 Welcome back to Send City guys and girls. We're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week. We know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 22 from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people and this event, if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and its ecosystem. We've got a great customer story coming up next featured on the main stage. I mean, you know, post-pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Salipsky was, you know, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay, that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means and I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond IT. Excellent, we've got two guests. One of them is an alumni. Scott Mullins joins us, GM AWS Worldwide Management Services and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys, great to have you. Hey guys, thanks for having us. Brad, talk a little bit. There was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's going on since then. Yeah, so we were very excited. I work with the Dean of Freedmen. She's my boss CEO of NASDAQ and she was on stage with Adam for his first keynote as CEO of AWS and we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the cloud and we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know, the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes, get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago and we said we were gonna move one of our options markets in the US, we have six of them and options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. And results so far? So I can sit here and say that November 7th, so we are live, we're in production and it's the MRX exchange is called Mercury. So we shortened it for MRX. We like acronyms and technology. And so we started with a phased launch of symbols. So you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working and then you add some volume on it and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far and I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you wanna talk about why we did that together and what we've done together over many years. Well, you know, Brad, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together. It's just the next step in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using cloud well? Who's doing well in the cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the cloud isn't a place. It's a set of capabilities. And so this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. So last year before re-invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem that technology companies are building on top of the cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that consumers of IT, historically your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services, and sassifying, putting it on the cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Dean on stage last year, we called it, by the way, we called it SuperCloud. Yeah, okay. I like the term. I like the term. I love it. SuperCloud. So when we saw it, Dean on stage said, that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with the US West. It's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot of, you've got a big on-premise state. Are you connecting to that? Are you, is it all in the cloud? Let's paint a picture of what the architecture looks like. Yeah, and there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. And the SuperCloud designation. What we are is we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. He likes it. The penguin off the iceberg. Yeah, and so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers. So you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of the early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carderette data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services. But then we were able to connect because in the markets, what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge compute platform, the AWS Outposts into Carderette, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. That's a familiar territory. It's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance. Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature, kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? Curious. Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced that it was really about extending territory. So we had our customers in mind, our global customers. And they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well, where is this region located? So finally, we saw this ability to grow the cloud geographically. And of course, we're in Sweden, so we work with the AWS region in Stockholm. But not every country has a region yet. And we're working as fast as we can to build an every single location around the planet. So we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint. And we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind. And it's a multi-industry trend. The edge compute has four or five industries that you can say this really makes a lot of sense to extend the cloud. And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the cloud. This is an opportunity to bring the cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. If you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carderet, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over really a four-year period thinking about this and how to make this technological transition to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along, is actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly, and very succinctly and successfully. Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? We did. We actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised, we have a couple of, by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ to AWS and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you were a little bit kidding on that, but we did. No, I was totally shocked. Because I want to go to the, like, where are we in the milestones and take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we work backwards. Yep. We did. We did. And I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production, having worked at NASDAQ myself. When you make a change and when you stand up a market, that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients, and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly, I know you were very happy, but on the AWS side, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that the Dean has said. And that was very important, I know, to you and for us as well. Yeah, and our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, check. We got that one done. That's awesome. The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivatives or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the U.S. Then we rolled it earlier this year, and that was last year. And we rolled it to our Nordic derivatives market and we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform. And we said, we really wanna achieve as good or better performance. And we achieved better performance. So that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it gonna perform? And that was, I think, one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about jointly together. And it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right. And we did a number of iterations. We're never done, but we have a final result that says it is better. Well, congratulations. It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023 from NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? Well, we just came from the partner, the partner keynote with Adam and Ruba. And we had another colleague on stage. So Nick Chubitario. So he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago. And we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we're going to offer a digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. I know we got to go, but I love this story. It fits so great at the SuperCloud, but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pizza teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then bringing that to the cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and it's like the NFL, we copy it. Think about product-market fit. You think about scientific go-to-market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries is really exciting to see. So congratulations. Oh, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of invent, and simplifying, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think, a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. Last question, and we've got only 30 seconds left, Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. Do you have the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together? What would it say? Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say modernizing the capital markets infrastructure together. So, very cool. Excellent, dropping the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. All right. We're our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.