 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with David Nicholson. We are running one of the industry's largest, most important hybrid tech events this year with AWS and it's enormous ecosystem of partners. We've been talking yesterday and today about the next decade in cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Henson, the vice president of Parvada Solutions. Welcome back to the program. Thank you, glad to be here. So talk to us about what's going on at Parvada. What are some of the things that you're focused on in the energy space? So for us, specifically, we're looking at energy as it's redefining itself, right? It's no longer just oil and gas, it's no longer just coal. It's renewable energies, it's carbon capture, it's retail energy, it's power generation. We're trying to understand as this energy industry redefines itself, how companies are starting to participate in there and how technologies are really helping them as they redefine their business models and go through their digital transformations. I was doing some reading that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world and will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Talk to me about the partnership with AWS. So our partnership goes back quite a while. We were one of their early partners. We saw the early potential of AWS jumped in, both feet in the deep end, and have had a wonderful partnership ever since. More recently, over the last couple of three years, as they've really matured their definition of energy, we've been right there with them, partnering them on a number of different projects across multiple industries, and really getting excited about how they define their journey going forward in the energy industry. We're in such a state of flux right now, we have been for quite a while, but talk about the energy transition. What is that? Why now? Are we all ready? Oh, great question. So the energy transition is really about us as a society looking to new sources of energy over fossil fuels. 83% of the world's energy today comes from fossil fuels, about 30% from coal, a little over 50% from oil and gas itself. We as a world are looking at this as energy that can't continue to be our primary source. It has been a pivotal source of energy getting us here. It is cheap, it is reliable, it is abundant, it's very good at what it does today. However, it's causing harm, so we need to address that. So what we're doing looking forward is helping companies understand what does it mean to be net zero? What does it mean to monitor and capture your carbon? What does it mean to transition your business model from a pure oil and gas play to one that's looking at new energies like carbon capture, like wind, like solar? So we're helping all these companies go through that journey as they figure out those next steps. So where does Paraveda come into the picture? What, take this down to the level of an engagement with an energy company. Who are the people that you parachute in? Sure, to engage with a customer. Well, let's talk about oil and gas first. The most near term best solution that we're seeing is really about operational excellence. How can I better run my business so I reduce my footprint? Am I having better maintenance to reduce accidental spills? Am I controlling my unexpected emissions, like flaring? How can I use technology to help me run my business better? Then we have companies in the retail energy who are looking at their customer base who are purchasing large amounts of energy who they themselves are striving to be net zero by 2050, 2060, and creating solutions for them so they can begin to capture their carbon solutions. So we typically parachute in a couple of different types of groups. Paraveda is both an advisory services firm and a technology services firm. So based upon where a company is in their journey, we may start more in the strategy space, working with the C-suite. What does it mean to build and structure an organization to strategically go after this new energy space? Or perhaps they're focusing more on operational excellence. We're trying to figure out how to leverage technology and process to run their business better, more cost effectively, more importantly, more ESG friendly. ESG is a big buzzword these days. Are you talking about conversations at the C-suite level? Has it always been there or is that something that with climate change and all the things going on, you think of Hurricane Ida, the drought in California, the fires, the flooding in Washington, is that something that is now more of a focus at the C-suite level? I think it has to be. Global warming first became mainstream back in the 70s. When we first started realizing there was going to be an impact from our use of fossil fuels. Originally, it wasn't quite sure the scientific data wasn't there necessarily to support it, but now we're starting to see that there is a climate change. Whether or not it's caused by fossil fuels is a debate for another day, but we are starting to see that. As a result, we're also starting to see a lot of pressures coming from very different areas of our world. The financial industry wanted to become a lot more transparent about their investment holdings, which means they're looking at their portfolio and choosing whether or not to put investment into capital projects, which is the heart of oil and gas companies. We're seeing social pressures, not just with campaigns and protests, but where people are choosing to work. The products they're choosing to buy, the brand that they're using to associate their identity, and that's also creating pressures for the C-suite to start to pay attention because that impacts their whole pipeline of talent. So I think we're starting to see that because of those impacts becoming much more far-reaching than just some scientific publications. Well, the focus on people is critical. You know, we talk about often people process technology, but the people focus is critical, especially since this has such, from an optics perspective, global visibility. Yes, people is critically important, not just from a talent acquisition, but also from a talent development perspective. These organizations are going to be going through some pretty dramatic changes. They're going to be leveraging technology they're already familiar with, perhaps some processes they're already familiar with, but they're ultimately moving into new industries, new competitive markets. So you need to not only be able to recruit the top talent by promoting an image that people can align to, but also be able to build that talent internally so that you can make them effective as you go through these business model transformations. You know, there's been a theme that we've seen just in the first full day today here at AWS re-invent, and that theme is that the AWS ecosystem is thriving and critical to the success of what AWS is developing. You've given a great example of an organization, your organization that connects or bridges the divide between technology and the value that technology can bring. You said it at the outset, you're not going in and talking technology first, typically, it's let's talk about strategy, let's talk about people and culture, and then let's find the tools that are best suited to leverage to achieve the goals. Because you start out talking about energy, so which compute instance do I need for that exactly? Somebody has to connect those dots. Absolutely, that's what I love about AWS. They offer a broad suite of services in their overall cloud infrastructure that allow you to start in multiple areas. Let's start with one of the very first