 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. And we are back live here in Las Vegas. We're in the sands as re-invent day two wraps up, AWS here for four days and we'll be here live again tomorrow by the way on theCUBE, continue our coverage. We're wrapping up here today, saving the best for last. No doubt about that, Stu Benham and John Walls. We're joined by a couple of folks from Software One. Mike Gersten, immediately to my right, a global innovation and strategy. Mike, good to see you, sir. Yeah, likewise, thanks for having us. And Lauren Schwartz on the far side there, the CMO at Software One. Lauren, it's good to see you. Pleasure to see you again. Tell us a little bit first off about not only what you do, but why you're here. Sure, yeah, so Software One, we're in the business of making sure that people are spending the right amount of money on their software, not too much in making sure they're not under spending either, right? So all that optimization to spend. We also help customers implement their technology. We're at the show because we help customers do that in a cloud environment, so obviously natural to be at AWS. We help them do that on-premise as well, and we find a lot of our customers here, people we've been talking to for a long time, new people as well, trying to move over, so it's a great environment for us. We kind of see what's going on in the innovation side from AWS too, so. And so, Mike, what do you make of the show in general then? I'm just curious about your two day tape. We've been here a couple of days, and by now it's suckin' a little bit, I would think. It's incredible, you know, we were here last year, and there was roughly 30,000 attendees. We're here again, there's over 45,000 attendees. I walk the floor here, I see dozens of providers that I didn't see here last year. Some of them are one guy with a six foot table who's got some pretty interesting technology. So I would say that the pace with which this ecosystem is growing isn't showing any signs of slowing down. One of the things we've been hearing for a while is, I mean, boy, I mean, Amazon keeps innovating, but it's been adding to complexity. You know, the Amazon catalog itself, you know, about 30,000 line items there, then you add on top of that a marketplace, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure it's infinite at this point, and marketplace has been a huge driver in growth. I have to expect that marketplace impacts your business quite a bit in a good way, I would think. Yeah, for us, that's probably one of the most exciting announcements that we've heard this week is around the marketplace specifically. We have a third year history selling software, so to see now AWS taking what they did in the online retail business, and Essence doing it for software in the marketplace, is a good opportunity for us to connect our global catalog to their global catalog, and provide a much wider range of software options for our customers. Yeah, Mike, I'm wondering if I can ask you, explain to our audience that might not have been in the keynote, gone to a break up, what is it about this announcement that's so special for Amazon? Today they have about 4,000 or a little bit over 4,000 applications that sit in the marketplace, and the idea is that any customer ought to be able to go up to the marketplace, and with a click of a button, procure some software, have it put into a maybe a reserved instance, or some hosted infrastructure from Amazon, and then be off to the races, no configuration, no support, no installation. Yeah, that was my tongue-in-cheek, so it's an infinite marketplace. It's an infinite marketplace. As of today. Right, yeah, Lawrence, one of the things we've been kind of wrestling with a little bit for the last few years, is this term multi-cloud. We hear an update from Andy every year as to how they look at it. Of course, I think it's everything is everything, is Amazon, and of course I think they've made an announcement about everything, and we still have another couple days left. How are customers, your customers, looking at that multi-cloud? What are you seeing? It gives a little insight as to and how does software 1 help? Well, what's interesting for us is because that's what we see all the time, and we were talking about this a little bit beforehand, and all the customers that we have, and we have tens of thousands of customers, we don't have any real conversations where people are talking about a single cloud that they're working with. They're working with multiple, maybe they're more in one today than another, but they're kind of looking at multiple solutions, so it's part of the business of what they do. And in a lot of cases, it's just another extension of what's happening in-prem or on-premise today or in the data center, and so they always have to think about that. So it's a part of it. There's lots of reasons for them to kind of go into that multi-cloud environment. Some of it might be for redundancy, some of it for flexibility on contracting, some of it is for things like GDPR where they're worried about where their data sits and some of the local requirements, so it's part of the conversations that we always have, and it's good to see some of the solutions that they're doing here where they think about that, and they've really thought about how different ways customers can go in there and look at a really dispersed environment, so. So, I mean, how does the, in a multi-cloud world, I mean, how does that change in terms of people optimizing their software, making these decisions that you're trying to steer and you're trying to advise them on? I mean, what's the impact that that's having kind of on what they're deciding to do going forward? Well, you've got, there's a couple of things. First of all, I couldn't agree more with Lawrence. Tens of thousands of customers, I can't think of a time where I've talked to a customer that wasn't multi-cloud, so it's almost, I would say all customers are multi-cloud. The challenge for our customers is how do you take all the different cloud environments you're working with that use different vernacular, bring it into one system that then is using a common language to, you know, a common language around the resources that sit in those cloud environments, a common language around how you map those resources to your organizational