 New York, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in New York, it's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier. Jeff Frick here, bringing all the action from the regional event of Amazon. It's like a reinventing New York City. It's Amazon Web Services. Our Scott Mullins is our next guest. He's the head of Worldwide Financial Services, business development. He's the one bringing in all the fintech startups, doing all the big banks. Really bringing cloud to the financial services industry, which is a great early adopter for everything. Yeah, absolutely. I was actually early adopter myself. So before I was at AWS, I was actually a customer. I started my journey to the cloud personally at NASDAQ and in 2012, was actually on stage at the New York Summit talking about our early use of AWS at the exchange. So it's really amazing to be here in 2018, six years later to see really how far we've come so far. Talk about the dynamics in financial services, in fintech, in general, this is a market that's highly volatile, need for real-time information, real-time, competitive advantages, speed, scale, data. I mean, financial really hits to me the crosshairs of where the action is in cloud because you got to have everything. You got to have speed, you have new software, new capabilities, whether it's blockchain, an exchange, or all these things. This is the competitive strategy. This is the advantage they're looking for. What are they doing? What are some of the things that you can talk about? Well, I think you've hit really two of the key things that people are looking for when they use the cloud. Number one, agility. I need to get to market faster. The things that I build for my customers, whether that's the things that I'm used to building, that I operate today to run financial markets or to serve my customers on the retail side, I need those things when I make changes to them to make those changes faster. On the other side, if I want to build something that new and innovative and cool, I can't take 18 months to actually bring that to market. I want to do that in three months. And so we actually have customers that are doing that today. You can look at what the DGCC is doing. I don't know if you saw the keynote address, Rob Palatnik, the chief architect there was talking about how they have transformed systems that they operate today, that power markets around the world that clear $1.4 quadrillion worth of value on an annual basis, taking those and transforming them fast for time to market or organizations like Allianz Insurance who launched a completely new pet insurance platform on us, a very established company in the insurance space in three months time as opposed to 18 months, which is what it used to take to launch something like that. And that was considered fast by the way, 18 months. Oh yeah, when I was in financial services, 18 months seemed like a very fast period of time to bring something to life. That's funny, because financial services is really almost like the bacteria of the space, because speed is so important. You guys have been, financial service companies have been software companies forever, it's numbers on the page, right? It's numbers in the database that are moving and the competitive edge gained by speed and innovation is so critically, critically important when you're really operating on this commodity thing that's transacted. So you guys are really a bit on the bleeding edge. I don't think people understand how important that is. And then also for the security, really it's a big important priority. So for financial services to be all in, leveraging public cloud is a pretty significant statement. Yeah, I agree. And I think you just said on something that's also very important to financial services customers, which is scale. You know, we talk about data and data being, you know, kind of the next frontier and the thing that's going to be the most important going forward. But in order to be able to process data and actually derive value from it, you've got to have compute power. You've got to have that horsepower and the scale to be able to actually apply analytics to it, whether it's traditional data analytics or machine learning. And so being able to access compute power at scale, is hugely important. And as you mentioned in financial services, you're probably a regulated organization. You're probably not just regulated by one entity. In the case of GTCC or some of our larger financial institutions customers, you may have hundreds of regulatory agencies and bodies that you're beholden to because you are a fiduciary. You have a responsibility to power and keep safe resilient markets. And so being able to have infrastructure that you trust, be able to scale appropriately, be able to be resilient and to hold up where you need it to, is hugely important. What's the specific business benefits? Because if you had to put your feet to the fire and someone said, I'm going to move my business to the cloud, I really want to look at this. What are the business benefits of going to the cloud? What do you say to that financial services company? I'll give you three, there are more than that, but I'll give you three equipment. Number one agility, time to market, time to market, time to market. I can actually get my product to market faster than I used to before. So making updates to what I provide today. And then also getting ahead of competitors. If I can roll something out in three months and it takes you 18 months to do that, I've got an advantage over you. I'm in the market 15 months before you ever even thought of it. So number one, the agility that's available. Number two, it's cost. Rob Palatnik, and I hate to say it, but he just got off stage, so it's fresh in my mind. He put up a slide that said, when we were going to build something in response to a regulation that came out in 2012, we thought it was going to cost us $4 million to do it. And by the way, it's a service we had to offer for free to the market. We couldn't recoup any more cost. His team came to him and said, hey, we think we can do this on the cloud with AWS for about $2,500 a month. Would you be interested in doing that? Well, of course. $48,000 a year versus $4 million in sunk costs. Yeah, the most interesting thing though is he actually showed what it cost him to run that application today. It's got more data in it. It's got more requests that go through it. And it cost him less than $1,000 a month to run the application. $903 a month to run a mission critical application. This brings up a good point. So obviously a great example. Show me, tell me more. I was like, hey, that's great numbers. So you get, that's an easy check. It's a good way to entice someone. But a lot of people are trying to figure out which services to move to the cloud. How do you advise on that? Because there's usually a sequence, something goes first. What are the key things that you want to move to the cloud if I'm a financial services? I usually recommend one of two things. Number one, if you have an immediate problem you're trying to solve, let's start there. It's always easier when you have something concrete to work from. So if you need to be able to run data analytics much more efficiently, let's try some machine learning. Let's take some data sets, let's build the data lake, let's build that right foundation, and let's run those analytics. You may have seen in Werner's commentary, he talked about Moody's, Moody's analytics running machine learning on AWS. Or if you want to get started early and you're a highly regular organization, you don't have an immediate problem to solve, let's look what you need to scale. Let's look at some workloads that aren't necessarily considered as mission critical, let's look at something that maybe doesn't involve sense of information to the firm, like PII or other types of information you might consider secret sauce, and