 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at AWS ReInvent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors Amazon and Trend Micro. Welcome back, we're here live at ReInvent in Las Vegas. I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon, you're watching theCUBE. Joining me now is Will Schoberry, he's the SVP of technology, a company called MediaMath, a marketing optimization company. Well, thanks for joining us. Yeah, of course, my pleasure. So for those out there that don't know, tell us a little bit about MediaMath and kind of what you guys are doing for your clients. Yeah, so MediaMath is a technology platform for marketing automation. We help, I guess Fortune 500 companies like Target and LLB and eBay and others that are household names drive their digital marketing spend. And we kind of focus on outcomes, right? So instead of blasting money towards a particular online advertising set, they are trying to move a particular product or drive some particular outcome and we optimize against that. So an LLB, for example, might have a new product and they want to reach a certain type of consumer and get an ad in front of them, whether it's mobile on the web. Exactly, yeah, and so we help them across digital media kind of portion their spend and manage that and optimize it. Yes, that whole ad tech business is, I mean we've covered this a little bit here on theCUBE. We've talked to companies in this business and we've talked to a company called Aerospike, who's one of the technologies that some of the ad tech runs on and it's fascinating and the performance requirements are just mind blowing when you think about it. Walk us through a little bit that kind of process when from a time, somebody logs on to a website, then they see an ad and it happens like that but there's a lot going on in the background. Yeah, it's kind of insane when you think about it. When you pop onto a webpage, ESPN.com, you're looking at whatever baseball stats that you want. That ad slot at the top of the page actually is a full auction, right? So it goes off to an exchange and we have about 40 to 50 milliseconds to reply back. Now the crazy thing is we do this at the scale of the internet, right? So this happens about two million times a second, right? So we have to kind of coordinate this across all of our exchanges and all of our data centers across the world. So it's a pretty interesting data problem and computation problem that has to happen at real time. Yeah, absolutely. So tell us a little bit about why you're here at the show. Presumably you're using AWS in some capacity to help you deliver on your mission. Talk a little bit about what AWS is doing for you and how you're using AWS to do that mind-numbly fast analytic process. Yeah, sure. So one of the things that we are finding to be true is that giving our customers control over their data and giving them access to it is fundamentally a really good thing for both for ourselves but also customers. And so what we found is that Amazon actually makes it easier not only for us but also for them to do this sort of analysis. The other thing is, as we're operating on the scale of 120 billion opportunities every single day, there's a lot of data exhaust that's created. So one of the things that we have to be good at but maybe we don't necessarily want to spend all of our time on is moving that data between data centers and analyzing it. And so that's something that we are actually really happy that Amazon has products like EMR and Kinesis and that entire slew of data pipeline tooling and so that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time with. We also have a number of application services that are baked on top of the EC2 stack and are very happy with them. So AWS is a really abstracting way of all that complexity of moving that data around, getting it where you need it so you can analyze it and deliver it to your customers so they can see how their ads are performing and that kind of thing? Exactly. So what about the hard core, the processing, the actual engine that's sending the data to the auction, delivering the ad? Are you doing that inside AWS or I would guess you're probably doing that off AWS. So we do actually have a pretty extensive hardware footprint. Part of that is necessitated by the latency demands that the exchanges have. One example would be between the United States, we have four different data centers. There's one in Brazil. There's three in the Asian Pacific region. But all that data exhaust that comes out of those locations is still funneled through the Amazon Web Services platform. Well that's interesting. So talk a little bit about, so AWS is great for a lot of things but it sounds like in terms of that really low latency requirements, people are still doing that either off-premise, they're doing it on bare metal or they're doing it somewhere else because AWS doesn't really support that kind of latency. Do you see that, is that an accurate perception? Do you see that ever changing? So I'm not actually sure that it is. I think AWS has done a really good job of making HPC type applications possible and some of those boxes have those 10 giga interconnects which should cause that latency to be less of an issue but for us primarily it's distance between our location and the exchange. And so in situations where the exchange is actually in an Amazon data center then that's certainly something that we can do. I know that a lot of companies are fond of doing cost modeling inside of the cloud and then moving those things off-cloud and we've found ourselves sometimes taking that approach and sometimes taking the opposite approach of actually saying that the benefits of managing this entire service outweigh the incremental cost that it might take to run it in Amazon. So I really think it depends on what you're trying to optimize for. We've found that focusing on the service is actually more beneficial to the business and ultimately we are here to solve the business's problems instead of necessarily hardcore technology problems. So talk a little bit about, take a step back and we're here to reinvent. I think I heard 13,000 people up from 8 last year so it's growing like crazy. Let's just take a step back. What is