 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Welcome back everyone, we are live here in Las Vegas for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re-invent 2016. Their annual user developer now, Enterprise Customer Conference, 32,000 people here. Center of the Tech Universe this week as Amazon releases their next truckload of content. Literally a truck came on stage, great three days of walls and wallcups. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Our next guest is Jeff Aiden, he's the founder and EVP of Marketing Strategic Business Development at Second Watch. Been an alumni of re-invent since the beginning and your customer, John Bruitt, technical manager, Kovanta and Jeff Singer, associate director of cloud engineering. Got your customers here, Second Watch. You've been here from the beginning. You've seen the evolution. I mean, you're a believer early on, so it's not like this is new to you. So, but you're seeing the growth, you're rising with the tide, you got some customers here. First question before we jump into some of the use case. Take a minute to talk about what you guys do and how does this show evolve with you guys growing? Yeah, well, I'll start. So, Second Watch has been here, this is our fifth year obviously at re-invent and things have changed. One thing that hasn't is the innovation or the rate of innovation with AWS. I remember back at the first one, there were 6,000 people, all partners, customers and Amazon employees all stayed in this hotel and there were no lines to get anywhere. You know, the center of the conversation was when are companies going to migrate? When are they going to close down entire data centers as these products rolled out? Sure enough, a few years later, we saw that. Us at Second Watch, what we do is we help companies design, deploy and then manage public cloud solutions. So, think of it as not just a bunch of Legos, but kind of an in solution that then is managed and then we help companies evolve those kind of into the next gen of what cloud services would be. In that, we work with primarily enterprise customers, a lot of your traditional retail, manufacturer type customers, as well as more specialty business services. You guys have some big name customers. We've seen that the past couple years here with theCUBE. Talk about your customers now. What are you guys doing? What's the solution? Well, how do you guys work here? Why are you guys here? What are we talking about? So, Covana decided middle, early of last year to go all in with AWS. And, you know, as a process, it took about four months for us to determine which cloud platform we wanted to go with. After that time, AWS was the clear solution and we needed to find a partner that was the right one for us to help us get there. We're a fairly small IT shop and so we needed somebody that truly knew the AWS platform, second watch, easily provided that service for us. See, mind if I jump in here? Typically, you know, there's been kind of this fud out there that IT groups are resistant to the cloud. You know, that there's concern. It's actually not what we found. He's the boss. But in some cases, but actually what we found in a lot of cases, it's really, these guys have very important day jobs today running their current infrastructure. So they're subject matter experts around compute storage. So it's not a matter of IT being resistant. Oftentimes it's a matter of do you have enough resources to be able to spend time understanding the rate of innovation that Amazon's at and then how to apply it to your business. So a lot of times companies like these will employ the help of a partner as they are making this transition that obviously like they're here to gain learning and expertise around the product and then they start to be evolved in the, you know, the evolve of the application as well. You know, I completely agree with you. I think there's so much dogma around pigeonholing IT to be like dogmatic, like the mainframe guys were. And there are guys like that that clutch on to their job, maybe have job insecurity, but this wouldn't have the growth of numbers here. Most IT guys now that they want to get their hands on cool stuff, right? They want to like get down and dirty and like drive value from my experience. This is always going to be- They want to do interesting things. They want to be excited. Yeah, so cloud is certainly catnip for that. I mean, it's like definitely go nuts with the clouds. I got to ask you guys, you mentioned before we came on that you guys did, you had 400 instances of service moved to the cloud, 40 apps in 16 weeks. Now let's just kind of put kind of our time machine, you know, hot tub time machine, now go back to the 80s. Imagine 1986 going in and saying, you got 16 weeks, you couldn't move a router in 16 weeks from one building across the street. It'd be like a migration plan, right? Now you guys move on a complete set of resources in 16 weeks, take us through that use case. Oh man, so this was a really big, it was a big project for us. You know, we really, we were really looking at the different providers out there and it was really important that we chose the right one. So that was a big thing. We really wanted to make sure that the company, that the department really had the right agility and that was kind of what led us towards this path down to the cloud. We had been looking at others, we had been working with other SaaS solutions before and said, you know what, having this physical data center really isn't doing us any good. And that's why we started moving into that. And so what was the key decision point cost? Was it just hassle? Time, too much time managing it? I mean, there was a lot of time that we were spending a lot of time managing our data center. There was, we had about five or six people whose full time job was to just run