 Live in Las Vegas, it's the Silicon Angle and Wikibon's theCUBE. Our flagship program, we go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, joined by co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Bill Saltz, who's the Vice President of US Operations and Business Development for Apps Associates. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Appreciate you coming on. So, you know, obviously, the cloud is big money and there's a lot of demand for it and the customer base, a lot of confusion, new mindset, Andy Jassy was using words in the keynote like, run these experiments. You know, it's test and dev now moving into production. A lot of customers want cloud. So, they're trying to figure it out. So, you guys partner with Amazon, you help them do that as well as roll out technology, IT technology. So, I got to ask you, what is your big takeaway so far from the show and what is the top concerns that your customers have around one? What is the cloud? How do they get their arms around it? How do they put it into use? Well, good question, John. I think to answer the first part of that, what we're taking away from the show is what we've been driving as a vision into our clients, which is innovation. The cloud is really all about how do you innovate for business value? And many clients are struggling with how they do that with the cloud, how they do that with other applications and technologies they have, but that vision's important because everything, the paradigm's shifting for them. And we think a cloud is a big part of that. And when they look at the cloud, they come in, they have preconceived use cases, they start a little small use cases. Do they kind of have a grandiose vision or is it more of, hey, good cost reduction, but I got applications that are driving it? What's some of the things you're hearing from them? So, our client base is primarily enterprise level and they're definitely taking an iterative approach. And sort of some of them are taking a wait and see approach. And the consulting that we're doing is to take that approach from the ground up. And they'll start with the workloads, such as dev test, disaster recovery backups, which are the transient workloads, workloads where they're not mission critical. One is they want to avoid some of the risk, but they want to understand how it might play for them. So, we were talking on the phone the other day about the sort of migration of workloads. You guys work the spectrum, right? Very hard to manage workloads, Oracle, et cetera. And you're actually having a lot of success with AWS. I wonder if we could lay out that spectrum that you see, because you're unbiased here, right? You got, you know, it's always interesting, right? You got AWS guys, Andy Jassy up in this morning, very compelling, any workload, any application, anywhere, anytime, his pie chart of our view of the cloud versus your old legacy vendors' view of the cloud. You know, guys like Joe Tucci, very compelling, smart, a lot of great customers saying, no, our customers want to keep it on-premise. So, what are you seeing in terms of that shift, that mix, and how are you guys helping folks do both on-premise and in the cloud? Yeah, and I think it's a classic adoption curve that we're going through. And because of that, you do have to do some risk management, and you don't want to be one of the leaders falling on your sword. So, the portfolio that we're dealing with is an enterprise workload of ERP with BI applications. They're doing some middleware stuff like that. And what we're seeing as a vision and a shift toward the cloud to move them to that future vision where they're actualizing the business value of it. And the way that they're doing that is to first take that, those transient workloads or those workloads that are less in fuchsia to the organization and do those first. Crapplications, I call them. Yes. Okay, so, to do those first, do you have examples of customers running transaction processing workloads in the cloud at this point? Yes. So, we've done both. Interestingly, we started with, we have a large analytics practice. And that practice, many of the customers said, hey, we want to give procurement to get the hardware in place to do this. Hey, let's look at this cloud thing. And can this do this for us? So, we started with analytics as one of the key areas because that's something that you can take, put into a warehouse, do off of your mission-critical ERP system. So, that was one. The other is just the data backups and the disaster recovery. So, those are some of the things. Okay, so those are classic cloud workloads, right? But what about like a hardcore transaction processing workload? Have you seen that running in the cloud? Yeah, I'm sorry, yes. And do you recommend that that runs in the cloud? Yeah, I think Andy Jassy's right in terms of the vision, right? In terms of where things are going. Right. We don't see that there's a difference between perception and reality there. However, for some of our clients, we've taken one in particular about a year ago, the entire infrastructure from mail systems through ERP systems all the way to the cloud, everything's off into AWS cloud at this point. Okay, so everything. Transaction systems, analytics, data warehouse, ERP, mail. And roughly the size of that organization headcount-wise? This is a US subsidiary of a Japanese printing organization that's about a $1 billion corporation. Here in the US, that subsidiary's about 200, 300 people. So it's a perfect use case for organizations that may be enterprise level, that want to do it globally and take it maybe one organization. And we have a lot of folks in the Wikibon community that we've talked to, I would say companies even larger than that, 4,500 headcount that have moved everything in the cloud. Same thing. In fact, in the past year and a half, I would say that's picked up quite considerably. We don't have examples of multi-thousand employee organizations moving everything in the cloud. Do you at this point? We don't have that. Do you expect that to happen? I do expect that to happen because the discussions that are going on around that vision, around the business value are exactly that. How do we get there? And what can we do for a roadmap point of view to manage that risk, okay? And they may be doing like a COLO or managed service contract, that's a three-year contract. They're not going to do anything till that contract's up, these large enterprises. This things like that are that are friction to the whole movement, in addition to security, in addition to that, they want to understand that and you can't blame them. And that's part of it. But absolutely, the discussion is, we're seeing the same thing. It's not only picking up, it's accelerating. How do we do it? Are we going to do it? How do we do a hybrid strategy? What makes sense for us? Absolutely. Bill, I got to ask you the last question because we got to run the next segment coming up. But put a bumper sticker on this event for the folks out there on the car. What is this? How would you summarize this year's AWS re-invent? But what's the bumper sticker? The bumper sticker is cloud is innovation. It's about innovation. Absolutely. Cloud is innovation, new use cases. We heard from folks that are doing things that they never dreamed they could do. Creativity is really the only thing that's stopping the innovation and there's plenty of it here with developers. This is theCUBE exclusive coverage live from the show floor here in re-invent Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.