 Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to our exclusive CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for Amazon Web Services AWS Summit 2018. We are all day covering the regional event for Amazon Web Services. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Steve Hall, Vice President of Partnerships at a company called Cloud Checker. Cloudcheck with an R.com. Companies we see in the ecosystem doing great stuff. Really capturing the growth of the clouds. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So I got to ask you, so you guys are like Switzerland, you guys are involved in a lot of the stuff. Before I go into some of the appointed questions, I'd love to get your thoughts on the cloud, but take a minute first to explain what Cloud Checker does, your core business, and why are you calling yourself Switzerland? Is it like you play nicely with all the clouds? Is there all the crypto currency's going to go? I mean, give us a straight scoop. Sure, you bet. So Cloud Checker is a cloud management platform, right, that helps organizations get visibility and control across their public cloud estate. So the challenges that we're seeing really typically fall into two categories. It's, I thought I was going to save me money when going to the cloud, and I thought that my data was going to be less secure going to the cloud. Cloud Checker helps solve both those problems by helping you reduce costs, eliminate waste, all that good stuff, as well as identify your attack surface and make sure that it's protected. Is it a SaaS offering, or is it more? SaaS offering born in the cloud, for the cloud. I mean, we focus, and as you said, Switzerland, we really focus on sort of a management layer that sits across a multi-cloud environment where you're not just looking at Amazon and AWSes, but also the Azures and GCPs of the world to make sure that you have a kind of that unified single pane of glass that everyone kind of wishes for, but that they don't necessarily know how to get. Yeah, and I had the joke on Switzerland with the cryptocurrency, the legit people are going to Switzerland, but metaphorically, you guys are independent. You want to play with all clouds because you're going to just look at the holistic picture. What's the critical thing that you're seeing right now? We had a guest on earlier talking about, you know, you leave the lights on, so to speak, quote, you know, the EC2 is running a lot of inefficiencies, you got security. Are you guys kind of like a dashboard, single pane of management glass in there? Is it other services? What specifically are you guys focused on right now? Yeah. Obviously the growth of the cloud as you guys are, that's a tailwind for you guys. That's a key thing that you do. So I mean, I think that the biggest thing that we see driving our business, right, is the economics around the cloud, right? Everyone's moving. The workloads are, you know, obviously, whether they're in the early days or kind of more mature. Everyone thinks that by moving to the cloud, they're going to save money. And there's data out there to suggest that there's upwards of 30 to 40% wastage happening inside of the cloud environments today, just because people using that analogy leave light switches on and they didn't even realize that they didn't know how to find them, right? So where we see a lot of pain, right, is, whoa, what do I do? Right, where do I start? And so partnering with not only the native tools that Amazon brings to bear, right? You know, trusted advisor or inspector or all the other tools. So there's a new term being developed called cloud sprawl. Stu, we talk about server sprawl, right? I mean, we have Lambda now. I mean, is it cloud sprawl? Is that an issue? Yeah, certainly. And cloud spend sprawl, right? You know, it's this shadow IT thing that goes on of, somebody told me a story of the CMO, a Bank of America, got a phone call a couple of years ago from the CEO after a Superbowl ad that ran and said, what is this thing that you're doing? And she said, oh, we just turned it on in the cloud. And he's like, did you talk to IT? Did you have anybody do it? And she's like, why would I do that, right? Like, why would I even bother? I can just go do it myself. So how do I get my arms around that? Right, obviously it's somewhat of an opportunity, but also a challenge. Yeah, so Steve Flick, talk about getting your arms around something. When we talk to customers, IT is heterogeneous. So, yes, public cloud and people are growing and using more Amazon, but there's other clouds, there's my service providers, and oh yeah, I've still probably got some data centers because there's 35 years after you stopped building those a few years back, for you to do that. How do you help them get around there? And I'd love to hear, how are you seeing Amazon maturing in working in some of those environments? It used to be Amazon is all in public cloud only, then it was, oh, there's the VMware stuff, there's the Red Hat stuff, oh hey, they're starting to work with service providers even. What are you seeing and how are you involved in that? Yeah, you bet. I mean, again, I think you touch on, again, probably the biggest problem, which is visibility, right, and transparency, and how do I create accountability around all of that? Because there's new roles that are emerging inside of these organizations to try to do things with this cloud stuff, as well as a lot of questions that are being asked, they don't even know how to answer