 from London, England. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to London Summit everybody. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We love to go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is our one day coverage of AWS Summit London and it's packed house. 12,000 people here, the 26,000 people registered which is just outstanding. Chris Bunch is here, he's the general manager of AMIA for cloud reach and he's joined by Mark Cranny, who's the COO of Signal FX. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, let's start with Signal FX. What's going on at the show? What's the buzz like? Very busy, dozens deep, a lot of demonstrations. Feature in our massively scalable metrics platform and distributed tracing platform. So we've had a very good show, good showing in London. All right, good. We're going to get into some of that. Chris, tell us about cloud reach. What do you guys do? Sure, so cloud reach was founded in 2009. So quite a long time ago in the history of cloud computing at least. Just right after the cloud. That's it, with quite a pure vision around helping complex organizations to adopt public cloud computing technologies to do more, faster and better. That's all we've ever done. It's all we ever intend to do. We work these days with enterprise organizations across the cloud lifecycle, starting with adoption, helping them to understand why cloud, how are we going to do this? How am I going to move my data centers into the cloud? How am I going to build new services? Moving on through the lifecycle, we help them with that migration. We help them to shut down their data centers and rebuild them in AWS. We help them to build new cloud native services using the latest offerings from Amazon and other cloud providers. We work with them on data analytics, helping them to generate insights from their data. Data flows in at an ever faster pace from across the world into their organization. And all of that is wrapped with an MSP managed service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So Mark, I got to ask you, so back in the day, the narrative was that the public cloud was going to kill every managed service provider out there. It's been nothing but a tailwind for your business. Business is booming. What actually happened to give you that lift? On the signal FX side, look, the big trends are the move to the cloud number one, the second piece is just the change in the architectures. You know, the move to Kubernetes, the introduction for elastic bursty type use cases of things like Lambda, and even more importantly, just the process of developing software moving from waterfall to agile and the whole DevOps movement and the introduction of microservices. So that's, it's just a, there are a lot of, a lot of these ways been going on for quite some time, but they're really starting to hit the shore, hit the shore right now. And I think it's been a great, great opportunity for companies like CloudReach to take advantage of. We're very excited about our partnership. Well, it has ripple effects on the rest of the business, doesn't it? I was saying earlier in a segment that IT used to be the business of no, we can't do that because, you know? And now you look around this audience, it's all doers and builders and, you know, it's actually great marketing because it works, doesn't it? So CloudNative has been a fundamental component of that. Yeah, I mean, look, our whole business is around making IT the enabler, you know, helping businesses to innovate. Once upon a time, the message was all around cost saving as the reason to move to the cloud. And there's still an element of that. Nobody wants to pay more, but actually increasingly what we're seeing is organizations moving to Amazon because they want the agility. They want to move faster and they don't want to be the culture of no and have a process that takes six months to deliver a new service to the business. They want to be able to deliver things in hours or minutes in some cases and they want to do so quickly and they want to innovate at a pace that they've never been able to before, partly from a competitive threat perspective and partly from a market opportunity. There's so much that we can deliver to customers if we put our minds to it and use the primitives that Amazon provide as building blocks to enable new services. You know, Mark, you live in the Bay Area, I spent a lot of time out there, we're based in Palo Alto and it's a vortex, it's unique. And sometimes I think we think that that's where all the action is. You come to London and you see all these startups, every business is becoming a software company. And, you know, we don't in Silicon Valley in America have a monopoly on innovation anymore, do we? No, not even close. So there's a lot of great innovation all over Europe, here in the UK all the way up to Northern Europe, Doc, Paris, Italy, we see it across the board, so. So what are people doing? Are they building new cloud native apps in the public cloud? Are they doing a lift and shift and trying to get more agility out of those traditional apps? What's the landscape look like? It's a combination of the two. The startup organizations, of course, are starting with no legacy, there's nothing to migrate and they are building cloud native and they're doing so fast. We have no IT. No, there you go, yeah, us neither. Technically, we bought an AS 400 on eBay for some test migrations, but that's the only hardware we're in. Exactly, yeah. The larger organizations, they have huge volumes of IT, legacy infrastructure, some of it dating back to the 70s in the case of financial institutions or public sector. And all of that is an opportunity to modernize and not just for the agility and innovation, but in some cases just to reduce risk. There is huge business risk in these old, untouched, dusty, cobweb-ridden servers that nobody understands anymore and there's a real opportunity to move that to the public cloud, reduce and remove that risk, and then while you're there, take advantage of the new technologies and innovate and deliver a better service to your end consumer, whoever that may be. So pre-cubanettis and microservices and even though containers have been around for a while, but the modern, you know, Docker's ascendancy. You know, Y2K was the year of the decade of modernization. It was like four or five years leading up to Y2K. And some IT shops said, okay, we're going to modernize, but none of these microservices existed. So it really was, it was about dates and maybe some application portfolio rationalization. What's different today that I can take those apps that were written in the 70s with a lot of custom code? How am I able to modernize those? I think it's the maturity of the services. You look at something, a platform like Amazon, there's 120, 130 or more, it grows almost every week. Building blocks, primitives that Amazon are providing and iterating on at an incredible rate. And there's almost a service for everything. And when you think they've run out of services to introduce a new services is created. And we talked about microservices, they introduced Lambda back in 2014, which was their serverless environment driving event-based microservices architectures. And it's ahead of the game, it's ahead of the curve, it's causing people to think very differently about what's even possible from an IT perspective. And there's no way in most organizations you can build that kind of infrastructure and that kind of platform that is built and costs you on a microsecond basis. I mean, it's incredible. It's amazing. I remember the first virtual machine with VMware that I saw