 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is our first day of covering AWS re-invent 2019. Dave, we have a jam-packed three days here. The seventh time theCUBE has been at re-invent. It's like the Super Bowl here. It is, I stole that from you, but you just sent it back to me. It is like the Super Bowl here. We're very pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Refinitiv. Refinitiv's first time on theCUBE, as well as our guest, please welcome Hannah. We've got Hannah Hellen, Helian, sorry, VP of Cloud Propositions, and James Turk, the head of architecture and cloud from Refinitiv. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having us. So here we are in the Expo Hall with thousands and thousands of folks. But I'd love for you guys to start. Hannah, we'll start with you. Tell our audience about Refinitiv. You're a data company, but really, what is it that you guys do? What do you deliver to the community? Absolutely, absolutely. So simply put, we are, as you said, we are a data company. So we serve the global financial community. So looking at banks, asset managers, hedge funds, corporations with financial and risk data. So very powerful combination in this cloud environment. So obviously, without data, cloud is empty. So that's where we come in. And what type of data are we talking about? You know, data, from a thematic perspective, it is, we know, and every company knows, on some level, there's tremendous value in the data. The challenge is being able to access it and unlock the value. Give us a slice of, in capital markets, for example, what are some of the types of data services that you provide to your customers? So we have all sorts of data. So we source the data from lots of different sources, whether it's coming from exchanges or from the market data sources. And then our customers use that to analyze the data and really running the backs testing for those data sets. They also go mingle our data with alternative data sets as well, as well as their own internal data. So it's all about that analytical layer that they can add on top of our data. Okay, and it's data as a service, essentially. Is that right? We do have some data as a service. We also deliver the data to the client. People are interested in accessing data in all sorts of different ways, including increasingly on the cloud. So talk more about your cloud offering, your cloud and your title, cloud architecture. So one of the things that we're doing is we have a combination, we're an interesting company in that we both have our own pieces of cloud infrastructure for our own purposes, but also increasingly we need to build and deliver solutions for our customers to be able to consume data in the clouds. That means being able to work with them to put it into the cloud that they want it to be going into, to be able to work out how we can keep that data up to date and to do it in a cost-effective manner for our clients to be able to get the most out of it. How do you deal with the inherent problems of data quality, you're getting data from different sources, how do you take care of that? Absolutely, so that's really our core strength and expertise that we have been doing that for years and years. So again, coming from different sources, we normalize the data on our site, we clean it up and then serve for our customers in our own information model. And we have created this permanent and unique identifier called PROMID. So we map all the data sets, so it's very easy for our customers to consume that and then also map it back to their own data and third-party data sets. Where does the global security come into play? Cause that's a topic and the thing that we talk about at every event, when you're talking about all these different external data sources, quality, but security is, I imagine, fundamental. How do you help deliver that? Absolutely, so obviously from the cloud perspective, that has been a big theme in the public cloud environment and I think we are seeing more and more feedback from our customers that as it comes down to public cloud, I think they are very comfortable actually now with the privacy and security of public cloud. So that has been, I think, big change past couple of years. I haven't personally seen those concerns anymore coming from customers the way that we saw a couple of years ago. One of the interesting things that we're seeing is an increasing move is that our clients want to be able to mix their data with our data and so increasingly you're seeing interesting solutions coming to market which allow them to keep their data where their data is held on their cloud or even on their own premises and mix that with our data and so we're trying to bring together those solutions where a customer doesn't have to put all of our data with theirs, put all of their data with ours but keep that segregation as you say because that PII data and all of those sorts of things are much more important these days for us to be able to be able to show that is how the data is being segregated and that things are being kept apart in an appropriate way. And who's responsible for that? Is that you guys? Is it the cloud provider? Is it the customers? So it's a shared responsibility model? Where do you leave off and where does the customer pick up? What do you advise customers in terms of hey, here's what we're going to do for you and now you have to be responsible for X. What is that line? Well, quite often defining that service boundary is something that we continue to work on. So historically we've delivered data to clients and so we've had lines going into a client's premises and then there's an obvious point at the end of that where this was us and that's you. As we get more into the cloud space we have to define much more clearly what that service boundary is. So again, as we're developing out some of our cloud propositions that's a key thing that we're working through as