 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS Summit New York 2018, about 10,000 AWSers coming together. This is an amazing ecosystem. AWS to summits all over the country, all over the world. Reinvent, of course, is a big show in Vegas in November. I'm guessing 50,000 plus this year. But we're excited to be here and we're excited for our next guest. It's Mark Raderman. He's the Managing Director Technology Enablement for Slalom. Welcome, Mark. Thank you. And Rihanna Sukram, She's Strategic Alliances Director also for Slalom. Welcome. Thank you. So have you guys been to the show before? Yes, we have. We have, it's our third year participating at the Summit. Third year participating? So what are your impressions? It was like 10,000 people, it's bananas. I mean, I've been here since 2016 and it's incredible to see the growth and the number of people that are coming year over year. I mean, just this year alone, we've had over 300 visitors at our booth, which is pretty fantastic so far. It's crazy because, you know, we go to a lot of shows and, you know, some booths are busy, and some booths are closed, and oftentimes they're not. But I mean, you couldn't really find a really more active ecosystem. They've been lined up all day long since they opened up to you. We've been packing again. It's been pretty exciting. Yeah, that's good. All right, so for people that aren't familiar with the company, give us an overview of Slalom. Great, so we're about 5,000 professionals in 27 markets in North America and the UK. We're a full service business and technology consultant company. A lot of that energy goes towards the AWS ecosystem. About 20, 25% of work effort is in the direction of AWS. And it's paid off handsomely for our clients. I have some great outcomes, some great stories to tell around success with AWS. So I'm curious as to how the conversation has changed over the years. When you first engage with a new client, how their perception of their public cloud strategy is different today than say when it was three years ago when you were here for your first summit. Sure. I think, I mean, initially the game was move what I have to the cloud. Find me some efficiencies, cost savings. Today it's all about innovation. It's about helping customers deliver digital product faster, more efficiently, make the best use of the AWS ecosystem to get creative, to do things around machine learning and artificial intelligence, real time market data, native solutions, anything that's basically allowing our customers to bring value to their customers faster. And there's a lot more of that going on. We're seeing a lot of clients come to us these days for proofs of concepts or POCs to help as Mark was saying with innovation. So let's stand up a two week group of concept around a machine learning model or let's do something with one of the artificial intelligence services like recognition or comprehend. And we're using those POCs as here's art of the possible and what you can do. We get the clients really excited about that and then they're moving forward with full blown production solutions. Yes, pretty many. We have Dr. Matt Wood coming on actually right after you guys and he's leading up that whole charge and it's pretty amazing how you can apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to so many different applications. I wonder if there's some kind of fun ones that who would have thought that some of your clients have done that have been pretty interesting. Yeah, you want to? Sure, we actually did a proof of concept for a medical company called Barapad. They test out fraudulent medication using a paper analytical device product. So fraudulent medication. So it's a big problem overseas in third world countries where medication is being brought over that's not real. So they're selling ibuprofen and acetaminophen and it's not actually the drug that's being sold in Kenya, for example. This company, Barapad was able to create a product where you can scratch off on a paper analytical device the crushed pill, test it in a solution and it will tell you using the human eye whether or not this accuracy is what you think it is. And what we were able to do with machine learning is actually use Amazon recognition to help compare that paper analytical device once you take a picture of it to a database of thousands of comparable solutions. And we were able to increase accuracy by 10% over the human intervention of it, so. It's pretty cool. So the accuracy of the diagnosis, so basically they drag the pill on the piece of paper and make some kind of a color. You take a picture, compare it against the database and tell you what kind of pill. It ultimately saves lives. Right, right. Who's the client? Is it doctors that are testing the pills or hospitals, who's the? The client is a company called Barapad and they're actually consumers ultimately. But they're actually shopping it around right now to the FDA equivalent in third world countries like Kenya and Nigeria. That's great. And we've done work in and around the music industry ultimately with greater customer insights ultimately leading towards can you predict the next hit? You know, what are people going to gravitate towards? What kind of music people are going to gravitate towards? We've done work within the automotive industry. Again, you know, geared a lot towards efficiency. Right. And anti-theft things of that nature. So it's really, it's been put to great use. So how long did it take people to figure out that this isn't a cost savings play. This is an innovation play. With machine learning, I mean, I think that people got that. I mean, AWS in general, I mean, so many times people think it's like speed of deployment and it's, you know, I don't want to spin up a bunch of servers that I want to pay for 50% of capacity that I'm never going to use. That's all fine and dandy, but that's really not where the big, big impact. Right, right. I'd say over the past several years, I mean, the lean has been more and more towards I can innovate faster. You know, it's hard to kind of put your finger on exactly, you know, when did that inflection point? Right, right. Take place, but you know, we found ourselves having more conversations about that versus helping me take my stuff to the cloud. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's such a more important play. Yeah, absolutely. That people didn't get at first, right? And I'm just curious how the security conversations have evolved. Security, right, always needs to be top of mind. It needs to be baked in all over the place. In early days, that was kind of a knock on public cloud. I think we're long past that, but still I'm curious how the security discussion still evolves, both in the context of AWS in general, but also in their solutions more broadly. So it's present in many of the industries we're doing work with. I mean, we're in farm and healthcare. We're in financial services. So it's kind of omnipresent, if you will. Right. We find that what's worked really well for us is to have partnerships, not only with IT and the business, but also with Infosec. And when we find ourselves starting a dialogue early with Infosec so they could get to know us and understand our skills and see that our people can kind of talk that talk and walk that walk as well. I think it breaks down a lot of barriers. Yeah, it's bringing them along the journey and making sure that they understand the full stack of the shared security model and everything that comes with it. Right. And then what about the actual management of their AWS infrastructure? So again, early knock was, it's always cheaper to buy than rent, which we know is not necessarily true. And you get kind of runaway costs if you're not keeping track of stuff because I used to pay in by the hour. How are people adjusting to kind of the CapEx versus ongoing expenses and the management of this new way to buy, consume and deliver IT services? Right. So at the end of the day, you still have to be smart about how you design and architect and build solutions. You could still be inefficient in the cloud. So for us, you know, a lot of our effort is geared towards doing it the right way, if you will. Right. You know, what's the appropriate way to architect and design and deploy a top AWS? Right. Yeah. It's just funny because you so often hear about the cloud benefit of spinning up, right? When you need excess capacity, spin up, spin up, spin up. You don't hear enough talk of spin down, spin down, spin down. You know, when you don't need it and that's where you do get some of these efficiencies and cost savings, when you don't need your services turned on over the weekend or the holiday or whatever. And even through the serverless features that are coming out through Amazon Web Services, we're seeing a lot of clients who, you know, five, 10 years ago, EC2, S3, you know, doing everything within those consumption models and now really looking at leveraging serverless and Lambda functions and all of those things to create even more efficiencies. Right. What about like spot market and some of those types of things? You see a lot of guys in the ecosystem that are buying and selling excess capacity and there's a whole, you know, kind of secondary market. Are your customers taking advantage of that or? I think some are and obviously the more sophisticated ones are. I mean, that's not necessarily a space we play in, but we'll partner more with companies that are looking, they're hoping to analyze that arena. Right. To Rihanna's point though, I mean, the direction of more and more being serverless, you know, just easier to maintain, easier to kind of run and operate with smaller staffs, easier to be nimble. You know, so that the needle is clearly moving more and more in that direction and that's something we've been very aggressive, you know, about getting on top of and, you know, riding that wave with our customers. Right. Yeah. And then what about two kind of like one-time workloads, whether it's a big test or some big batch run or, you know, things that before you couldn't do easily because you had to add all this extra capacity but now you can go out and you can do some of these things without necessarily building the infrastructure that you had in the past. Yep. Absolutely. Opens up a good innovation, a good innovation path. All right, so I can't believe we're July, like half way through July, which is bananas. We're almost, so what are some of your priorities looking to the balance of 2018? It's a great, it's a better question when it's January but not July, I'm sorry. But you know, what are some things you guys are working on over the next six months? I think, you know, one of the biggest areas that we're seeing with growth in at least the New York market is machine learning. So I think a couple of new services were released today during the keynote. Definitely want to get our hands into those and create new POCs and continue to ride that wave throughout the end of the year. Mark, from your point of view, beyond ML. So, you know, just continuing down this innovation path. You know, more and more just opportunities to kind of break new ground. I mentioned to you before the camera started rolling, you know, more and more of our solutions are multifaceted. So, you know, we're very big AWS fans but a lot of the work product that we're doing is integrating in with legacy, is integrating in with other mainstream platforms and together they're forming a positive outcome. So for us, you know, I think that's where we've been able to differentiate ourselves when it comes to being best of read on top of AWS but also bringing in tools like Salesforce and AEM and other platforms where at the end of the day, you know, when you look at a whole solution, you know, those end up being some of the other important facets of the solution. I would say the transformation piece. So you have a lot of customers that, you know, started on their cloud journey, migrating workloads into the cloud and a lot of them are now taking that step back and saying, how do I integrate my cloud solution with all of the other enterprise apps and you know, how do I enable the people and the process aspect of my organization beyond the tool set. So continuing, you know, helping our customers handle all of that transformation base. Toring outside, if you hear the guy talking, Javits is flooding, it's good to turn it into the arc and we're all going to float down the East River to the Statue of Liberty. Another thing I'll mention just in terms of second half focus, part of our business is strategy and more and more what we're seeing is business strategy going hand in hand with technology. So helping companies understand, you know, how they're going to build it, how they're going to be successful launching a product but also understanding the value realization, you know, framing that up for them as well, understanding a good business case so that they understand, you know, what constitutes success. So our strategy consultants, you know, end up going hand in hand quite often, our consultants that focus on org design, organizational effectiveness, you know, we're changing the fabric of these organizations so that becomes a really important part of kind of easing them into kind of the new world or whatever if you will. Well, you know, right? It's always people in process is way harder than the technology. You guys are in the business and I spend an ordained amount of time thinking about it but you must be doing something right, a billion in revenue on your way to two, 5,000 people. So thanks again for stopping by. Our pleasure. Thank you for having us. And best of luck going forward. Thanks so much. All right, he's Mark. He's Rhianna, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from AWS. Reinvent or not reinvent. That's coming up. It's a summit in New York City in the rain. Thanks for watching.