projects that we got into that really focused on operational excellence and improving how an organization ran its business. This is a public reference, so I'm going to go ahead and say it, we did work with AWS, partnering with them, at ExxonMobil to help them redefine how they collaborate with their engineering, procurement and construction companies. So this was a cloud platform that allowed them to change the way they interface with those vendors as they took on these large capital projects. We were able to take time out of the system, help that organization run more profitably, which allows them to invest in that new energy technology. Then we moved to retail energy where we've been looking at a large adoption in IoT technologies. That IoT capability of AWS allows organizations to monitor their infrastructure, understand how their equipment is performing, where carbon emissions might be occurring or other greenhouse gashins might be occurring, and bringing that in. Then you bring in the AL and ML stack capabilities. One of the leading ways of detecting emissions right now is image machine learning around emissions, looking at satellite photos to see if there are changes in the atmosphere to where there might be a methane leak. So all these technologies work together to help us derive better answers for how to be a better energy company and how to be a more environmentally friendly corporation. What's the customer flywheel like? Often we talk with AWS, they talk about really, we start backwards, we start from the customer, we work forward, the customer obsession, we saw the NASCAR slides this morning of all the logos, I'm sure many more that didn't fit, but talk to me about the alignment between Paraveda, your focus on the customers, how they help you guys innovate and create new solutions. I imagine similar culturally to AWS. That's one of my favorite aspects about being a premier partner with AWS is the cultural alignment. We have a process that we call right to left thinking. It's beginning with business outcomes before we ever look at the technology, ever start to design the solution, ever start to build that solution. Are we meeting the end user's needs? And where that cultural alliance with AWS is it aligns with their working backwards process where they sit with their primary end users and pick some point in the future and say if I were to do a press release today, announcing the solution that we just built, what would it say? And then if I had questions, I wanted people to be able to find answers to, the frequently asked questions, what would be in those frequently asked questions and what would those answers look like? So those two approaches to starting with the right to left, business outcome focus, helps us begin with the most important thing, what we call jobs to be done. So we're not working on a symptom, we're working on the actual problem. And that's where we really align with AWS and our cultures have helped us focus on the most critical issues at hand. So we've talked a lot about energy and your affiliation with AWS in these efforts. But tell us a little more about Paraveda in terms of just in a more broad sense. What's the history? Sure, so it's the pitch. Yeah, absolutely. Paraveda has been around for over 18 years. It started with a vision that our mission should be about developing people to their fullest potential. Start there and everything else will come. Since then we've developed into a both a strategy services firm and a technology services firm where we want to bring together what we consider to be the three primary components of an enterprise architecture. Basically business, product, technology all wrapped around strategy. And so we want to focus on those areas and we use those to help deliver projects. So whether it's technology, whether we're helping travel and hospitality companies that you probably would recognize or we're working with sports leagues to help read brand, we're working in the agricultural industry to change how they capture data from equipment in the field to working in the medical industry, redefining the way that doctors work with their patients by capturing their entire conversation for them. So they're spending less time translating their notes instead of valuing our notes to ensure top quality healthcare to working energy. So we're based in North America. We have 10 offices in the US, one in Toronto. We're about 750 strong and we are really focused on deliberate growth versus just exponential growth. Well that outcomes focus is absolutely critical as you talked about earlier for every organization. And one of the things that we learned during the last 22 months is that real time data access is no longer a nice to have. It's absolutely essential. But also we're also seeing every company is becoming a data company. But they have to learn how, how can we work with technology partners like AWS like Paribetta to be able to capture the value that it unlock it quickly so that we can iterate and be able to deliver, especially in this interesting climate that we're in and pivot and pivot and pivot. So that outcomes focus that Paribetta has is really critical for enabling businesses in every industry to be able to survive and thrive these days. You said it well, we agree with you completely. What we've designed at Paribetta is what we call the modern data enterprise where it looks at the holistic vision of becoming a data company. Everything from governance to technology choices to how I structure my organization to have the right roles, the right leadership, the right executive support and thinking about the full picture of delivering a successful data platform so that we can really focus on something that one of my mentees calls data liquidity. It's the ability of a company to convert their data to value as quickly as possible. In order to do that, you have to come at it from multiple angles. You do and that's a competitive differentiator these days. Yes, absolutely. It's more than just let me bring you a data lake and hook up some data pipelines. Again, if that's where you start, you're probably not starting in the right place. We want to start with the end users. What questions are they answering? What jobs are they trying to get done? And then moving back and say, well, what data do we need and what form do we need and how do we present it to them so they can do their job extremely well and create their own competitive differentiation. Right, that's really critical. Last question is we have just a few seconds left. Here, Alan is so much announced today alone. This is like David said, the first full day of coverage at ReInvent. But from a visionary perspective, what are some of the things that we can expect to see from Power of Beta as we finish the year 2021 and enter 2022? So let me speak a little selfishly to energy. What you're going to see is us as an organization are going to work side by side with AWS Energy to help shape the picture. What does it mean to be an energy company? As these industries start to converge, we're going to build more holistic platforms, more holistic approaches so organizations can figure out, how do I still do the business I need to do today to fund the business I need to be tomorrow? And you're going to start to see us bringing better messaging to that on both strategy, technology, and product approaches. Awesome, Alan, thank you for joining David and me talking about what's going on with Power of Beta. Awesome approach, I love the people focus, great stuff. I love it, Lisa, David, thank you for having me. Oh, our pleasure. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.