 Hey, welcome back. We are live in day two. Kind of towards the end of the day, one more segment after this, the CUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and expect to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, joining my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. Dave, how are you holding up? You're doing great, John. We have Arjun Tropa, CEO of SmartShift Entrepreneur. Even following cloud, we were just talking before you came on about some of the things you've done. We're first welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. It's theCUBE, we like to talk. We can just talk about anything. So let's talk about your entrepreneurial ventures. So you were the founder of a company that sold to our friends at GigaOM. Well, I founded a company which is a joint venture with GigaOM. And then we got acquired by what's called SmartShift now. And I appreciate the bump up in my title. I'm Chief Technology Officer. Okay, okay. But yeah, absolutely. End of the day, my eyes are... That's right, that's right. And I'm standing between us and drinks. So I'll try to keep this short. Okay, so tell us about SmartShift. So SmartShift was started with a simple mission. And our goal is to help organizations get to the cloud. So we have a lot of tools and technology we've built to help with customers' journey on that side. And once the customers get to the cloud, we provide 24 by seven managed services to keep them there. A lot of our IP is focused on really looking at the infrastructure and the source code organizations have and transforming them as required. So removing bottlenecks in the source code that they may have and identifying infrastructure, the challenges that they might face. But then helping them with all the automation and orchestration that's required to enable them to run in a secure or highly available or a scalable manner on AWS. So you guys are a premier partner of Amazon. So what's it like working with those guys? What's your role with those guys and how do you guys pass the puck back and forth? Sure, no, we've been working closely with Amazon for several years now. And what we've seen off late is a lot of our customers are self-selecting Amazon as their preferred infrastructure as a service provider. We work closely with Amazon. We get a deep insight into some of the newer technologies that they're looking to launch. We work with their solutions architects to understand more on the optimal way for customers to run effectively on AWS. And along the way we have projects for 10 of the top 20 global financial institutions, for example, running on AWS and having to pass through the security gauntlet at all these organizations is challenging. So really understanding and working with Amazon to see that we are set up in the optimal way. So we work closely with them on that side and there's a lot of lead sharing that happens. So a lot of their customers who need assistance, we're in a position to help us upset of those to get on to AWS. And then once they get there, then there's the 24 by seven monitoring and management to stay there. And that's one of the things from an operation side that we provide those organizations. Arjun, where are you having success? Can you talk about the applications that you're able to move? And then let's talk about some of the harder to move applications. Yeah, absolutely. So let's start with the harder to move, right? So we have a large set of technologies that are focused on SAP. So we can really help organizations. You know, and Nike, for example, is one of our customers, Exxon Mobile, Shell, BP. All of these are customers that we have with SAP footprints. And where we've seen the activity on that side, if you may, is getting them ready to handle the deluge of big data. So as they're looking at HANA, for example, which is a big push from SAP's perspective, optimizing their existing applications to take advantage of that is challenging. So normally, organizations do this in a highly manual way. So they'll have an army of people who show up and then kind of manually go through their code and start setting it up. But our tools can do that. What would normally take a year, we can do in a month. So we're starting to see activity on that side, but those systems tend to be so mission critical that they're looking to keep them in-house. But yeah, so, sorry, just to stop you there. You're talking about HANA apps? SAP applications that they're looking to kind of get enabled to handle big data. And they're looking to move those to HANA and the cloud simultaneously? Absolutely, get HANA in there. The cloud is something that we're seeing starting to take on that side. So as we're looking at the more difficult applications. I'm trying to determine if you're talking about sort of more of a green field approach. No, these are existing applications that they have. That they're now looking to say, okay, these applications might not be in a position to handle the big data deluge that they're starting to see. Or they want to get the intelligence out of the applications in an optimal way, and that's getting to be challenging. So we're coming in and helping them and as we're doing that, the cloud journey is beginning for a lot of those customers. So they got maybe a traditional BI system. Absolutely. And they want to move that to a more agile platform. So that's really where you're having success at. We had some questions on the chat earlier, but then it was just no text to me by the crew and back. They want me to ask you about Oracle. Sure. I mean, it's a similar kind of deal, right? So what we found is some of the mission critical applications, we view it as a comet, if you may. Thank you. So what happens on that side is that the head of the comet is probably your hardcore ERP system that you may have. But then the debris or the tail of the comet, that's where all the adjunct systems live. So your dev test systems, your staging systems, your pre-prod, your evaluation systems, all of those typically are the tail of the comet. So those are the ones that are starting to move very quickly. Oracle systems, we have several customers, a lot of the banks, for example, that I mentioned. They're now comfortable working with Oracle on AWS. So we've got a lot of deployments, both Oracle Standard, Oracle RDS, on AWS, as well as Oracle Enterprise, where they're getting more comfortable. So these are production systems? Large production systems that are running? We're talking thousands of employees. Thousands of employees, you know? Thousands of users hitting these systems. Absolutely. So