 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's live continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2015. I'm Stu Miniman joined with Brian Graceley and excited to do a Wikibon focus segment. We've got head of research and CTO and co-founder of Wikibon, David Fleuer. David, Brian and I have been in the analyst sessions and want to talk a little bit about how what we're hearing at Amazon fits into the general research and everything that we're doing. So David, when we look at Wikibon, our three pillars have been cloud, big data and infrastructure and how the three of those really fit together. You know, what's the high level thesis that we're driving to at Wikibon? Well, that's a very good question as Amazon would say all the way through their presentations today. What we're focusing on, we're focusing on a whole number of things, but some of the really interesting things are what is cloud best useful? What is the role of hybrid cloud? What is the role of infrastructure? In particular, how does infrastructure get in the way and where can it contribute and where should you place workloads? What part of the cloud, or the cloud? What cloud should it be? And we've done some very interesting research this year on the whole subject of the intersection of cloud, of infrastructure and of where, what are the right strategies for people who want to put the majority of all a lot of their workloads onto the clouds. Yeah, and of course, David, Wikibon was founded allowing IT practitioners to share with their peers. We talked to so many people at the shows, you're in Silicon Valley, Brian and I attend plenty of events too and talk to practitioners. How is that really end user viewpoint changing? How are they understanding and looking at these disruptive trends? Well, I think the most important trend is that initially, most of the cloud was about putting development into the cloud, putting things which had clear could be extracted from the whole of the rest of IT. For example, web services were things that you could easily put in the cloud. What is clear is there's a lot more activity going on in, for example, big data. What they are finding new ways of looking at big data, extracting that information and using some of the services there. That's one of the trends that I've seen very strongly here. The database side is, for me, the asset test. Will they be able to deliver a set of database services that allow any application to run in the cloud? That is their challenge over the next three years or the next five years. It's a long haul and they're going to have a lot of other ways of doing it coming out. But database as a service is going to be the place where the rubber hits the road for the large customers and the very large systems and whether they'll be able to get to the cloud as well. Yeah, I guess, David, if we look at it, I've heard the average application for enterprises is somewhere 12, 15 years old. So these migrations take time. You've talked a lot about migration costs. So how does that play into this whole discussion? Well, migration costs have been with us forever. People used to migrate from mainframes to open systems, from every system to another system. And the bottom line is that any migration that you don't have to do, you really want to try and avoid. It is costly for every reason. You are stopping, updating the existing applications. You have to freeze them. That's not good. People want to make changes, want to add things. It costs you money, it's risky. More than one company has gone out of business or been on the verge of going out of business by trying to save a few million dollars here and ending up spending hundreds of millions of dollars in getting back again. So migration is not a good thing. You do it when you have to and you do it when you know it's going to be successful. And it's at the moment, there's good stuff going on with the smaller systems and good stuff going on with smaller companies bringing their stuff up. There's lots of very, very good use of Amazon service, cloud services in general. But to convince the very largest companies that they should convert their major systems over to the cloud, that's a little way off yet. And it's got to have those database services to actually make that happen. But there's a lot happening. There's a lot that you can put out on the cloud. It's growing very fast indeed. Yeah, so Brian, you've been looking at the application space, application modernization, new cloud native platforms and all the kind of infrastructure layer underneath it. How does that play into this discussion? Well, I think what people are trying to figure out is a couple of things. David talked about age of applications, migrating applications. I think they're really trying to figure out two things. One is of that extra 20% of my IT budget that's not keeping the lights on, that's not maintaining it, is that enough to go drive new business? And that's coming out of IT. And then more so, they're also trying to figure out, do I start funding technology like I do, trying to grow sales or trying to grow marketing? And that's where we're seeing a lot of the innovation coming around here is there are more modern applications. They're being driven to drive top line of the business, not so much productivity or cost savings. And people are trying to figure out, am I going to be in the business of augmenting existing applications? We're going to see a lot of examples of that. How do I augment an existing application that might live on-prem that I want to augment off-prem? Or do I build a brand new application? And then they're really asking themselves, do I lock myself into, lock myself in is the wrong word, do I leverage a lot of the native AWS services? Or do I build my own platform? Platform is a service, or do I look at something like a Cloud Foundry or something else? And so the application space is really interesting. We do a lot of things in infrastructure shows. We're at VMworld, we're at EMCworld, we're at HP events. This is a very developer-centric feel to it. David, you made a mention. It's a younger feel, it's a lot of genes and hoodies. This is a developer conference primarily. It's great to get a different viewpoint on what's driving their motivation. I want to pose a question to both of you, because at Wikibon, we're very supportive of open source. And when you look at the developer movement, open source is usually part and parcel with that. However, while Amazon leverages Linux, I can do lots of open source things on AWS. They're not really the largest, biggest pusher of contributing back to open source. Is that an issue? I don't think too much of a fuss about that discussion. Andy Jassy said it's not in the top 20 of what his customers and partners are saying. And he said that actually they do quite a bit pushing back to the community. So Brian, maybe start with you on the developer side. Is that, does that come up? Yeah, I mean, there's always an argument of like, do you contribute back to open source? Are you part of the community? I think for the folks here, their biggest thing is, are you going to prevent me from using open source? So they want to use open databases. They want to use open programming languages. And as long as Amazon is not preventing you from doing that, they're offering options to do managed open databases. I don't think there's as much of a pushback. I think there's a lot of companies that want to talk about who's more open than others. Red Hat's or Amazon's never made that a big deal. They've never tried to get in the middle of that conversation that they're more open. They're simply saying, look, I build a marketplace. My marketplace happens to be a technology platform. And as long as you can get in or get