let's look at those and move those over as a test bed and then we can rapidly scale up from there. Talk about the New York dynamic. We were here a couple of weeks ago for the Blockchain Week consensus event around Blockchain and cryptocurrency, and we were talking to a few reporters on our cube and they're like, we haven't seen New York just jazzed up on cryptocurrencies because New York's a money town, you've got Wall Street, so you're seeing a new kind of buzz going on in New York around cloud, edge computing, mobile computing, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, you know, the power of money always gets financial services excited. How has that dynamic of, say cloud and some of these new emerging technologies, whether it's AI, blockchain, energize financial services? Is that a key trend? What's your observation? You know, I think that financial services, as we mentioned before we started talking on camera, is always an early adopter of technology, specifically in capital markets, right? So if something new comes out, you're going to imagine that financial services company wants to experiment with it, they want to be ahead of the curve, they want to be on that bleeding edge, I think it's no different in the new tools that we offer today, whether that's cloud, financial services with a very early adopter of the cloud and being able to take advantage of the agility and the scalability, where you look at things like blockchain, where for the last four years, you've been actually looking at blockchain and how it's going to actually impact the financial services market, whether that's through cryptocurrencies and the exchanges that we're building on cloud, or you're looking at the way that blockchain itself and distributed ledger can actually look at replacing some of the middle and back office, financial services is always going to be on that leading edge and figuring out how we're going to make changes to the industry that incrementally provide value. I think the big differentiator though, when you look at cloud and you look at things like blockchain and really the reemergence of AI and machine learning, is that now with cloud, you actually have the ability to take advantage of some of those things. It's not just theory, you're not talking about it anymore. You can actually go out and experiment and try these things out and make them happen much more quickly. You're running BizDev for financial services sector. Really awesome, exciting market. What are some of the conversations? Take us through the day in the life. You're probably a middle-eater not on the phone, but on email and face-to-face on the phone. What is some of the conversations that you're having? Stack rank, the kinds of high-level conversations and specific things that you are dealing with day in, day out. I think if you went back two years ago, it would be what is it and why would I do it? A lot of convincing. Today it's how, how, how and how fast can I do it? How did I do this? I am a startup company. I'm a FinTech organization. This is a conversation I had literally three weeks ago. I am starting from scratch. I have a new idea that I think can revolutionize the financial services industry, but my customers are going to be other large financial institutions. How do I build something on AWS that's going to pass muster with them? We help companies do that on a daily basis. On the flip side, I'm a large financial institution. I have a legacy. I've been in business for hundreds of years. I've got, I've got siloed parts of my organization that do things differently from a technology perspective. How do I even begin to contemplate this kind of a transformational change? How do I do that? That's conversations we have on a daily basis as well. It's very fun to help organizations both transform the way that our markets work today and then also at the same time rethink how we can do that from an innovation perspective. And what are you guys doing at the organizational level? Obviously the demand is they're lining up literally virtually and literally. You got digital tools. You have obviously the cloud technologies. You got templates. How are you building out your organization to serve your customers through that channel? What's new? What's going on? Well obviously we start with the services that we offer and so you've seen some new launches of services here in addition to things like SageMaker and our machine learning tools. We continue to iterate very quickly and effectively for all of our customers, but our financial services customers do provide a lot of the feedback that we get in relation to informing that roadmap. So very important, 90% of the AWS roadmap is inbound customer requests for enhancements to our features and to our services. That's very important. So number one, we're always on the cutting edge from the standpoint of the services. Specifically for financial services though, it is a lot of how? How would I do that? I'm a large financial institution or I have to deal with regulation. How do I do that Scott? And what we're doing there is making sure that we continue to bring expertise in-house that has the experience in doing that. And so from a standpoint of- Security. Regulatory, compliance and security, builders from the industry, bringing those onto our team so that people understand you can do this. We've done it before. Here's how we do it again. What's the best sellers? SageMaker's certainly hot. I don't think, and the numbers are out, but I forecast that that reinvent that SageMaker will out be the number one selling service. I'm sure it might have already passed some of the Aurora database migration stuff going on. What if an angel service is interested? What's the top products that they're going after right now? Well as you know, Aurora is our fastest growing service in history. I think many financial services institutions are very interested in databases and how to replace their legacy databases with something new. It's a lot more scalable, a lot more cost effective. So Aurora would be one I'd point to. Data analytics is probably the number one workload in financial services today. Whether that's traditional data analytics with business intelligence on top of it, to building data lakes and using our version of Hadoop, which is an Elastic MapReduce or EMR. Organizations like FINRA who run all the market surveillance for the U.S. capital markets using exactly that setup at Data Lake and S3 and the EMR to power that. You can look at our machine learning tool. I think machine learning has really kind of overtaken blockchain in some respects in relation to hotness. I like to joke, Chris Church, if you know Chris Church into the last set, he and I found ourselves on the speaking circuit quite often going to different conferences and then we'd be speaking on the cloud and then suddenly Chris was the new hot thing because he was distributed ledger and Chris started to have the kind of the keynotes and then I joked with Chris at SIFMA a couple of weeks ago. Hey Chris, you're actually going to have to introduce the guy talking about machine learning next because that's the new hotness as well. So machine learning tools, I think with SageMaker, as you mentioned, obviously a very hot thing for investors. Well, the developer space of a blockchain, decentralized applications, not just distributed computing, but you start to see decentralized apps, DApps, they're called, start to come out, new wallets with crypto. So, you know, a lot of new stuff but the cloud's going to power. So, looks like you got a good job positioning for you for the next couple of years. You know, financial services isn't going anywhere. I think so, I'm a financial services guy. I'm just very happy to be a part of the transformation of the industry as it's happening today. Scott, thanks for coming on. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. Appreciate it.