structure or how you manage your business, so that you're looking at your cloud resources, you're planning for them financially, but in the context of your business, using a common vernacular across all cloud providers, that's a difficult thing to do if you're just going to a point solution from one of the publishers. So, why do that? You wouldn't, you'd come look at it like this. I mean, why not simplify? Why not, but why not just keep it in one environment or maybe two environments? Why branch out? Why take it to a different sphere? Well, I think Lawrence touched on some of the reasons, which is, you know, some of it's price, some of it is I've got legacy applications that don't work in one cloud infrastructure, but will work in another cloud infrastructure. Some of it is security, some of it is just, you know, simply I don't have any control over it. People are acquiring cloud infrastructure via credit card within departments. Yeah, you can't say you have to use Amazon or you have to use Microsoft. You're not controlling that. You know, we've talked before, software one has a different legacy than say what I'd say the cloud management providers that are out there, but some of the things are very similar that you're attacking, because everybody, I think, has identified this multi-cloud and it's the big elephant, everybody's trying to take bites out of it. Could maybe give us a little bit of a comparative contrast, you know, about, you know, I think there's all these companies out there that start with cloud and have one or two other words, you know, with them, you know, how to software one, you know, what's similar, what's different? Yeah, I think the, when you look at that, there's certainly a lot of vendors here do a good job of starting to think about that, but a lot of vendors have started with, you know, the cloud and kind of built around that. And for companies that are born in the cloud and that's all they focus on, that might be a great solution. But a lot of the enterprises that we deal with the larger customers, that mix of what's on premise and what's in the cloud is still a minority is going to be in the cloud. It's going to be definitely less than 50% for a lot of companies, even smaller for some of the big places. So if you get really, really good visibility, even in a multi-cloud environment, on only 20 or 30% of your environment, then you're not getting the whole big picture of what's happening, particularly on the expense side and where you're spending the money. So what we bring to the table that's a little bit unique here is we come from the history of doing this for many years on premise. We give a good visibility into what they're doing, how their assets are being utilized, giving them thoughts and contributions on how they price it and what they buy to it. So we give them that good view of on premise as well as what's happening in the cloud. So now when they make decisions, they're getting that holistic view. So marketing might come in there and they might have a software catalog that's part in cloud and part of it's on premise. Their CRM might be on premise. So if you're looking at, what's my overall budget and spend there? How do I consolidate it? How do I make it better? You just can't look at the SaaS applications and what's in the cloud or what's in Amazon. You've really got to get that full picture and that's what we can bring to bear. And the other thing is a lot of the solutions that you see, a lot of the vendors are very focused on one particular country or environment. Software one is really spread out across the globe. We're in 80 plus countries. So when you're looking at, okay, now I've got to figure out who's buying whatever in Switzerland and the UK and the US. How do I simplify procurement for it? How do I get visibility across all of that on-prem in the cloud? That becomes a much more complex question. And those are the things that we can help enterprises with that's a little bit above and beyond what you might see on some of the kind of pure cloud focused players. Mike, I had an interesting session I got to sit in with Amazon talking about how they are helping customers with innovation. And one of the things they put forth is, companies have usually hundreds or thousands of applications but at least the premise they put forth is there's usually a handful of companies that are the strategic ones. There may be a next tier that are kind of important and then there's whole lots of other stuff. Maybe they're not all crapplications but they're putting out, but they're coming to Amazon and saying you're innovating, you're moving fast. How do we do that? How do we help with the digital transformation? How does software one get involved in kind of the innovation helping them along that journey? Well, you know it's true that we work with over 9,000 publishers and I would say that the top seven or eight make up the lion's share of both our revenue and our customers' spend. However, if you take what we call the tail end spend, if you take not just those top tier providers and not the middle tier, but all of those small little applications they've been using departmentally, they don't seem to add up to a lot when you look at them at each department or each geography. When you bring them together for the enterprise, it's a large spend and it's very hard for our customers to get control of that. So when we talk about innovation, I would not suggest that you innovate just around the top five to 10 publishers. You have to be able to provide a cost management solution across the entire portfolio for customers across the entire life cycle. That's on-premises, that's multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and that's from acquisition through disposition. It includes the tail end spend. So as a lot of that when you give the visibility into the client as to what they're doing across the enterprise, they might not realize how deeply involved they are and that could give them leverage for pricing and then the like. The best example is SAS today because SAS has enabled Shadow IT in a way that we've never seen. Now people are just buying whatever application they want in their department with their credit card. Well, the IT department, the procurement department, the compliance group, they have no idea where that spend is coming from. They haven't discovered