 Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2021. It's our third day, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're getting all the action, two sets in person. It's also a virtual hybrid event. So there's a lot of great content online, bringing you all the fresh voices, all the knowledge, all the news, and all the action. We've got a great guest here. Tune in to your render. Managing director of AWS, Europe, Middle East and Africa, also known as EMEA. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. Lovely to be here. Europe is really hot. Middle East, Africa, great growth. The VC culture in Europe, particularly has been booming this year. A lot of great action. We've done many Cube gigs out there, talking to folks, entrepreneurship, cloud-native growth, and then for just global. It's awesome. So first question I got to ask you is, you're new to AWS. What brought you here? Yeah, John, thank you so much. I've been here about three and a half months now, actually. So what brought me here? I have been in and around the tech world since I was a baby. My father was an entrepreneur. I sold fax machines and microfilm equipment in my early days. And then my career has spanned technology in some form or the other. I was at EMC when we bought VMware. I was at Colt when we did a fintech startup, joined Schneider in my background, which is industrial tech. So I guess I'm a bit of a tech nerd, although I'm not an engineer, that's for sure. The other thing is I've spent a huge part of my career advising clients. So while I was at McKinsey on business transformation, and cloud keeps coming up, especially post-pandemic, huge, huge, huge enabler ride of transformation. So when I got the call from AWS, I thought here's my opportunity to finally take what companies are wrestling with, bring together a pioneer in cloud with our enterprise and startup and SMB clients, connect those dots between business and technology and make things happen, so real magic. So that's what brought me here. And I guess the only other thing to say is I'd heard a lot about the culture, customer obsession and leadership principles. So that's why I'm here. It's been a great success. I got to ask you too, now that you're new, Austin McKinsey, you've been seeing in the front lines all the transformation, the pandemic has really forced everybody globally to move faster. Things like Kinect were popular. And EMEA, how is that going out there? Is it the same kind of global pressure on the digital transformation with cloud? What are you seeing out there? I mean, I've been traveling since I joined around 10 of the countries already. So I've been in planes, trains, automobiles. And what you definitely see is massive acceleration. And I think it's around reinvention of the business. So people are adopting cloud because it's obviously there's cost reasons. There's MNA reasons. There's really increasingly more about innovating. How do I innovate my business? How do I reinvent my business? So you see that constantly. And whether you're an enterprise company or you're a startup, they're all adopting cloud in different, different ways. I mean, I want to call a quarter stack because it's really interesting. And Adam mentioned this on his keynote. Five to 15% only of workloads have moved to the cloud. So there's this tremendous runway ahead of us. And the three big things on people's minds helped me become a tech company. So it doesn't matter who you are, your retail, whether you're life sciences or healthcare, you probably heard about the Roche work that we're doing with Roche around accelerating R&D with data. Or if you're shoes, Adidas, how do you accelerate again your personalized experiences? So it doesn't matter who you are, help me become a tech company. Give me skills, digital skills, and then help me become a more sustainable company. Those are the three big things I'm picking up. So a couple of things to unpack there. So think about IT transformation. We still have a long way to go to your point, 10, 15%, depending on which numbers you look at. We've been talking a lot on theCUBE about the next decade around business transformation, deeper business integration, and the force march to digital, and it woke us up to that and accelerated that, as you say. So as you travel around to customers in EMEA, what are you hearing with regard to that? I mean, many customers maybe didn't have time to plan. Now they can sit back and take what they've learned. What are you hearing from customers? Yeah, and it's a little bit different in different places, right? So I mean, if you start, if you look at our businesses, for example, in France, or if you look at our businesses in Iberia or Italy, a lot of them are now starting, they're on the, at least on the enterprise front, they are now starting to adopt cloud. So they're stepping back and thinking about their overall strategy, right? And then the way that they're doing it is actually they're using data as the first trigger point. And I think that makes it easier to migrate, because if you look at large enterprises, and if you think of the big processes that they've got, and all the mainframes and everything that they need to do, if you look at it as one big block, it's too difficult. But when you think about data, you can actually start to aggregate all of your data into one area, and then start to analyze and unpack that. So I think what I'm seeing for sure is, in those countries, data is the first trigger. If you go out to Israel, well, there you've got all, it's really startup nation, as you know, right? And there we've got more of the digital natives, and they want to absorb all of the innovation that we're throwing at them. And you've heard a lot here at Reinvent on some of the things, whether it's digital