your take on AWS and how they're disrupting some of the more traditional approaches to IT? So that's kind of an interesting question. I think this morning's keynote is a really good example. I think they released, I don't know the exact number, it's six plus new products and personally I'm very interested in all of the software-developable lifecycle tool sets. That's another example of something that I need to be good at but don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time on and so that's something that we'll spend a lot of time looking at deploying our new service that's set into. So if you're a new startup team inside of an enterprise that's working on a service I don't know why you would, with the new tool chain that they've kind of launched today I don't know why you would necessarily look at any other solutions to prop up a brand new service. Just my opinion. Yeah, well I mean it's really amazing that AWS has grown so fast and they're starting to, they're really disrupting traditional markets but they're also really moving quickly. You reference the number of announcements and it's hard to keep track of them all. They keep rolling out new processes, new approaches, new services and they've had that number I think 450 plus new services this year over 280 new ones last year and it keeps growing. It's really remarkable. But you said something interesting and I wonder if you could expand on it. You mentioned business processes, things that you need to be good at but you don't necessarily want to own. How do you determine what fits into that bucket versus what fits into, this is competitive differentiation for us and we need to own this. I mean I think ultimately ends up, it's not a perfect economy but the things that create business value those are the ones that we focus on. So that example earlier of latency, that's the reason why we try to be really great at peering with providers that are right next to us and maybe expanding our footprint globally so that the media that we're buying works for the customer and then the user. But then there are things like configuration management and deployment life cycles and that sort of thing where I could invest an entire team's time for years to solve those problems and as you know it changes. The model changes and you have to keep up in order to be effective and I don't necessarily think that that's the best use of the organization's time at this point. Now if we were the scale of maybe Amazon and we had I don't remember what the number was, 3 million servers, we would definitely take a look at solving some of those problems in-house but at this point I think it makes great business sense not to try to solve them that way. And so it sounds like that approach allows you to focus on the things that differentiate you from your competition. So how do you continue, I mean you've got to continue to innovate. I mean you're in a business where, well let me ask the question, what are the key differentiators for you compared to your competition and where are the areas that you need to keep pushing to stay ahead of them because there's a pretty vibrant ecosystem out there in this market and as I mentioned we've talked to a few of your competitors and a lot of them are here, they're AWS customers as well. What do you do in terms of maintaining that competitive edge? So there's a set of technical differentiators which we look at internally within the engineering team that we try to continue to drive and then there's a set of product differentiators and I'll try to talk to a little bit above them. From the technical perspective we believe that building great technology and having that technology operate at scale more efficiently than the competition is something that will benefit the customer quite heavily. So we focus a lot of time around that. That includes being able to analyze more data, being able to deliver it to the customer more rapidly, driving down the latency on the analytics, those types of things and also making it freely available via our data platform. Those sorts of things are incredibly important to us. We also focus very heavily on the product set which are things like expanding our footprint across multiple channels. It's not enough as a platform like ours to just focus on display. We're expanding into mobile, we're expanding into social, we're expanding into video. We've acquired a couple of companies recently that have focused on that. So those sorts of things are the, that feature set focus is the other half of what we try to do. And I think we've done actually a pretty great job. Year over year, our growth has been incredible. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of opportunity and again I know that you guys are working hard to innovate and continue to deliver more value to your customers. So we only have time for one more question so I want to give you the last word. Again, just any takeaways from this show. What would you say to our audience, people watching who couldn't make it to the show in terms of AWS, where they're going and how they're impacting the enterprise? I think ultimately, if your desire is to be as a business whose business isn't primarily infrastructure, if your desire is to be good at infrastructure then keep doing whatever you're doing. But if your desire is to accelerate the pace of the problems that you're trying to solve with technology then I would take a hard look at not just the infrastructure offering that Amazon provides via the Amazon Web Services platform but also the opinions that they are subtly stating via some of the tools that they're providing. I think Andy Jassy earlier mentioned things like continuous deployment, delivery and integration and all the integrations with that toolset. It's really obvious and it's really clear to, I'm sure most of this crowd here that that's the direction that companies need to go in order to innovate effectively and quickly and if that's interesting, play with it. Good advice. We've got to leave it there. Will Sturberry from Media Math. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. My pleasure. Thank you. Stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest live from Las Vegas at AWS ReInvent. You're watching theCUBE.