to what is it that the client wants to control and what is it that we need to control? That's very true Hannah. I mean, 10 years ago you talked to financial services companies and we will never be in the cloud and now they're much more comfortable. Now you guys do this cloud survey each year. Yes. What are you seeing? I'll share some of our data, I wonder if it matches. What are the big trends? Sure, sure. Yeah, so we are doing this. It's almost becoming a tradition for us to do this cloud survey on a yearly basis. So it's quite interesting to kind of compare the previous surveys and where we are today. So what we have found out on the survey this year is that the OIT investment is very much going to public cloud. So I think when we started the cloud survey a couple of years ago, we saw that about 32% of the IT investment went to public cloud. But then for next year, that is increasing almost to 50%. So obviously public cloud is definitely here to stay. I think another key trend that we saw from the surveys that I think the testing that the companies have been doing, like they are learning more and more and they are really seeing the benefit from public cloud now. And I would highlight that, especially our hedge fund customers, they were highlighting that they saw also cost benefits with the cloud. So about 92% saw that actually when they moved to the cloud and do the projects in the cloud environment, it really saves money for them, which is quite interesting because also then at the same time for what many of the customer discussions like it can be also a challenge for, especially for large organizations as they move to the cloud environment, that's how do you kind of manage that traditional technology stack and when you move to the public cloud. So it's kind of two-sided way there. But I think the general consensus as it comes down to cloud survey was that many of the organization, they really saw the big transition that organizations are going through and that it can be really big impacts for their own own business. So very, very positive message on that part. Let's dig into that a little bit more from a transition or we'll use Andy Jassy's or a transformation. James, I'd love to get your perspective on what has changed in the last few to see the numbers that Helen talked about. Really, Hannah, excuse me. Going up so significantly as we know that cloud 1.0 is compute and storage and networking and maybe some data services, but what do you think has fundamentally changed across industries such that public cloud now is much more strategic? I think for a lot of firms, particularly in financial services, we spend a lot of time looking at analytics and being able to run those large analytical jobs and be able to scale them. I think that as people have become more comfortable about the data that they can put into the cloud and being able to get access to more data through companies like Refinitiv, being able to run those machine learning jobs and it was really interesting to see the keynote this morning, to see Amazon really putting a lot of effort into democratizing the use of machine learning through SageMaker. Thought it was very exciting. We think that that is going to be an increasing thing. So as you see in financial services, people are looking for those large workloads. They have really large data sets and so the only way that they can do that in a kind of realistic manner is being able to use public cloud and then you see them taking a lot of the old traditional systems and as we're seeing the risk appetite to be able to get onto cloud becoming more, they're going through the same sort of transformation which we see many firms having gone through. You know, the developers are insisting that they're getting the best tools so that it can have the agility to deliver what their clients want and again, one of the best ways of doing that is moving onto a public cloud infrastructure that really delivers those tools to you. I wonder if you could talk about what you're seeing in terms of adoption of new tech. So I said we share some of our data. At the macro, you know, spending slowing down. It's reverting to pre-2018 levels. It's not falling off a cliff, but when you look at the spending data from ETR and others, it's slowing down. Financial services is a bellwether. You're seeing less experimentation and sort of more narrowing of their bets. They're placing bets on things that they know are going to work. They've been experimenting with digital transformation for the last couple of years and now they're saying, hey, we're now going to double down on the things that work. We're going to unplug the things, the legacy stuff so we can get rid of some of our technical debt. What are you seeing in terms of the trends of technology adoption, particularly for emerging tech? With NFS? Yeah, I think you touched on this briefly, but I think what we are seeing is that when we started the discussions with our customers, they all started with the kind of the back end technology IT conversation at that time, but I think that trend, as you say, as well, so it's moving very much to the end users and end users, for example, data scientists, picking the analytical tools that they want to consume. And I think that's a very big trend that we are seeing. So again, AI, ML, analytics in general that you can add on top of the cloud environment and on top of the data, that will be the big thing happening. One of the things that Andy Jassy said this morning, James, is in sort of these four kind of essentials for transformation to happen. He said the first one is you've got to get senior executive alignment. And the second thing he said has to be this, and he used the word aggressive, aggressive top-down approach. What are some of the changes that you're seeing with respect to, you know, where it comes to maybe what you said, Hannah, about the emerging technologies and the end users really