 From the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Marketplace, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS re-invent 2018. I can't wait to get the people count. It's crazy, we're kicking off nine days of coverage over the next three days. We've got four sets in three locations, but today we're at the AWS Marketplace Service Catalog Experience Hub at the Aria. Come on by, there's no wait for drinks over here. We're excited to jump into, really not necessarily the tech, but a lot of the process behind the tech. We've got first-time CUBE guest, Tolga Tarhan. He's the CTO of Onika, welcome. Thank you. And with him, Jeremy Bendad, he's the director of business development partnerships. Welcome. Thank you, sir. So let's jump into what does Onika do before we kind of get into the details. Okay, go ahead. Onika is what's called an Amazon Premier Consulting Partner. So all we do is help customers embrace, become educated, and become empowered on top of AWS. So we work primarily with enterprise customers across North America. We have offices both in the United States and in Canada, and we're really excited to be here today. And how big is the company, how long you've been around? We've about 300 people. We've been doing AWS for approximately six years, but collectively across our team, it probably goes to 1,000 years of experience. Probably. So there's so much kind of fun out there about rent versus buy, and do Amazon used to be security, but I think we've heard now security's actually more of a tailwind than a headwind for Amazon. So let's break it down. First off, clearly Amazon is doing well. There's a lot of companies built their business on this platform. You guys have as well. What are some of the things when you first engage with a customer that's just kind of AWS 101, how they need to think about this differently than what they've been buying and racking and stacking in their data center? So the model's different, and it's important to not think of AWS as a data center. It's important to embrace the cloud for the cloud. And so there's a pretty common saying about pets versus cattle. And I want to break that down just a little bit. So you've got pets that you love and you care for them, and you've got cattle that are for a purpose. You raise them and then you use them for milk or food. And in the cloud, we want that ladder model. We want to be able to spin up an instance, do something and have it go away when we're done, and then be responsive to our demand. Now this isn't, I'm not the first one saying this idea on camera, but I think the interesting thing to consider is the evolution. So we went from physical hardware in our data centers to virtual machines in our data centers. And at that leap, we got higher capacity. We could pack more VMs onto one physical server than we could in the physical world. And we also got some benefits about reliability and ease of configuration. Then we went to the cloud of those VMs and we got cost benefits. We got performance benefits. We got scale benefits. And now in the last couple of years, we've gone from that to containers in the cloud. And now we're getting even higher density, even more flexible deployments, even quicker scale up times. And then the last piece of this that's the newest is now we're going to serverless, where we're not even managing the operating system or any of the details behind it. It's just all event driven. So that evolution, you don't have to go to the end. It's a journey, but it's important to sort of buy into that journey on your way to the cloud and not just think of it as a place to park some VMs. I would imagine for a lot of people it's really hard to change their behavior, not to forward buy additional capacity and to actually turn things off when they're not being used. I mean, that's not what they've been doing throughout their careers in kind of traditional IT. And that's why we want to talk about those types of things on day one, that security conversation, that optimization conversation, just overall automation of the environment. That conversation is happening the very first time we sit down with a customer, typically. Because it's something that we want them to embrace and start off with good habits when it comes to not only how they're going to use the cloud, but how they should not use the cloud. Right. Because I think a lot of them, they just leave it on, right? I went to a great session. It was a little application, right? Because I like when people turn us off on the weekend and I'm not making revenue because they don't need us, right? It's a high capacity kind of end of the month, you know, kind of run job piece of software. And it's so counterintuitive, but it's really establishing a different type of relationship than you had before. That's right. It's that sort of, it's a friendly consumption model, right? Use what you need, pay for what you use, no long-term lock in. And that applies, I think, not just to AWS, but to the ecosystem they've built. So now you're seeing SaaS vendors, you're seeing partner ecosystem folks adopt that same model. Right, clearly, 60,000 plus whatever here. So a whole lot of Amazon people, but a whole lot of ecosystem people. So when you approach a customer and they're starting this journey, well, first off, how many of your customers are just kind of getting started and they're smart enough to know I need to go to a pro versus how many who got started and unfortunately left the lights on and the Amazon bill was coming in. Wait, wait, wait, you know, this is not what I expected. I'm not being able to manage it. What's kind of the shift of the customers that we'll get into each one? We see a really healthy mix across the board. We've had the opportunity to work with startups that have been purchased for over a billion dollars. We've also had the opportunity to work with traditional enterprise shops where it's their very first cloud project and they want to make sure they're setting things up the right way. And what we find is that we'll actually do something that's incredibly advanced for them, doing a serverless project, for example, and that then becomes the referenceable architecture for all future innovative projects that they end up doing. So because of that spread, we see this incredibly wide spread of different projects, different types of customer challenges, and we're able to collectively take that experience and then help individual customers embrace their specific challenges and point them in the right direction and help accelerate that. Yeah, on that note, it's cloud adoption isn't like a one track journey. Not every company should adopt