 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 everybody. We're here live at AWS ReInvent 2014 in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon. I'm joining the segment by Kavir Shahani. He's the VP of technology and applications at IMS Health. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Jeff. So tell us a little bit about IMS Health. I understand data services company and software. Tell us a little bit about it for audience who might not be familiar with. Yeah, IMS Health is a leading provider of technology and services across the healthcare and life science continuum. We have three major pieces to our business. Lots of components to it, but essentially a large data business that we roll up across 100,000 data suppliers. We have a 10 and a half petabyte proprietary database of prescriptions and physician reference information and health outcomes research and a lot of really interesting healthcare data. A lot of services, kind of a second pillar of our business to help our customers get value from that data to enable reporting and analytics for our customers. And the third more recent part of our company is our software business, where we have a suite of commercial applications to enable our customers across their commercial operation. Okay, interesting. So all that health data is coming from various sources around the country, around the world, whether it's, you mentioned prescription data. What are the other kind of data sources that you're gathering into this? How big was the database, 10 petabytes? Yeah, it's a over 10 petabyte proprietary database. Yeah, it's a really interesting business. It's been around for 60 years, operating in over 100 countries. So we have a very unique perspective and a unique set of assets that we've developed to be able to really understand prescription trends to be able to understand sales volumes, to understand health outcomes, having a number of anonymized patient lives in our database as well. So we work with a lot of governments who work with a lot of healthcare and life science companies across the continuum. Yeah, so let's dig into what your customers are doing with the data. So they're probably performing some type of analytics. What are the different types of companies, you mentioned pharmaceuticals, you mentioned governments. What are some of the use cases that kind of get you guys excited? Yeah, and the area that we're really focused on now is the software and how that lights up the data. So we have five applications in our quote-unquote software business. The first is something we call IMS-1, which actually is a full data warehousing type capability with master data management, a library of APIs to push and pull data, our data and third party data to be able to get a lot of interesting insights into both prescription trends as well as sales information that our customers are looking for. So IMS-1 provides all that underlying infrastructure and then alongside that we have four business applications. One is a multi-channel marketing suite so our customers are actually using our data to understand well what physicians should they be targeting for certain types of information that they want to be able to have a conversation with that physician about, using the data to be able to understand well how is certain marketing campaigns actually influencing changes in prescription patterns, and ultimately sales. So that's really around our multi-channel marketing product. We have a full CRM product as well that our customers are able to put in the hands of all their sales reps to have a really closed loop between all the marketing activity, all the actual prescription activity that comes through our data sets, as well as then what kind of conversation the salesman wants to have with a particular physician. We have a social media sentiment analysis that's going to be interesting if there's what's called an adverse event. So you take a drug, you say, oh I got a rash and you tweet about it that's actually an adverse event that the drug company has to report to the FDA. We have a full social media compliance product that helps our customers actually be able to play in social media because they can manage that compliance and regulatory constraints. And then lastly is Nexus Performance which is a really rich BI and analytics product we're developing using AWS to be able to help our customers really look at sales and product type information across all their businesses globally. So you mentioned that's a relatively new line of business? Correct. So what made you, what drove that decision to get into the applications business in addition to obviously you've got the data, you're providing APIs and services and people can integrate into that their own environments. But at some point you made the decision we want to build our own applications to help people. Why that decision? I've seen the time and I sort of came into the company because of that and I think it's taking a really customer driven approach. One of the really interesting things that I see happening and I think as a company we're seeing happening in the industry is most enterprise software companies are trying to figure out how to be data companies. We're building really interesting software applications collecting data over a long period of time and then trying to enable new use cases for those customers because they have data. We're on the other side of that in a data company for a really long time and now we can very rapidly build exciting software products around that data and when you look at the way in which our customers are trying to get value the raw data itself doesn't do a lot for the customer until it's embedded in an application or until there's services around it and we've historically provided a lot of insight around the data and a lot of great services to help our customers get value from the data they're buying from us and the intrinsic value that data has the holy grail is of course being able to just give them a software application that does that and so it's a real interesting shift for us because as we're building these very sophisticated software products that are giving our customers access to the tools to get value they're actually also getting more value out of our services teams too because often times software is not enough and you do need some expert services around it to ensure you can get the most value across your enterprise. It's interesting because I cover the big data space for Wikibon and we've been covering the Hadoop market and all these new technologies that are coming to the fore really both though on the infrastructure on the container level you're putting data in there you're processing you're transforming it then you've got the analytics layer but ultimately these applications where things get people make decisions actions get triggered where real business happens when you get an application we haven't seen a lot of package big data applications out there in the market and you see you're right you've seen the application providers the SAPs and the Oracles of the world they're trying to adapt to this new world and add more analytic capabilities to their package applications but it's interesting seeing a data provider essentially saying why don't we flip this on instead and we provide the application. Yeah and I think we're unlocking a ton of value for our customers by doing that and you raise an interesting point I really think there's another way we're going to start to see of application focused companies and products based on all these great technologies I mean the