them. And so where Amazon I think is really maturing, we'll start there, right, is not only providing a lot of just the native tooling, that is somewhat kind of, yes, Amazon focused, but focused really on kind of providing that, that visibility that they need, where I think Cloud Checker really kind of steps in, is sort of a little bit deeper level view of what they have, as well as how do you cross-pollinate that with the other environments, whether it's a hybrid environment or another cloud provider that you want to, again, kind of bring into one singular view. That's really how we try to help. And then I think that the other piece that you touched on, which is there's this whole managed service provider and reseller community that's really quite mature, in fact, within the AWS ecosystem, which I think is one of the things that AWS really kind of differentiates itself with by empowering partners to be able to build a practice around AWS, because, again, another challenge that we see is Cloud is great, but I don't have the people to do it. Or I don't know what the people that I do have don't know what to do, and so having a trusted partner, like a managed service provider, to turn to to go do that stuff is like a blessing. What sort of areas, where can that local managed service provider, where can they help, is it just because they have localized people, but what services they have, is it just enabling people to get up into the cloud, or are there things that they're doing between the service provider and Amazon with Direct Connect and the like? So the first thing honestly becomes billing, truthfully, and that sounds so boring in many respects, but okay, I get a bill, but the billing is really... Yeah, the CFO doesn't think it's boring. But they don't, right? As well as you get the bill, how do I make sense of it, right? And so clients are looking for managed service providers to sort of make sense of all of these cost data and usage data, and give them sort of the view of who's using what and how much should we spend, right? Because money talks. And so that is driving a different conversation for managed service providers. So building, we're seeing a lot of our partners working up new practices around cost optimization, right? And how to build an entire, not only just billing portal, but a practice on top of that to help optimize the environment for... Well, there's such a huge opportunity there. I've talked to customers that were like, I dedicated engineer to do financial engineering. Rather than architecting. So there's an opportunity when you see that, it's like, oh wait, do you want a headcount of a highly trained engineer? Or that's what the partner can help with, right? Yeah, and there's a couple of different ways that they can do it too. We see partners, some that are hiring the smart guy in the room, putting them in a back room and doing the analytics and analysis around that data. Others are literally just creating white labeled portals and putting it in front of their customers. So there's lots of different ways that AWS makes it easy for a partner to build new products and actually turn their 7% margins into 20% margins by building more services and solutions around the AWS infrastructure. Steve, I want to get your industry expertise on some of you, the vice president of partnerships and we always talk on the cubes, Stu, myself, Dave Vellante, Jeff Frick and the team around what it's like to compete in the modern era. And we commented on Amazon's competitive strategy for the first time. They got to actually deal with heavy dose of competition. And no one's going to give up the market, so they got to fight tooth and nail. You deal with all the cloud providers. But people are learning. There's a new kind of partnership. If everything's API based, you got satisfied, platform as a service kind of going away to infrastructure as a service. You have this cloud fabric, global reach with regions, all kinds of new moving parts. How is it changing partnerships? How should people who are in trying to partner with the big clouds? Is there a posture, is there an approach? Is there a playbook that you see that's different than the old way? The old way was, you know, press the pavement, press the palms together, you get dinner, you do coffee, whatever, you do a deal, longer time horizon. Now it's, you got to have services, you got the data, whole different landscape. What's your thoughts on the partner equation? How should people partner? What's the playbook? And I'll speak on, from cloud checkers perspective. So we've been going to reinvent in these summits for the last five, six years, right? So I remember when this was 500 people in a room, right? You know, and there's 10 vendors exhibiting and here you have 7,000 plus people now, right? That are, you know, where you have lots of vendors that you're very familiar with, right? You know, that are large scale, you know, kind of like global vendors. So definitely the competitive landscape has changed and it's partly just like you said, the opportunity, right, you know, this is a, I heard somebody say it's probably market cap of a trillion dollars in public cloud, right, at the end of the day. So everyone sees the opportunity, but how do you actually make good use of it as a partner to the cloud providers? First of all, you solve a real problem, right? There's a lot of, I tend to see a lot of people that are just cloud dipping their solutions and kind of coming to market around things