in the data scientists, needing to be able to get their hands wet with all this. But what are you seeing in terms of organizations that you work with, where is that senior leadership really getting on board where public cloud is a strategy that has driven top-down? Absolutely, increasingly you're seeing that happen, is that it really is going to be the top-down strategy. There are a number of very large capital markets firms who have come out and said that they're going to adopt varying cloud providers. And increasingly that's because the level of trust has gone up and the level of maturity of the cloud providers has also increased. So a few years ago you would speak to the cloud providers and they really wouldn't understand the need to engage with the regulators. Now companies have large teams of people who go out and engage with the regulators and they will partner with the financial institutions to make sure that we're getting the right sort of level of engagement and the right level of permission to do these things. So that means that the senior management are there. And I think that also the senior management, you know, finally are starting to see some of the benefits flow through in terms of a combination of the agility, the different sort of cost controls and the elasticity. And if you think about some of the nature of the workloads that financial institutions run, you've got a lot of this overnight processing which still goes on for creating risk reports and all those sorts of things, really well suited for elasticity. And in the last few years you've seen just this massive increase in the regulatory requirement for those things. And certainly at institutions that I've worked with, you end up in a situation where you're saying, well, in order to be able to accommodate just working out what I need to do there, I'd need to build three different data sensors. Clearly nobody is doing that anymore. You're going to go out, you're going to partner with your cloud provider and they're going to provide you with that capability. That may not be something that you need in the long term but it'll be something that will help you work out what it is that you do need and then you can turn that into a normal workload. So AWS obviously is a cloud provider for you. There may be others as well, but you saw some of the announcements today. You mentioned some of the machine learning and AI stuff, SageMaker. You also saw a lot of activity on the data store, you know, Redshift and separating compute from storage. Is that something that you care about? Is that your customers have to worry about that? Sometimes they ask you for the solution? We super care about this. In fact, one of the big things that we're looking at at the moment and I was really interested in the announcements today, but exactly that is how do we get our data into people's data lakes? As I said, how do we do that in a way where we're making sure that the commitments that we have on digital rights management are being honored and how do we work with cloud providers like Amazon about how we do that? So we have very strong relationships with Amazon. We have very strong relationships with other providers as well. And so we are trying hard to work out what the best solution is because to be honest with you, we have to deliver where our clients want the data to be. So we're working with lots of different providers on this, but these are all really interesting times and this focus on the data and how you get the data into people's data lakes is really interesting to us. It's something where we're pushing very hard. Yeah, and then how you act on it. It's a whole new layer of compute being driven. New workloads that are emerging as a result of that data. It's not just throw it in the data lake anymore. It's I have to extract insights. Absolutely, yeah. Talk to us about how on that front, how are you helping, Hannah, we'll start with you. How are you helping customers, maybe a large enterprise legacy organization actually start to use data for competitive advantage in business differentiation, especially where the enterprise is concerned where they most likely have competitors that are born in the cloud that have the agility and the speed and the appetite to take risks. How are you helping customers unlock this data and go, wow, this is a huge advantage for our business? Absolutely, so obviously, as I said earlier, so because we are a data company, so our customers know us from that perspective. So they come to us for both financial and risk data. So that's kind of one go-to place to get everything. And then we are obviously working very closely with our customers to also offer them new additional data sets. So things like alternative data obviously being one that you again want to go mingle your own data with the third party data with alternative data sets as well. So we, for example, formed a partnership with the company called Battlefin earlier this year, which has this very nice technology to onboard different alternative data sets. And then we are onboarding those data sets for our customers again, combining that with our overall information model. But it's really, again, coming back to that flexible question that we want to make sure that our data can be served in the environment where our customers are. So whether they're in public cloud, private cloud, whether they have their on-prem solution still, obviously, especially with the larger institutions, they still have those, as well as we hosting the offerings for them as well. So it's all about the flexibility that we would be offering. Excellent. Well, Hannah, James, thank you for joining David Mead, sharing with our audience who definitive is what you do and really kind of this importance of data as we're in this new next gen of cloud. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from day one of our coverage of AWS re-invent 19. Thanks for watching.