 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE with Keith Townsend, my co-host this week. Our next guest is Chris Jordan, the chief CEO of IOLAP, online transaction process for all and database geeks out there. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So you guys were part of the team that worked with Amazon on Alexa for Business, which, believe me, rushing into the market is an understatement. They needed to get this to the market. Alexa is the most popular lightning in a ball. When we saw it come out, we're like, it's going to be awesome. And of course we got some new cool stuff with the wireless cameras and amazing set of services. But in the industry track on Tuesday, the number one repeat session, because that's kind of an indicator. They want, people wanted more demand. Was Alexa anything to do with Alexa? Voice is hot. So, tell us about your role with Alexa for Business. How did you guys get involved? How far along were you with Amazon before they launched it? Tell us about your relationship with Amazon. Right, so our relationship with Amazon really started with when they launched Redshift five years ago, right? We're a traditional analytics, big data warehousing type company and when Redshift came out, it became really compelling to us. We were already interested in Amazon or AWS prior to that, but got real interested with Redshift. Two years ago when Alexa came out, we started playing with it, immediately put it in our innovation lab and started trying to figure out how can we use this in an enterprise setting? How can we get it into the business place and make use of it? And we almost immediately started working with a couple of our customers, one of whom who was one of the launch partners today in the keynote with looking at what we can build and how we can use Alexa in that environment. And what we found was a lot of roadblocks. Alexa was, Echoes and Dots is a consumer product, right? And it really wasn't right for the enterprise. And so we started building out components that help us get to the enterprise. 10 months ago, we started working with Alexa for the Alexa for Business team and worked real closely with them. When they made the keynote announcement this morning, there was I think eight launch partners that are listed on the website today, one of which we are, we feel like we have a pretty different approach to where we want to use Alexa in the enterprise. It's the voice is hard. I mean, Alexa's great. In fact, my wife actually moved Alexa from the kitchen into my room because she thinks Alexa's listening to her. So security issues there. But Alexa's great. You talk to her, gets them in back. But integrating into databases and normal enterprise stuff is hard. Look at voiceover IP. Look how hard that was to jam into an enterprise. So I mean, that's... The number one challenge, the first thing we bumped into was user authentication. If you've got an Alexa device sitting in a room, anybody that comes in and asks a question is going to get the answer. If it's built to do it, you can't have that in an enterprise setting. So we had to come up with an authentication method, some active directory integration or something like that. And that was the first component that we built and integrated into our platform that allows us to understand and enable access control. And... All right, so let's go down and look at where the challenges were with Alexa for business that they had to overcome. And once they got a knockdown going forward, either directly AWS or through ecosystem partners. Go ahead. Well, the first challenge was device management. And that's the biggest thing that they solved with Alexa for businesses. If I'm a company that wants to roll out 100 devices across the organization or 1,000 devices in hotel rooms or something like that, how do I manage that? How do I deploy it? How do I assign the users and all of that? Alexa for business solved that today. So let's go down this MDM path a little bit. Alexa is not just a service that runs on a dot or echo. There are screen use cases for it. I personally don't like just talking to a headless unit. What are some of the other MDM integration points, not when you Android, Apple, iOS applications, headless devices, just apps is a use case for a lessons. Yeah, definitely. So the services that we're already building, and actually they were announced last year at re-invent here, Lex and Polly, with those we can build applications that we're interacting on our phone either via voice through text with a chat bot like interface. We can also do a display so we can be showing results while we're asking and getting a response. Show results on a screen either on a device like an echo show or on a television with a fire stick plugged in it or on a computer screen with a URL launch. So I'm really interested in this, what John likes to call the white space of Amazon. They get involved in so many areas. A good point is authentication. Eventually Amazon is going to figure that out. So where are the white spaces where echo system partners can safely invest, add value to customers in Amazon, but at the same time stay in business. What we're doing is taking our years of domain experience and innovating with our clients to come up with personas and use cases and really develop those voice applications, if you will, that become a almost like another interface into all of the enterprise systems that they've already built. And for us, we think that's what ultimately the business will be. Our platform is great and it solves some problems that aren't necessarily solved already, but I don't think there's anything that stops AWS from solving those problems themselves and in fact, I would expect them to over time. Well, they want the ecosystem to step up. Andy Jassy told me when I had my meeting with him one-on-one last week prior to the conference, I asked him straight up, I go, you know, people might be afraid that you're going to roll over these awesome opportunities. And he said, look, our customers want us to do certain things like monitoring, but new relic is kicking ass, MongoDB on the database side. So he wants to create, they want to create an environment for partners to thrive. No doubt about it. So, you know, even though that they might will probably take over it all anyway, some point, but what is the opportunity for partners? Because you guys are first in kind of jumping in the water with Amazon. This is going to be a massively intoxicating area for developers because of voice. And if they can turn around these APIs, I mean, the innovation's spectacular. Yeah, I think it's wide open to build out kind of pre-built solutions. We've got five already that we think are interesting in the enterprise. At the very least, it's a great conversation starter to have a KPI concierge for a CFO, and we've got pre-built sort of garden path of questions and answers that we can guide the CFO down and build out his group of KPIs. And that's a repeatable solution. We definitely think there's that solution type problem. The platform, we think we've built some unique things there to be able to integrate the visual assistant part of it. And I think- Well, you guys get to leverage your tech in a way that can be put into a new flywheel, if you will. But Keith, this is what we were talking about earlier. Now, when I asked Chris the question, because this is the real question, what would be the alternative without Amazon to roll in and roll out kiosks by a PC, full stack engineering, QA? I mean, it would be ridiculous. The cost would be, now you can just walk down and knock down potentially anything with an iPad. You stick an iPad on, you've got a kiosk. We had our first proof of concept up and running within three weeks, or three months, I'm sorry, and we couldn't have done that if it wasn't for all of the platform and service that AWS had already built. Huge opportunity, not for startups, but for existing companies. All right, so what's your advice for folks to end the segment here out there? You guys are on it, you're taking your initial property, you're wrapping it around Alexa, or Alexa's wrapping around you, however it works. What's your advice, folks, want to jump in on this bandwagon? First thing is to jump in and start playing with voice and see how it changes the way you interact with your systems. We discovered our customers jumped in and we thought, there were things that were like, hey, can we do this, can we do that, that we never thought of until we just jumped in and started doing it, so jump in. All right, and share one thing that people might not know about Alexa for business, something that's part of your experience, working with AWS on this early program. What, share some color, funny story, something anecdotal, something maybe crazy. Did Werner wear that T-shirt with Seattle shirts every day? Well, definitely one of the, it's not exactly an Alexa for business story, but the thing that really led me to, I need some form of authentication is when I first put my echo at home, my children were playing with it and within 10 minutes had ordered a book on a hundred different ways to cook ramen noodles. And so I thought, I don't need them to be able to buy everything they can without me authenticating that somehow, and we need to get some authentication on this device. Exactly, all the crazy stuff that comes out. Yeah. All right, Chris, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on your success, your business. IOLP, IOLAP, what are you guys based out of? We're headquartered in Dallas, Texas area, first guy. Congratulations. Thank you. All right, Alexa for business, hot topic, obviously probably a little tsunami of integration going on. And again, this could move the needle big time, game changer, hopefully create great apps. It's a cube, live coverage. Day three here at ReInvent, more coverage after this short break.