of the summit here and some of the conversations we had is how the enterprise has always been kind of a hard environment to find stuff as people live at home and working at home working remotely, working in remote teams the idea of searching for stuff becomes interesting so you guys announced the general availability of Kendra the timing couldn't have been better for that because that's really giving you a Google-like vibe feel for funding information but it's really an integration play under the covers so I think that's the kind of trend that we're seeing we're seeing also startups putting up apps out there so you're seeing a lot of activity that's kind of in line with this that you guys are announcing anything, any update on the Kendra or AI front? Yeah, Kendra is fantastic and it's really I think struck a nerve with folks where the traditional way of thinking about search particularly internal for internal intranets just doesn't work. You know, the how many hits do you get and how many millions of people across billions and billions of people on the internet that model works on the intranet you might be looking for very specific things and with machine learning we're able to tell what is the intent of the request that people are looking for and take you to the right place so that if you say, you know, what are the hours of my help desk? There's a very specific page that you're looking for which is this number in fact, you're not looking for a page to go to you're not looking for information about help desks you're looking for the actual hours of my internal help desk particularly probably for my building and as we do build these ML models that can start to learn on how your internet works and how people are thinking about it and what's helpful or not we've been able to improve an internet search orders of magnitude, I've used it internally for our own internet and it's night and day compared to what we use before where it's kind of a pure keyword search type of a thing so I think applying ML particularly when people are remote and really relying on resources like that where they can't just, you know lean over to the cube next to them and say, hey, what time is the help desk open? Yeah, and I think it's breaking down those silos too it's just building that abstraction layer of data lake really kind of makes a big difference. That's right. So final question for you as companies settle into the new realities that are upon them what's the outlook for the rest of 2020 for you guys and what do you say to the customers that are here on the online trying to consume the virtual content that they should be building out because you've got not just customers you've got commercial customers you've got public sector and you've got an ecosystem you've got partners out there who are building on top of AWS we're all in this together what's your message to them? What's on the outlook for 2020? Well, number one I encourage everyone to take advantage I think, you know in many ways some of these virtual summits are a great opportunity maybe for those who aren't able to travel to the summit or to be able to actually physically get there it's a great opportunity to learn and really dive in try to do some virtual labs really get in and understand some of the new features and functionality are out there from a partner perspective many of the things that we're building whether it's our app flow service that we just launched a couple of weeks ago that helps us to really connect to our various ISV partners into a data lake as John was mentioning those are, these are really some of the things that you know, if you think about our broad swath of our partner ecosystem I encourage our customers to really look at all of the partners that are running on AWS who have great solutions like theCUBE they're looking for virtual events they have an awesome product that you should check out but we have a wide set of partners that are helping you to put together the virtual world that you all are trying to work through right now and encourage you just to learn. Matt, I really appreciate the plug especially one for the theCUBE new event cloud look, we're trying to figure it out and I think this kind of reminds me of a famous quote I heard on theCUBE which is a notable one is that everything in the future that is going to be invented was on Star Trek or Star Wars so you know, soon we're going to have video cameras in everyone's office and we'll be able to go and talk to folks so looking forward to again standing up content, getting the content and connecting people thanks for spending the time your day to come in and talk with me and share your insights and Amazon Summit, web services summit online virtual, CUBE virtual thanks for your time, appreciate your insights. Great, thank you, bye. Okay, CUBE here virtual in our studio covering remotely all the top content out there covering AWS Summit online this is a whole new reality we're all in it together I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.