energy here at re-invent is palpable I mean you can just tell there's so many interesting things happening people are really excited about what they're working on customers are glomming on to these technologies because they know they need the kind of power and capability a lot of these products are bringing but there's still some gaps and companies like IMS Health and many others I'm sure are going to start to see the value and we're already seeing the value and being able to use a lot of these you know leading edge technologies but doing it in a way where because we understand our customers so deeply we can address customer use cases at a very you know one foot level instead of having to go through all the energy of figuring out well how do I use Hadoop and what are the right ways I should be using Hadoop we'll just give you the application it might be using Hadoop in the back end but not it doesn't really matter and a business person doesn't care right they want the answer so tell us a little bit about your relationship with AWS are you guys as we've heard the phrase this week all in on AWS so what components of AWS you're using to support your business what's the relationship? Yeah so we signed up I think we're the sixth enterprise acceleration partner for AWS and you know that relationship is really important for us because number one I think there's a lot of strong cultural alignment what's really important for us is a company that operates at the scale that we do and has the depth of relationship with our customers that we do is you know we can't afford to have any I would say mission critical IP like components in somebody else's platform right AWS for us is really rich infrastructure it's very powerful infrastructure but we need to maintain our own proprietary platform and AWS not only technologically but philosophically gives us that flexibility right and he says himself you know we're the building blocks for you and that's exactly what type of relationship we want so I think that's that's super important we're also able to work together to ensure that we're building the right capability for our customers and so our sales teams and our go-to market teams are actually working together talking to CIO's having conversations about the types of capabilities because you know every time we win AWS wins you know it's sort of like this great relationship where you know we can do what's right for the customer and build a great solution for the customer and build great software products for the customer and the customer wins we win AWS wins and it's really exciting to see that relationship dig in a little bit more around the things that AWS allows you to do that you potentially couldn't do before it's mainly around agility is it around just getting rid of that headache of dealing with the infrastructure yeah I mean a lot of it is just being able to focus on the things that matter right I mean to me the infrastructure is now just a utility and and I think that's for Amazon to turn into a utility company is fantastic right I'd love to be the power company so you know I think that that's I think that's great and it lets us focus on building some great software which is a huge piece of it it also lets us scale really really quickly right I mean we all know the time it takes to go buy your own hardware provision your own data center all the steps it takes to do that country data centers are super important and the fact that we know that AWS is on that train and they're focused on rolling out new data centers in new regions on a very consistent basis that again enables us to focus on the areas that account for our customers I think kind of related to that point the whole issue around privacy and regulations especially in healthcare and the type of data you're dealing with was there any concerns you know when you're looking at AWS in terms of well we've got to be very careful here around around our compliance right does AWS help hurt how do you deal with compliance issues when you're running on top of a platform as we went through this assessment first determining if it makes sense or not to use a third party cloud which I think it's in the software business it's a done decision for everybody it makes total sense but particularly this level of relationship and this type of move we have to go extraordinarily deep in the assessment on security and compliance and all the processes around that we have to have a lot of experts inside of IMS Health around that and we can our colleagues can do that assessment I think you know the other piece to that is how it's changed over time so you know 36 months ago when I used to talk to you know a potential customer or a CIO and have a dialogue about our infrastructure and if we said hey we're using AWS there'd be some you know questions and it wouldn't be a that's interesting to tell me more about that I want to learn more I'm not sure the last six months it's a huge benefit I mean it's amazing how fast this industry has evolved where when I spent a lot of my time talking to our customers and the CIOs of large and mid-sized health care life science companies and pretty much every time I've had that conversation over the last six months it's been a huge positive because AWS is investing the resources and focusing on this area now one issue with AWS in terms of their partners is AWS kind of takes a step back they look at what all their partners are doing and sometimes they say well there's a partner doing some very valuable things maybe we should get into that business ourselves so you got to be it's an interesting relationship how do you view that I think that's an issue on the infrastructure side so if IMS Health was an infrastructure company you'd be more concerned about that that would be something to think about we are in completely different businesses we are a technology and services company we build software products Amazon starts to build software products that they sell to business users that would be an issue that would be a pretty big concern but the conversations I've had with the team I don't see that on the roadmap I don't think that's the business that Amazon intends to play and I think that it lets us each focus on our relative strengths and do what's right for the customer just a couple more minutes so I want to give you the last word just talking to our audience out there you mentioned a little bit but talk about the vibe here at this show and is this your first reinvent it is my first reinvent your impressions of this show for the folks at home who aren't here what's it really like on the ground I'm really happy that I'm here I'm really happy we came I'm happy we had the announcement with the team this conference it's really more than just about Amazon than just about AWS and I think the team at AWS probably wants it that way there's just so much innovation happening there's so many ideas being shared there's so much of a focus on it's like craftsmen very excited about their craft is how I would describe the audience and the group and so what I'm finding in the hallway conversations and walking the floor and sitting in the sessions there's just an intent focus on talking about new technology and how to use it and how to get value and sharing best practices very community oriented very collaborative this sounds like you'll probably be back next year I think so and hopefully we'll see you on the Cube then as well thank you Shihani from IMSL thanks so much for joining us on the Cube thanks for watching guys stick with us we'll be right back after the short break live at AWS reinvent