when you migrate to the cloud, what's the process? So these are packaged applications, but there's a lot of customization involved, right? Sure. Does the customer have to freeze the code before they move? You know, it depends. So with a lot of our customers that have existing systems that they've identified, right? So if they know, and they're, in our opinion, further along the cloud journey, where they understand that, okay, here are the set of systems that we are ready to move to AWS, right, or the cloud. So what we see with them is they've usually understood what it takes to disrupt those systems. And what we've tended to do is to minimize that disruption is we'll stand up parallel environments for those. Then we'll get the data to move. So it's a very phased approach, and they can then see what that environment will look like in production before they actually flip the switch. So nobody wants to do big bang. Nobody wants to, for obvious reasons, destabilize existing systems. So oftentimes, they're constantly using them. They might be enhancing them as they go. But with AWS, you have the agility, the ability to be agile. So that's what we help a lot of organizations also set up. So we will set something up in parallel, and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't meet the performance benchmark, so metrics, you can scrap that and go back to the drawing board and evaluate it again. So you'll essentially replicate the system on Amazon, or maybe fine tune it for Amazon, and then move the data over. Well, of course you do testing between the cutover, but you'll ensure that there's adequate performance, security, you know, all this, okay. That's exactly it. And the two kinds of really shifts that customers do, right? So one is a simple rehost. So you know, that's where it tends to be more of, you know, tactical systems. It tends to be more of a financially driven play. So organizations are like, hey, I'm paying X number of dollars for hosting it here. When I move it, you know, there's all the added benefits of being in the cloud, but then there's an immediate savings to be had. The easier systems or the, you know, to your earlier question, those are the easier ones to move. The more difficult ones are the ones that need to be re-architected. And those are the ones to say that, okay, I'm not set up to horizontally scale, for example. Right, or I'm not set up for, in a highly available manner, what do I do? So we'll typically sit with the customer and then understand what that optimal architecture looks like. Then the next stage is typically automating and orchestrating a lot of that. So how do you make sure that it's one thing to stand up a system? But then it's another thing to make sure that it stays up and it's got the necessary automation. So if you need to make a copy of that system or that entire deployment for debugging purposes, you want to have a DevTest system that's a replica of production. You want to have something that you hand over to your sales guys for demos. A lot of that work starts to become possible. What are you finding with hybrid cloud? Are people doing hybrids? Are they sort of picking one or the other? Are they doing federated apps? Yeah, no, good question. So I think it depends on how we define hybrid. So we have a lot of customers that have existing systems on-premise that are not in a cloud environment. So for example, some of the banks that we've worked with had data and application and business logic still stuck in mainframes. So that's going to stay in the mainframe for the foreseeable future. But they have applications that are running or they want to get maybe the app here moved up into the cloud. So they can get some elasticity, they can get some of the processing work done there. So we see a lot more of that in a hybrid environment. So you'll have some components of your application running on AWS and then having tunnels that come down or direct connects coming down to talk to other on-premise systems. So that's typically what we're seeing. I tweeted out today, you're probably too young to remember, but back in the early 90s, there was a big trend called downsizing. Everybody was getting the applications off the mainframe. Essentially any application that could be moved off the mainframe was, unless the CIO was asleep at the wheel. And any application that couldn't be moved, wasn't moved, if they tried to move it, a lot of times they drive the company to the ground. So I feel like it's a modern day version of that. Just the big sucking sound is all those applications that don't need to be on-premise going right into the cloud. Is that a fair analogy? David, that is a fantastic analogy. So the DNA of our company comes from a company that used to do exactly that in the early 90s. It was called IQ. So a lot of the technology that we focus on essentially was moving stuff off of mainframes into state-of-the-art at that point, which is client server. And the client server became web technologies. The company ended up getting acquired by Razerfish for a billion and a half, right? Following Razerfish is refocusing on media, if you may. A lot of that IP was spun out and that's what basically formed the core of the IP of our company. And it's essentially looking at systems where you can go in and see how do I move this in a way that doesn't destabilize and it de-risks the overall project. So that's really where our DNA comes from. And I think the big difference is, I always use the term paving the cowpath. A lot of the downsizing was paving the cowpath, moving to microprocessor-based systems and client server. It feels like, in addition to the big sucking sound, you're getting a lot of incremental innovation in the cloud that you're seeing. And much, much more of a robust startup ecosystem. And that agility is just hard to get elsewhere. All right, June, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. I want to get your final take on the show here. For the folks out there, put the bumper sticker on the car as it drives away from this year. What does it say? What does the AWS re-invent conference say this year? What's done the bumper sticker? It's even bigger and even better if that was even possible. And next year, I mean, at this scale, they have to figure out how to auto-scale conferences. Because we're definitely bursting at the seams. Bursting at the seams, awesome. Awesome stuff, great job. We're here live at theCUBE, rounding out day two. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our wrap up of day two right after this short break. Thank you.