out and I'm not going to inhibit you, people don't seem to mind too much. Because again, they just want speed of business agility. They're not that religious about open source versus sort of open capabilities. As long as the API is available, they're pretty happy. All right, David, I mean, you talk about open databases, so open source in general, what's your take on that? Well, the open source databases, the MySQLs of the world are, it's pretty important to a number of clients that they can get support from outside. They want to be, they've been through the process of losing support before in a number of these environments. Guaranteed support is good. So whether that be from Red Hat or whether it be from versions of MySQL, they want to ensure that that is the place. I think from the developer's point of view, I think there is a resentment to some extent of Amazon taking a lot of open code and then forking and not giving back. So I'm not fully in agreement that there is not some blowback on that. And I think they should be giving a lot, I think it's short-sighted of them just to take and not give back because in the long run, they'll need the community to be helping. It brings up the question. They've learned so much. They've figured out so much from a learning curve perspective. Are there things they should be giving back to the community that the community's then going to go, boom, I can explode in terms of innovation and they talk about flywheels all the time. That is the one flywheel that we don't really see. We see a cost flywheel, we see an innovation flywheel, but do we need that from an open source? Because there is so much learning they've gained that the world hasn't really seen that could benefit their whole ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with you that they should be giving some of that back into the flywheel of open source as well. So what about, you know, big data analytics, Hadoop, and all the other pieces, not just Hadoop but Spark and everything else? George Gilbert would be talking about systems of intelligence. How much of that's in the cloud? How much more do we expect to see that in the cloud? What's the big data in cloud angle, David? Well, one of the things that we're doing a lot of research into is systems of intelligence and that's really, really important to an end point. I think I completely agree with the assertion that AWS makes is that the current way of doing analytics is broken, that the data warehouse is broken. It is giving a few people insight in an organization and that insight is not being protected. It's being husband by a very few people. So the whole investments in data warehousing in general, if every CTO, every person that I've talked to and I ask the question, have you got a good return? They say, hmm, it's necessary. Is it a good return? No, there are some exceptions, obviously, like in everything, but on the general, it's broken. What systems of intelligence do is that they focus on the algorithm to automate the result of that insight rather than the insight itself. So that you're focusing on putting that algorithm back into the operational system and running the operational system and the systems of intelligence on top of it to make a single system. The return on that is so much greater because you're now improving the productivity of the company as a whole instead of the productivity of just a few people. So we believe that's very strongly where things are going and Amazon is front and center of the ability to do that because you have potentially the operational data and the analytical data together and if they can provide the low latency technology, if they can be ahead of the technology curve and give those to the users before other vendors, that is a very good way for them to get into these really tremendous payback systems of intelligence. All right, so thank you, David. We went through the big data piece. Brian, we're running a little short on time. We can just walk through from a cloud standpoint the research and the forecasting and the other pieces that you're working on, kind of from a manifesto and research topic. Yeah, no, absolutely. And just real quick, a lot of work around how big are these clouds? How big are they in the sense of, how do I look at them as a vendor, the investments that customers are making? How big is the opportunity to grow and partner with them? So doing a lot of work around how big are the public clouds, all faces of that. We'll be looking at how big are private clouds and comparative. We're looking a lot around hybrid cloud. What does it mean? What's the right way to do it? What's the wrong way to do that? Looking at sort of all the different vendor approaches to looking at this interoperability. Where does it matter? Where does it not? And then as you mentioned, we're looking a lot at sort of these next generation applications. How do I do them? Do I build a platform myself? Do I look to have somebody else help me there? Do I use some of the public clouds? So those are three huge areas. People want to know how big is the market? How fast do I go? Who do I partner with? Do I need hybrid? Is it right for me? What are the right choices? And then when I want to go to those new things, what are the best ways to get there? Because those things are changing businesses and changing markets. Yeah, so last piece I want to ask you, David, is at this show I always love, we get a tiny little inkling as to what Amazon's doing with their hyperscale infrastructure. And you've written about kind of hyperscale and what that also means for the enterprise. So can you talk from an infrastructure standpoint? You know, what does that mean? Well, they are past masters at incrementally improving every aspect of the data center. They are improving what they put into systems. They're taking out what they don't need. They are streamlining it all the way through. They're improving the amount of energy that they're using. They're improving the utilization. I think it's one of the, they are there in Google, obviously, are data centers which really have slowly improved and improved the efficiency with which they bring silicon. And it's a great story. It's one of the reasons why they're growing so fast, that basic efficiency, the flywheel that they talk about. And the forecast that you talk about, what we're forecasting is that in the next decade, we're going to be up to 30% of IT spend in cloud. That's a huge percentage. And I got to imagine the number one, one of the number one questions you get from an infrastructure perspective is, you see Google, you see what Amazon's doing, how do I translate that back into what I want to do in my enterprise or my mid-sized business? People want that sort of insight. Absolutely, yes. And that's very, very important that we can take that information and push it back. There are some areas where Amazon's way ahead, there are some areas where they are going to be not so quick to get there. So there are lots of opportunities for lots of vendors and lots of different ways of doing things. I think it's an amazing time to be in IT and there's so much change going on. All right, well, David and Brian, thank you so much for joining. By the way, if you haven't checked out, beginning of this year we launched new website wikibon.com. It's got details on, you can see all the research from Brian, myself, David, George, the rest of the team on there. There's also, if you have questions for us specifically, the website wikibon.com, look at the menu on the top. There's ways to reach out directly to us and of course you can always hit us up on Twitter. Our information's kind of pretty easy to find. So thank you both for joining. We'll be right back with our next guest here from AWS, re-invent 2015.