the data center, worry about the cooling, you know, energy responding to alerts. And also we, you know, after crunching the numbers we found there to be a pretty considerable cost savings. And that was really what helped us sell the business case. So what do you guys do with Second Watch? What's their role with you guys? Second Watch was really one of, they're part of the team that helped figure out they kind of architecting the new environment with Amazon. We, you know, three of us all work together to come up with the right design. And Second Watch was the company that really helped us move that forward. John, I want to ask you the DevOps question because this always comes in, you got to engineer this stuff. So you probably rolls right to you. When you look at that kind of task, when you look at the cloud migration, how hard is it? Give us a kind of sense for what's involved and what the trade-offs are as you guys look at engineering. And how do you see the upside as an engineer? Sure, well so Amazon gives, and really most cloud providers, give a unique ability to deploy at speed, you know. A lot of IT shops have a hard time doing things quickly when they're doing it in their own data center. Whether that be because of procurement, because of process automation, whatever it be. Going to a cloud provider, especially like Amazon, they've got a huge breadth of services and they make getting there fairly simple. You know, again, like you mentioned, we were able to move 400 servers in 16 weeks. It's a monumental effort. It took a lot of doing. There was a lot of late nights, but with the help of a good partner and some of that hard work, you know, we were able to get it done. And then once you're up there, the ability to improve process quickly is really the story. I got to ask you the question, because when I was on everyone's mind, I won't say Johnny come late least of the cloud, but there's a lot of pressure coming in. You see new practices. You've been doing this for a while. It's that can watch. When you do selection of partners, what do you look for? I mean, what are some of the key criteria is that you say, hey, they're kind of cool and smart, but they're new or they're cool and smart, but don't know anything. I mean, people are coming in. There's a lot more service providers coming into the cloud. How do you select the best? For us, we looked for a partner that did, specifically did what we were looking to do, which is basically shut down our data center. And second watch had just completed a successful similar migration with Connie Nass that was very publicly out there. And so it, you know, having a partner that is aligned with your strategy and how you want to do it and can show a proven track record is probably the most important point. So track record is key. Obviously, I have to chop, so that's table stakes to you kind of like look at what they got, talent, but then track record. I got to ask you on this, as you look at the landscape, what are some of the track record things that you've seen? You've seen multiple times you've done this. What are some of the, as a cloud service provider and managed provider, what are some of the key things that you guys focus on as a business to stay relevant and stay ahead? I'll see knocking down some use cases is good, but as you go down and look at this growth. Yeah. No, it's a great question. You know, we're very much aligned with Amazon around the customer. The customer really drives where our business goes and it also drives kind of how we view the business. So if we take care of their customer, our business is going to do well. You know, there generally is a shortage of talent when it comes to understanding cloud services. Few years ago, there were 7,500 SKUs with Amazon. There's over 30,000 SKUs today. So you're asking somebody that has to run a data center today in their off hours to learn Amazon. It's difficult. So partners are needed. Reputation as well as a lot of certifications are important for us to not only work with great clients like these guys, but also to attract and retain talent. And so yes, there's a lot of companies coming in, which is natural. Some of it's opportunistic. Some of it's technology driven. But you know, our customers, which we have over 24 public case studies and a lot behind that that aren't public, talk to these guys in reference calls, are able to articulate the value as well as tell them what we do really, really well and what we don't do well or what we don't engage in. You know, we don't engage in broad brush business consultant. We don't rewrite apps for three to four years. Again, one of the things that this company benefited, like a lot of customers, is you get an initial savings from lift and shift. At that point, you again can look at optimization. So how do you functionally optimize it? Is it running on the right size instance? Is it running on the right class instance? Then how do you look at financial optimization? Just to pause there for a second. So you're saying the sequence is lift and shift, do that extremely well. Then once it's operational, then you kind of make sure it's, then you go, is that the order operation? So again, where do you need company? A lot of companies approach this from the application layer. I want to make a lot of money rewriting your application. CondiNAS is a great example of PeopleSoft application lifted and shifted, 40 business line applications lifted and shifted, lot Microsoft, Linux. I mean, it's a wide variety in some cases, Oracle. And so what you're able to do is to lift and shift. And if you architect it properly, you're going to get a 30 to 60% savings just from that lift and shift. Okay, without spending the time, I mean, 16 weeks you couldn't set up a data center from ordering to delivery. So a lot of companies don't view it that way. And then once we