twins, or robotics, or frankly, even using 5G private network we've just announced, but they are adopting innovation and really taking that in. So it really does differ. But I think the one big message I would leave you with is bringing industry solutions to business is critical. So rather than just talking IT and technology, we've got to be able to bring some of what we've done. So for example, the Goldman Sachs financial cloud, bring that to the rest of financial services companies in the MIA, or if you take the work we're doing on industrials and IoT. So it's really about connecting what industry use cases with our technology. What's interesting about the Goldman, Dave and I were commenting, we coined the term, the story we wrote on Thursday last week and then Sunday, super clouds. Because you look at the rise of snowflake and data bricks and Goldman Sachs, you're going to start to see people building on AWS and building these super clouds because they're taking unique platform features of AWS and then satisfying it for their needs and then offering that as a service. So there's kind of a whole other tier developing in the natural evolution of clouds. So the partners are on fire right now because the creativity, the market opportunities are there to be captured. So you're seeing this opportunity recognition, opportunity capture vibe going on. And it's interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that because certainly the VCs are here in force. Dave and I saw all the top Silicon Valley VCs here and some European VCs are all here. They're all seeing this. Yeah, so pick up on two things you mentioned that I think are absolutely spot on. We're absolutely seeing with our partners this integration on our platform is so important. So we talk about the power of three, which is you bring a JSI partner, you bring an ISV partner, you bring AWS. You create that power of three and you take it to our customers. And it doesn't matter which industry. Our partner ecosystem is so rich. The other mention we have 100,000 partners around the world. And then you integrate that with Marketplace. And AWS Marketplace just opens the world. We have about 325,000 active customers on Marketplace. So, certification, integration with our platform, bringing in the GSIs and the NSIs. I think that's the real power to coming back to your point on transformation. On the second one, the unicorns. You know, it's interesting. So, UK, France, Israel, Mia, I spent a lot of time recently in Dubai and you can see it happening there. Africa, Nigeria, South Africa. I mean, all across those countries, you're seeing a huge amount of VC funding going in towards developers, towards startups, towards scaleups. More and more of our startup clients, by the way, are actually going IPO. Initially, it used to be a lot of M&A and strategic acquisitions, but they have actually bigger aspirations and they're going IPO. And we've seen them through from when they were seed or pre-seed, all the way to now that they are unicorns, right? So, there's just a tremendous amount happening in Mia. And we're fueling that. You know, born in the cloud is easy, right? In terms of what AWS brings to the table. Well, I've been saying for years, I always thought to A&E Jesse about this because he's a big sports nut. When you bring like these stadiums to certain cities, it rejuvenates and Amazon regions are bringing local rejuvenation around the digital economies. And what you're seeing with the startup culture is the ecosystems around it. And Silicon Valley thrives because you have all the service providers, you have all the fear of failure goes away, there's support systems. You start to see now with AWS's ecosystem, that same ecosystem support, the robustness of it. So, it's classic rising tide floats all boats kind of vibe. So, I mean, we don't really have our narrative get down on this but we're seeing this ecosystem kind of play going on. Yeah, and actually, it's a real virtuous circle or we call flywheel, right, within AWS. Because a startup wants to connect to an enterprise. An enterprise wants to connect to a startup, right? A lot of our ISV partners, by the way, were startups and now they've graduated and they're like very large. So, what we, I see our role, and by the way, this is one of the other reasons I came here is I see our role to be able to be real facilitators of these ecosystems, right? And you know, we've got something that we kicked off in EMEA, which I'm really proud of, called our EMEA startup loft accelerator. And we launched at a web summit and the idea is to bring startups into our space virtually and physically and help them build and help them make those connections. So, I think real, I really do think, and our enterprise clients are asking us all the time, right, who do I need to involve if I'm thinking IoT? Who do I need to involve if I want to do something with data? And that's what we do, super connectors. Well, John, you mentioned the Goldman deal and I think it was Adam and his keynote, was talking about, our customers are asking us to teach them how to essentially build a super cloud in our words. But so, with your McKinsey background, I would imagine there's real opportunities there, especially as I hear you talk about EMEA going around to see customers. There must be a lot of sort of non-digital businesses that are now transforming to digital. A lot of capital needs there, but maybe you could talk about sort of how you see that playing out over the next several years in your role, in AWS's role, in affecting that transformation. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you're right, actually. And maybe I will, from my past experience, pick up on something. You know, I was in the world of industry with Schneider, as an example. And, you know, we did business through the channel. And a lot of our channel was not digitized. You know, you had point of sale, electrical distributors, wholesalers, et cetera. I think all of those businesses during the pandemic realized that they had to go digital and online, right? And so they started from having one fax machine in a store, really, literally, I'm not kidding, nothing else, to actually having to go online and be able to do click and collect and various other things. And we were able, with AWS, you can spin up in minutes. That sort of service, right? I love the fact that you have a credit card, you can get onto our cloud, right? That's the whole thing. And it's about instances. Adam talked about instances, which I think is great. How do businesses transform? And again, I think it's about unpacking the problem. So what we do a lot is we sit down with our customers and we actually map a migration journey with them. We look across their core infrastructure. We look at their SAP systems, for example. We look at what's happening in the various businesses, their e-commerce systems, their customer lifecycle value management systems. I think you've got to go business by business by business, use case by use case by use case, and then help our technology enable that use case to actually digitize. And whether it's front office or back office, I think the advantages are pretty clear. It's more, I think the difficulty is not technology anymore. The difficulty is mindset, leadership commitment, the operating model, the organizational model, and skills. And so what we have to do as AWS is bring not only our technology, but our culture of innovation and our digital innovation teams to help our clients on that journey. And apply that technology. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time coming on theCUBE. We have a couple more minutes. I do want to get into what's your agenda now that you're in charge, got the landscape, got a 20 mile stare in front of you, clouds booming, you got some personal passion projects. Tell us what your plans are. So three or four things, right? Three or four really big takeaways for me is, one, I came here to help make sure our customers could leverage the power of the cloud. So I will not feel like my job's been done if I haven't been able to do that. So you know that five to 15% we talked about? We've got to go 50, 60, 70%. That's the goal, right? And why not 100% at some point, right? So I think over the next few years, that's the acceleration. We need to help bring in AMIA. America's already started to get there, as you know, much more and we need to drive that into AMIA and then eventually our APJ colleagues are going to do the same. So that's one thing. The other is we talked about partners. I really want to accelerate and expand our partner ecosystem. We have actually a huge growth by the way and the number of partners signing up, the number of certifications they're taking. I really, really want to double down on our partners and actually do what they ask us for, which is join COSEL, join marketing, globalization. So that's two. I think the third big thing is what you mentioned, industry, industry, industry. We've got to bring real use cases and solutions to our customers and not only talk technology, got to connect those two dots. And we have lots of examples to bring, by the way. And then four, hiring develop the best. You know, we've got a new LP, as you know, to strive to be Earth's best employer. I want to do that in AMIA. I want to make sure we can actually do that. We attract, we retain, and we grow, and we develop our talent. And diversity has been a huge theme of this event. You know, it's front and center in virtually every company. I'm usually passionate about diversity. I'm proud actually that when I was a back at Schneider, I launched something called the Power Women Network. We're a network of 100 senior women and we meet every month. I've also got a podcast out there. So if anyone's listening, it's called Power Women Speak. Is it still going? It is, I've done 16 over the pandemic with CEOs of Power Women Speak. Power Women Speak, that's the podcast. On Apple and Spotify and everything else. We'll promote it, good stuff. And you know what I love about what we're doing is AWS on diversity. And you heard Adam on stage talk to this. We've got our restart program where we really help underemployed and unemployed to get a 12 week intensive course and get trained up on cloud skills. And the other thing is get IT. Helping young girls 12 to 15 get into STEM. So lots of different things on the whole, but we need to do a lot more, of course, on diversity. And I look forward to helping our clients through that as well. Well, we had the training VP on yesterday. It's all free. It's all free. The training's free. And John- Those freebies, yeah? You've got such a digital skills issue that I love that we've said 29 million people around the world free cloud training. Literally the gap there between earnings with cloud certification, you can be making six figures with cloud training. So I mean, it's really easy. It's free. It's such a great thing. Have you seen the YouTube video on Charlotte Wilkins? No, I have not seen that one. McDonald's fast food. She changed her mind. She wanted a tech career. She now has a tech career as a result of being part of Rista. It's a wonderful story. I really appreciate it. You got a lot of energy and love the podcast. I'm subscribing. I'm going to listen. Thank you. We love doing the podcast as well. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. Good luck on Anemia and your plans. Thank you. Okay, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Allotta here at re-invent physical event in person. Hybrid event as well. Thanks for watching.