 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. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent. We're day two in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, here extracting the signal from the noise. And the big story today is the partner keynote, Andy Jassy yesterday, and the new guards versus the old guards. What is the value equation of the modern error? Our next guest, Mike Cowden, president of Slalom Build, an organically growing company with 8,000 employees. Highlighted in the keynote today. So congratulations for being highlighted in the keynote and also for a great company. So thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here. So talk about the company real quick. Quick highlights about the firm, how big you guys are, and your secret of success. Sure, so Slalom has been around for over 15 years now. And we, like you mentioned, we've grown 100% organically. And our model is very much a locally focused model. So our consultants live in the city, live and work in the cities that they grow up in. And so they know their customers really well. It's not a traveling model. And then Slalom Build, which is, I'm the president of Slalom Build, is Slalom's answer to building modern software products and modern data products. And we have a dozen build centers around in three different countries that support projects in those local cities. So this local model, I think this is really clever and I think it's interesting. It might be an indicator of how to organize in this modern cultural era of mission based. It's not quick hit, traveling, hey, sell you something, see you later. You only get called up when you only see them when they're selling something. That's kind of the old model. Hey, I'm selling you something. Here's a bunch of people, see you later. Not anymore. Not anymore. In the world we work in today, you have to have proximity to the problem that you're trying to solve. And so we try to get as close as we can to our customers and create long-term relationships. Just like our customers are creating with these new modern technologies, a long-term relationship, it's a transformational relationship. And that's how we approach our customer, that we put them first and we try to stay as close as we possibly can to them. Okay, so you guys have a very interesting interdisciplinary portfolio. You do product engineering, you do analytics, you got consulting, again, people-based business, which you just pointed out. Andy Jazzy talked about a big theme was, hey, CEOs, get involved. It's a leadership transformation imperative. Basically, hey, get smarter people so you don't buy Microsoft. That's my interpretation. But, but, IT's changing. Yes. Leadership's critical. What are your customers doing with respect to putting that leadership stake in the ground? How are they driving those big transformations, not tire kicking, we're talking about full-throttle transformations. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting time right now for sure. We're in the middle of this technology revolution, which Andy liked to say a lot as well, that if you're not turning yourself into a modern technology organization, you are going to, you're going to be, not to be around for very long. I think you have a lot of new startups that are going to be cloud-native. They're going to be moving very, very quickly. They're taking advantage of all of these modern technologies. So there's, it really must be an imperative for senior leaders in these companies to take on that transformational. I will, just one more quick point. We have two memes that we've been developing on theCUBE here. I want to share them with you and get your reaction. One is cloud-native. If you take the T out of cloud-native, it's cloud-naive. The other one is reborn in the cloud. Enterprises have to be reborn in the cloud. What's your reaction to those two things? Is there a naivety out there? And is, do you have to be reborn in the cloud? I mean, I think the naivety is getting better. We've made a lot of progress over the last 10 years, let's say, in cloud adoption. So it's less than it used to be, but in terms of the cloud reborn, I think it's absolutely something every incumbent needs to be thinking about. So they may have been born a retail organization or an automobile organization or whatever it might be. They now need to view themselves as a technology organization. And they may not have grown up cloud-native, but they do need to be cloud reborn. So I really resonate with that one. So Mike, I want to unpack this modern technology organization a little bit. Some people might interpret as, oh, modern IT shop, that's not what you mean. You're talking about a modern organization, which is technology is the underpinning. So let's talk a little bit more about what that means. And obviously data plays a role there, machine intelligence. But so maybe you can unpack that a little bit and give us some color on what really is a modern organization and how do they get there? Yeah, it is a little bit of a misnomer to call it a modern technology organization because technology is really just a tool. It's the organization itself that really needs to become modern. And it's a way of thinking. It's a cultural shift in the way that you think. That kind of the way that you do budgeting, the way that you think about how do you get new products to market. Everybody needs to be involved in this. And so it becomes very much a team-based sport. So you need to remove those silos and transform the entire organization in the way that they address how they work with their customers, their customers and our customers' customers. So talk a little bit more about the data component of that. Because I can't envision a modern organization that's not sort of data-driven, pick whatever, but puts data at the core. So how do you help organizations do that? Well that's the thing. And there's so many applications that are either consuming or making data so that there's so much data out there so how do you find the data that you need? So there's a lot of great tools, especially on AWS, that allow everyone in an organization to become an analyst, if you will, that they can go and find the specific data they need to do their job to make the right decisions. And so really putting data at the heart of everything you do is super, super important today. Yeah, so now you also, you know, your focus is you build tools. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about what those are and how you're applying them to help customers. Yeah, so one of the big announcements we had this morning was AWS and Slalom have joined together to create launch centers. There are going to be physical locations that are going to be co-populated with Slalom employees and AWS employees to give our customers, our joint customers, this unique experience of having the best of both worlds in one place. We can talk about the transformation of an organization. We can talk about the application of tools to solve technology problems and we can do it altogether in one location with our customers. Who are the stakeholders when you go in and transform an organization? Andy Jassy, as John said, said, we got to start with the CEO. Part of the problem with, you know, just the top down is a lot of times the senior management teams going and the people who are responsible for actually transacting the day-to-day business are like, well, I got this other thing going on and you get this dissonance. So what do you see as successful models to address that? I do think it has to start with the CEO. You have to have that transformational mindset that comes from the very top that then can flow down into the organization. But like you said, everybody needs to buy into this. We need to transform model or we're not going to be in business. And so the CIO is super important. The CMO is super important. But then it goes back to what I was talking about in terms of a team-based sport. Everybody needs to be involved. It isn't one person's responsibility. It's not the CIO's responsibility. It's not the CTO's responsibility. Everybody needs to be involved in this model of transforming into a modern technology organization. On analytics, what's the hot product for analytics? What are people buying in on? Oh, I mean, right now, Snowflake's a really big one. You know, it's very, very popular. There's a whole bunch of them and it really kind of depends on the specific use case that the customer is trying to solve for. Whether they're trying to extract data from legacy systems and create analytics where they're trying to create ML, AI, and ML models. It really kind of depends. Well, you mentioned Snowflake. I mean, the reason I think that's interesting is, you know, in the days of John and I started theCUBE, you know, we did all the Hadoop circuit and there were a lot of promises there. I mean, I remember the old data warehouse days, we're going to transform your business, 360 degree view of your business, never happened. What happened with Hadoop, you had all these data lakes that became data swamps. But now you have all this data in the cloud and you're seeing tools like Snowflake, like Redshift, bring in Databricks, other machine learning, SageMaker, applied on top of that data with a much more simplified way to get insights out of that data. Data's plentiful, insights aren't. But now to your point, you're democratizing that data and there's a whole new set of use cases emerging in the cloud. You see that and I think, personally, I think it's very exciting. And I think it's the next wave, you know, John calls it cloud 2.0. I think that's a big component of it. Your thoughts. Or even 3.0, you know, I mean, it's really, because it used to be just visualization was, like that was great when Tableau came out. You know, now you apply that along with all of the analytics that you can get underneath it. It really does enable anyone in the organization to use data effectively and have access to it and not have to send a request into a central IT organization to create an ETL and get a report back. It's real time and it's at your fingertips. It's later, yeah. I saw at ADJAS, he doesn't like cloud 2.0, although we made that term up to Goof on web 2.0, but really it's about next-gen cloud. Kind of like next-gen stats, if you will. So I got to ask you, what do you think the next-gen cloud is all about when someone says, hey, you know what? I need to get on this. Educate me on next-gen cloud. Yeah, a lot of what we're talking about. So the first-gen cloud is let's move applications. Let's get workloads into the cloud. Let's shut down some data centers. Let's do some cost takeout. The next generation of cloud is really about extracting the value of all the promises that are made by the cloud. So how do you turn your organization into something that's really customer-focused that can move really, really fast, that has access to data at all times to solve these business problems and create some autonomy within the organization? So the next version of cloud to me is about unlocking that value so that you can have a much more customer-focused organization as opposed to just having a cost takeout play which is the original version of the cloud. I got to answer the question, because you're on the front lines with customers. The number one question we hear is there's two types of customers, even Andy Jassy really kind of recognized it for the first time in his keynote. Customers and developers, they want all the low-level building blocks, now they want some prefab, not his word, my word, but customer prefabricated solutions, more consumable Amazon. They might not have the people that can get down on the weeds and provision lamb and functions and craziness of all the greatness they got, which is hard if you really got to get down and dirty. You guys are out there right now. Is there a trend where you're starting to see more consumable presentation of product or how do you see that evolving? I thought Andy did a really good job in his keynote, finishing around focus on the builders. And I mean, it's a big focus what we have is why we named our modern technology organization Slalom Build, right? But everybody, every company needs to, if they turn themselves into a technology organization or they have a technology focus, you can create this version of a technology organization within your own company. You can trade your own builders. And so making this technology available to your current staff and will also allow you to attract the new staff that have some of the more of the modern skills. Final question I have for you is that one trend we're seeing and we're just starting now to report on this is that data science with SageMaker Studio, you're going to start to see some more uptake with data science. But most customers don't know they need a data science until they have data. So you can't just say, hey, we need data scientists. Well, you got to have some data first. So getting data full is step one. How do you guys view that? Do you agree with that? Do you, is there a way mechanisms to get people with enough data to get started saying, okay, for the marketing department now it's going to have a dedicated data scientist. Yeah, I think there's so much data. There's a lot of data that people don't realize they already have. So there's so much data out there that tends to be the biggest part of the problem. It's like, what do I do with all this data? So there's some great tools, you know, that the whole data lake has opened up access to vast amounts of data that can be unstructured that wasn't available before. And so I think everybody has the data. They just may not realize they have the data. So with these modern tools, you have access to it. It's a lake formation, you throw a lake for me. Get in a data lake, start seeing it first. Right, knowing you have it. And you don't have to hire a whole bunch of data scientists anymore. Like we've moved around that as well. You can get AI and ML now out of the box essentially and use that data to your advantage. I think it starts with understanding how data affects the monetization of your business. Whether it's cutting costs, driving productivity, or actually directly raising revenue. Not necessarily selling the data, but how data contributes to that. And then aligning with the line of business to say, okay, how do I turn this into money? And then there is a skills component. It's, you know, this may not be an army of data scientists, but you mentioned builders before. Not everybody has these builders inside their organizations. I think you can attract them and you can create them. And if you create an organization that's attractive to them, it'll be amazing what you can do there. Oh, you can tap guys like you. Yeah. Mike, thanks for coming on. And we'd love to follow up with you and get more of your story. Fascinating, love the people centric. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Cube, Next Gen, Cube. Next Gen Cloud, we're here bringing all the data. We'll be back with more coverage from Reinvent 2019 after this short break.