get it up and running, you're able to say, hey, here's some applications that you can actually change the class or you can change the size and use auto scaling and optimize it from a technical standpoint because you want to be able to see how that runs when you're up there. Then once you get to kind of, I don't want to call it a steady state, but you understand how the environment and workloads are working, you then can start to say, how can I financially optimize that? And then the last step as we're starting to talk at this reinvent as we're starting to see with these new products is how do I evolve it? So how do I, am I using not just the best class, am I using the best cloud service product to really evolve this to where either I reduce my management costs, I reduce my downtime, I increase my performance, I really make it hum if you would. So guys, so on your end, what's next for you guys? Because now that you moved to the cloud, so did you do the lift and shift, everything's complete? So no more data center or is there still some remnant data center hanging around? Yeah, we've got some leftover systems that we're cleaning up, but for our cloud data center, I think what Jeff described really kind of covers like what our plans are moving forward. We want to get into the financial optimization of the environment. We want to get into the technical optimization of the environment and then once we're there, we can really take advantage of all the new services that are available. Are you guys happy with the situation right now? Oh yeah. Yeah, on the engineering side, okay. So what do you, when you look at this landscape of what they just dropped in, a truck load literally, well that was a snowmobile, but truck on stage was pretty impressive. Had a truck on stage and tried to trail a truck. As an engineer, what's going through your head when you look at the keynote? I mean, are you envisioning like how are you going to engineer this stuff? What's next for you guys now that you moved to the cloud? Yeah, so every time they release a new product or a new innovation on what you would think of as being some old school process and you immediately start thinking, oh my gosh, I have XYZ application that needs to be replaced by that starting tomorrow. Because they almost seem to always be a step ahead of the next thing you need to be doing. So it's nice to see that they continually are able to innovate and add more features that we can immediately see value in moving to. And managing it, it's a breeze. You have focused on the business issues. What are those now? Are you guys just playing cards? I mean, what are you guys doing at the office? You know now, so one of the important things that we need to get to really make sure our team is up to speed, they have the skills, they have the understanding. It's pretty much across the department as a whole. So we're trying to like tool everybody up so that they understand what's going on. And then also we need to be able to market this stuff and reach out to our business teams to make sure that they understand what we have. So you're doing more business evaluation, you're involved more in less mundane, hassle. Yeah, that's a hassle goes away. That's where we want to be. We're definitely moving towards that direction. That's the big job I said, my friends. You're not just not playing cards, you're actually working on some other cooler stuff when you get that hassle out of the way. I mean what's great about this conference, I mean they may not use the snowmobile truck that came on stage, but as they start to think about their business and their mission, energy conservation and think about how can we use machine learning or deep learning or IoT to really help contribute globally, not just within the business, but how do we work as a business to help the entire world to be a better place? And ultimately, technology like AWS is allowing us to do it faster, cheaper and with less environmental impact. It's a huge power source, not just for resource, but also powerful as a company. I'm an operating system guy, so that's my background. I look at what they're doing, I'm like, oh my God, I could build some serious, because you're talking about stuff that's, okay great, it's been vetted, push a button. I'm not a plumber, I'm a machinist now, I'm just connecting and building out. And I think that is something that people overlook, that that will shift the value. And so this is why I think you guys got a good thing going on here with that integration, getting the data centers out. I mean, just the power costs alone. I mean, think about like, I mean, that must be a big one for you, like the power. When was that the big issue? Or was it more of cost than just hassle? Too many hassle. It's not just power, I mean, what we've heard were companies like them, Kanye and Nas is a great example. I don't have to go to lunch with all my reps that are selling me hardware. That alone freed up. They lose the golf outings, so come on. That alone freed up the time. I mean, so there's multiple benefits, both work and life balance, from moving to the cloud. They're trimmer, they're in shape. And you know, you can sit on a plane and actually provision instances and use products, which you could never do in the physical world. So your work-life balance should get better by moving to the cloud? Yeah, I just think it's just so much cool. Get rid of the hassles, make life better. And work on some better stuff. Jeff, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Congratulations on all your success. We'll see you next year. Guys, congratulations on moving up the big workloads and infrastructure to the cloud and see you next year. Thank you. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, live in Las Vegas for Amazon ReInvent 2016. We'll be right back with more after this short break.