because they want a piece of the pie. But if you really focus yourself on how do I solve some of the most pressing needs, right? And that's where again, we see, you know, our product helping customers around cost and security, but even our partners- The ecosystem is a key. You got to be part of an ecosystem. Is that the criteria? You got to play, well, yeah, and it's not just go to coffee and have drinks, right? You know what I mean? It's connect with the people inside of your community, right? Whether it's at these events or whether it's in your local AWS offices or in the smaller, you know, sort of settings to say what are your customers asking for, right? And how can we help you with that? I mean, it's pretty obvious stuff, but- So Steve, if you mentioned security a few times, you know, if you go back a few years, it was like, oh, I'm going to be less secure if I go to cloud and now most people realize it's an opportunity for me to readdress security and chances are the security is better because when's the last time I really updated all my security? What are the hot buttons? What are you seeing? What's Amazon doing well? What does the industry as a whole need to do better? Absolutely, well, I mean, you touched on it. Security used to be the reason not to go and now it is the reason to go. I think companies have realized, oh my God, they've got hundreds of security engineers. We have two. So I think that their infrastructure is probably more secure. What we're seeing is the hot press buttons. I mean, I think the last 18 months, 12 months have been all about S3 buckets, right? You know, and all this data that's been exposed sitting out there on the internet. And I think AWS has done a fabulous job of changing some of the configurations to allow customers not to stab themselves in the foot. But I think that a lot of it honestly ends up being human error, right? You know, I mean, really it's the human element inside of security that continues to plague the industry and the cloud only makes it harder because now you don't have IT people doing IT. You've got business people doing IT, right? Back to the Bank of America example. So, sorry, Bank of America, right? So my point is, yeah, I think that it's really back to how do we create solutions that non-IT people can use and make sense of it so that we can put common sense, good controls- The business models are critical. Dailing the business models critical. Steve, final question for you. I want to just put you on the spot a little bit here. You guys are trying to solve a real big need in the marketplace, becoming a trusted source for cloud optimization, cloud costs. I mean, it's going to impact obviously financial workflows and rolling the data up. So a lot of moving parts in AWS and other clouds. So are you guys using machine learning and AI because if Werner Vogels says, hey, look at all the magic that could happen in the cloud, how are you guys using all these data points? How are you rolling them up? Can you share the philosophy, the tech, are you guys cutting edge? Are you on the front bleeding edge? What, are you guys eating your own dog food? I'm obviously putting on the spot there. So go ahead. Yeah, no, that's fine. So we are absolutely using machine learning and artificial intelligence on the back end, using AWS technology in fact to empower a lot of that inside of the Cloud Checker platform. And it is all about taking all of these disparate data sources. I call it the machine exhaust of the cloud, right? That's kind of coming out. How do I put good sense to that? And Cloud Checker really is that layer above all of that whether it's your cloud trail logs or your cloud watch metrics or your cloud usage report, putting it all into one place and then doing machine learning and predictive analytics around that. That's exactly what Cloud Checker is all about. It's an implementation challenge, right? Right, right. I mean, go ahead. Yeah, so Steve, it was just, we talked about kind of the heterogeneous nature and you brought up a term, a surface area. Yeah. When we start adding in things like IoT, surface area is going to grow exponentially and the heterogeneous nature is just going to go up the same. Cloud Checker going to help there? Is that something your customers are ready for? I think they're already there, right? So I mean, I think a lot of our customers, like the use cases that we see are either big data analytics or IoT or some other use case around why they're using public cloud to begin with. And so really it's about as that expansion and increased usage occurs, how do I protect that attack surface? How do I look for known good state information and then lock my doors and windows, if you will? As well as how do I make sure that I'm using the right resources in the right way so that again, I have that visibility and transparency and then can have the right controls and automation around it to do something about it? Steve, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Check out Cloud Checker. Again, this is one of those things. As you use the cloud, there's going to be more bells and whistles, more services to watch and instrument. Obviously cost containment and managing the growth is certainly going to be something to watch using the data and managing it. That's what Cloud Checker does. Of course theCUBE is bringing all the data here at the Trusted Source for all the action at AWS Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More coverage after this short break.