spun up and I'm like, wow, this is going to change the world. And then the cloud comes along, you're like, wow, this is going to change the world. And now serverless. I don't even have to deploy servers anymore inside my Amazon instance. We see this even in some of the more traditional organizations we work with in the UK and in Germany and France and elsewhere, you don't even need to be looking at serverless. Just the ability to programmatically spin up a virtual machine without a human touching anything, that's incredible to some organizations, right? They're used to it taking six months to provision some infrastructure to deploy an application. Now they can click a button and by the time they've made a cup of coffee, it's up and running and it changes the way people think. So Mark, talk about cloud reach and signal FX. What's the partnership like between you two and what's your partnership like with AWS? On the cloud reach side, we went through an extensive evaluation by cloud reach and over several months, they evaluated all the alternatives on the market and ended up selecting us to be their standard for their managed service provider business. So we're super excited about that on the go for it. We're rolling that out with them to their current customer base and we were hoping that using signal FX at cloud reach that will help them be the point of the spear on all cloud native in their marketplace as they go pursue other customers. So we're pretty excited about that. So it's not a pressure release deal, not a Barney deal like we like to say. No, they're a paying customer and they've made a big bet on signal FX going forward. So why the choice to go with a managed service provider? You could have built it yourself and maybe take us through that. Yeah, I mean the nature of the business we're in is very much predicated on the fact that you don't build it yourself, you look at the market and if somebody is already doing it well and provides excellent service as a commodity, you use it. And we've been in the MSP space since round about 2010, very soon after the company was founded and we know it pretty well. We have a large customer base. We are one of the top tier MSPs for all of the major cloud vendors in the world, lots of large organizations. However, as we look to refresh our tooling with a view on more of an application centric approach which is what all of our customers want and expect as we look to microservices and the very latest platforms and technologies being released by the hyperscale cloud vendors, we recognize the need for a newer, more modern tooling. And after a thorough evaluation, as Mark says, SignalFX came out on top. Why is that? Partly it's the cloud native element and some of that sounds a little bit like a marketing buzzword, but in reality what it means is the company was founded relatively recently and as a result was geared towards modern technology. So out of the box they support Docker, they support containers, they understand and they're orchestrated around microservices. It deals with scale and volume and we want to low test things in a big way. We only serve large scale enterprise customers and they are going to throw tens of thousands of containers and microservices at their tooling and it has to be able to handle that massive volume of transactions. It's a complicated picture actually. Sometimes microservices aren't so micro. Yes. And you've got to secure all these containers. You've got to spin it up a VM as easy. Well, you're seeing multiples and multiples. So how do you guys deal with that? I mean, you're obviously experts at it, but give us the sales pitch on SFX. I think you covered it earlier with all this great new technology with the introduction of microservices. I mean, developers are now writing it, they're running it, they're pushing code directly into production environment. You went from releasing code once or twice a year a few years back now to several releases and you're lifting shift. They're starting with a few microservices. Some of them are getting up into the hundreds, even thousands in our most advanced deployments. It ends up being a situation where, all right, all this innovation is great, but it also introduces a ton of complexity and based on the way we've architectured our system, real time streaming, like within seconds, you're going to need to see it to react to it. Whatever the use case is, and that's what differentiates signal FX, is this massively scalable streaming architecture we've built from a metrics platform standpoint, and then from an East and West standpoint from your custom code, our microservices APM solution on top of that to go help measure what those transactions are, how they're performing across the entire complex environment. So we feel like we're just purpose built for today to help in the lift and shift crowd and or for the more advanced customers that are into the deploying dozens, if not hundreds of microservices. Tell me more about this metrics platform. You've mentioned it a couple of times, and what is that all about? Well, we'd start with essentially, the three big pillars are logs, metrics, and APM, and our company was, we have deep roots back in the 2007 range is our founders were, they built the monitoring stack at Facebook, and so they had several years kind of earning and learning that secret. In the early days, they didn't call it DevOps back then. They called it move fast, break things culture. They didn't call it microservices. I mean, and then late 2013, early 2014, that's when the founders got together and started the company. It's also the same timeframe Docker came out, and we're just purpose built for this environment. Final thoughts, and the event, and where you guys are headed, maybe a little roadmap if you could. The event has been incredible. Every year it gets a little bit bigger, it gets a little bit more exciting. There's a bigger range of organizations, different industries, and it changes a little bit over time. This year, financial services has been particularly of interest for us at this event. There's a lot of large banks, investment houses, those kind of companies here, and that's been really exciting for us. I think the trend I'm most excited about is really around machine learning. Amazon talked about it in the keynote this morning, the democratization of very, very complex technology, bringing it to the masses as a managed service that can be provisioned in minutes and seconds, and for me, that's something that's really exciting, and using the Signal FX platform, we're now in a position to provide managed service wrappers around the machine learning based solutions that we build for our customers. Yeah, the financial service is interesting. Back in 2009, when you started a lot of the banks in New York, thought they could scale and compete essentially with AWS. The world changes very quickly, absolutely. Final thoughts from you, Mark? Yeah, I think we're moving past that point. Even the later adopters, I think we're moving past that point. And look, they're getting pressure from the startup community, whether it's Fintech or any industry is going to have that type of pressure. You talked about that Y2K moment, I think in any vertical out there, it's that those cloud native type companies, the companies are becoming software companies, you're either going to transform yourself or you're going to have some pressure from the startup going forward. Well guys, I'm thrilled that you can make time to come in theCUBE. Thank you, Mark and Chris. It was great to have you. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from London, AWS Summit, right back.