those unknown SAS subscriptions and you can't budget for it, you can't manage what you can't see. Is that, what's the shocker then? I mean, when you come in just in general to a business, what's the eye-opening moment for them, you think, in terms of what you're uncovering or what you're showing them about their own process that you think they would know, but you give them a little aha. Yeah, I think one example, I mean, we work with obviously a lot of the companies, but one, not that far from here, we work with LA Metro, the county and what they do there, and transportation. And they were looking at their environment and their spend in the cloud. And once we gave them our platform to kind of see what was going on, give them full visibility on what's happening with their VMs, what's happening in the cloud, they saw that they're basically spending two to three X what they needed to beforehand, before they really took a good look at it. I think they were surprised by that, but it was a really good opportunity to take a good, hard look at what VMs I might need to spin down, what ones I need to throttle, what ones aren't being active. And again, you want to make sure you're right-sized for what you're doing instead of just over-provisioning and kind of taking a guess at it, if you will, and overspending at the end of the day. And interestingly enough, just to add onto that, I was talking to a CIO that we worked with maybe a month ago. We surveyed all of our customers on their spend, by and large, most of them know they're overspending on software, they estimate to go anywhere between 25 and 35%, especially in the cloud, but they know they're overspending. So some of them can't solve the problem, so they just budget for the overspend. So I was meeting with her, and I said to her, you know, do you know you're overspending? She said, yeah, we're definitely overspending about 30%, I said, what are you doing about that? She says, I just put it into my budget. I said, it's crazy, why wouldn't you want to solve the problem? And the irony is that she's actually the CIO for a tax and accounting firm, but they're just bearing it, right? So, yeah. Yeah, that is funny. So, Andy, Jassy did quite an extensive keynote, lots of announcements, kind of give you the wild card. Something that jumped out at you, you want to build on any announcements or any pieces of Andy's presentation? Yeah, I think overall, I mean, he kept talking about innovation, right, and what they're doing. I think for us, we talked a little bit about the marketplace, but you also see things they're doing on the database side that's strengthening Aurora, making Postgre more attractive as an alternative to some of the legacy systems, and that complements well, the kind of what we see as a migration and people want to do, right? You really strengthen the offering, it makes it more attractive, and then certainly makes it interesting for the ecosystem, which we're part of, to help contribute that for people to move over there. I also really liked his analogy there, he kept going back to the musicians and kind of the relationship they have or thinking of that from compared to developers, right? And having all the instruments that you need to kind of build what you want and having that flexibility of choice. And I think it's a great analogy, and I think the flip side of that is, hey, if you've got a jam session here and you're bringing in all these different instruments, you know, a guitar player, a tuba player, whatever it is to build this up, you also have to look at, what do you have in-house? You probably already have a pretty good-sized orchestra. Some of it might be legacy, some people might be playing the harpsichord, the recorder, whatever it is, and you've got to figure out how does, in some cases, how do I blend that together? If I'm bringing them in, is it just for a jam session or do I need them here for a full set or for like a year-long concert? And if you're not careful, you can end up spending a lot of money on bringing in all these different players. And I think that's an interesting way to think about this is, it's great to have the flexibility, but how do you make sure you have the visibility of the cost controls so that doesn't overdo or overspend what you want to do to get that creativity that you need? You know. Everybody's going to play in the same key too, right? All right, let's all get on the same page. Same page of music, yeah. So, Software One's a global company. I know you both do a lot of travel. Give us kind of, we're here in the center of AWS. I mean, 43,000 devoted, super excited, passionate people, but what are you seeing out there in the globe? Where does AWS specifically, Public Cloud in general, still need to push? What are some of the concerns, challenges, things that you see out there? Geographically, yeah. Well, I mean, certainly in APAC, there's a challenge that any cloud infrastructure provider is going to face, and that's Oli Cloud. Oli Cloud is a fairly dominant player in China and Japan, and they have good presence throughout APAC. I think that AWS is making strong strides in Asia. Clearly, the market leader worldwide, everybody is chasing them with over 1,000 features and enhancements announced just within the last year. The pricing changes happening at such rapid fire that I think it's difficult for the other guys to keep up with them. So I'd say there's no question there that the market leader globally, Asia Pacific is probably their biggest challenge. Lawrence? I concur with a lot of that. I mean, we've seen in our own company, a lot of activities starting in Amia and even in South America, some good relationships with AWS, some early adoption there, but yeah, I think those comments on APAC, I think you've got some good experiences there, so. Well gentlemen, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time here on theCUBE. Good luck with the rest of the show, and I'll be kind of curious to see where this goes. The vibe is good, right? Vibes, unbelievable. Fantastic. And you got a big runway, so good luck with that. Thank you. All right, gentlemen. That's it for our coverage here on theCUBE today, day two here at Reinvent. Back with more live tomorrow morning, 11 o'clock Pacific time. We'll be with you two o'clock on the east coast that we'll see you right here. Until then, have a good night.