it the same way. I think the unique value that experienced partners bring to the ecosystem is helping customers find the right path for them, not shoving them into the one path that we know. And how many of them graphs would be, do most of them come in really on the cost-saving side? They see an opportunity to be more efficient in their spend on infrastructure, or how many of them are coming in saying, I see really speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, and this is an innovation engine. Oh, by the way, hopefully I'll save a few bucks versus running a 50% utilization on my data center. I think it's all the above. All the above? It's all the above. Everyone wants speed and they also want to do it cheaply. And that's why they come to us. And that's why the ecosystem for partners is actually so big, is because they know that there's a better way of doing things and through that collective experience that we bring or that companies on the marketplace bring, they know they're going to jumpstart that initiative and end up doing it the right way. Yeah, another big thing I think, probably you guys are making good hay on this opportunity, but you know Andy's going to stand up on Thursday and he's going to speak for a couple hours and he's going to have some mega slides, right? He has those mega slides. He's going to have a mega slide about startups that are running on AWS. He's going to have a mega slide about enterprises that are running on AWS. And then he's going to have the mega, mega slide. Lord knows how many new services they're going to introduce with just this sea of services. And I always look for S3. Like where is the little S3 logo on this slide? From a consumption point of view, from a customer point of view, yes, it's great to have options and yes, there's probably a service that can satisfy my need, but how am I supposed to know where to go? I mean, I imagine that's got to be a huge part of your guys value add to help people navigate what is really a giant, you know, selection process opportunity. Yeah, I think most customers understand the basics now. Like most customers understand how to do compute on AWS at least at a starting point. But you're right, there's a hundred other services that look and feel like they could help you. And our job as partners is to help you identify the right ones for your requirements. The flexibility that AWS provides is part of the value, but it also means you have to be responsible and educated about how to use it. Right, what's the biggest just foil 101? Like you know they're all going to step into it, they all do it when people are just kind of getting started on this journey. Don't leave your instances on and walk away. The amount of times we've seen that, just because you do pay for what you use. Right. And so we want to make sure that we're starting off with good habits and we're building in that automation to turn things off if they're not being used. Or that we have those guardrails built in for a customer that, hey, is enabling access for a team of people that haven't had access to their own infrastructure previously. Right. Yeah, it's that whole DevOps mentality. So go into your cloud journey with a DevOps mindset. I know that word has become complicated, but what I mean by that is think about how you're going to automate deployments. Think about how you're going to deliver code from wherever it comes to production in an automated way, early in the process. Because if you spin up a giant environment kind of manually and haphazardly, that's when this kind of cost runaway stuff starts to show its ugly head. So we're here in the marketplace and service catalog area here at the ARIA. So I'm just curious to get your take on working with Amazon as a partner. And you guys are different than maybe some of the solution providers or some of the component software people that we've been talking to earlier in the day. But as a services company, how are they to work with, how do you guys play with the marketplace? And I imagine the service catalog is probably a big way that you deliver your services to your clients is to teach them how to manage that thing. Absolutely. So we recently became one of the launch partners that's on the consulting side that's able to not only recommend but also resell products from the AWS marketplace. And so what that means is we actually get early access or sometimes even private pricing access to marketplace items and can then offer those to our customers to help accelerate their initiatives. One of the cool things that we've done is we've actually set up direct partnerships with some of the SaaS providers that offer their services on marketplace to help to strategically drop in or offer that within a service catalog to our end customers. So they win because of price. They also win because we've helped to vet some of those products and we're helping to a lot of the times accelerate that initiative. Yeah, there's also the actual SaaS providers themselves. So those are actually customers we work with a lot as well. They need to integrate their SaaS products with the marketplace APIs. But when they do that, they get access to the purchasing base of AWS. And all of a sudden, Amazon customers can buy from you with no contracts, no legal paperwork needed. It's already covered by their Amazon agreement. So enabling that and taking your SaaS product and offering it for sale on marketplace is another big area that we help customers. And that's kind of the ugly back end stuff that they got to work on, right? All that kind of administration, which is really what that service catalog is all about actually not just talking about it, but deploying it at scale. That's right. That's the last track, that procurement cycle that you would otherwise have to go through all those legal docs. So if we can, at the click of a button, enable one of our customers to adopt the product or even POC it in a very short period of time and turn it off. Again, pay as you go model, the marketplace opens up a ton of doors for these customers. Just pay as you go. Just pay for what you use. Don't leave the lights on. Can be very expensive. Well, Jeremy Tolget, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and have a great show. I'm sure leave extra time to get to wherever you're next. Thank you. Thank you. We can't thank you enough for being here and we're so excited for re-invent 2018. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks. All right, he's Tolget. He's Jeremy. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We are at the AWS marketplace and service catalog experience here at the ARIA. Thanks for watching.