 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to Excel London, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our day long coverage of the AWS Summit in London, 12,000 people here. It's a summit, it's like a mini reinvent. Dominic Deacon is here, he's the sales director for cloud and alliances at CenturyLink. Dominic, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks very much for having me. So what's going on here at the show? What's CenturyLink showing? What are the conversations like? And what are you guys up to? Well, it's been a fantastic day for us here at CenturyLink. We've got a big stand presence out on the floor here. It's been fantastic to see the vast number of people here today. And fascinating from all different types of industries, different types of technology companies, manufacturing companies, it's just a vast different array of people and some fantastic conversations on the stand today. So cloud computing when it came in, a lot of people sort of didn't understand it. A lot of people ignored it. A lot of people thought they could replicate it. But now it's starting to come into focus now that we're in whatever it is, 15 years in, 12, 13 years in. It's been a real tailwind for your business. Describe why that is, where you fit in the value chain of the ecosystem. Sure. So, you know, CenturyLink is a global IT network technology organization. So we operate in many, many different countries, 60-odd countries globally. And for us, the value proposition with CenturyLink is around connecting customers to AWS, cloud. It's around then helping do the migration and transition of workloads to AWS and the cloud. And then for us, a key part of our heritage is managed services. So then we are able, once applications have been and workloads have been transitioned to AWS, we're able to manage those as a managed service provider for the organizations. And a lot of enterprises now are on this digital transformation journey. You know, a lot of industries today are being disrupted by new entrants and we've seen a lot of those over the past kind of five to 10 years. Probably Naima, you know, 25 of them off the top of my head if we wanted to right now. So industries are being disrupted and we're there to really help organizations in that digital transformation journey through connecting, through migration, and then through the management aspect. So the early days of cloud, of course you saw a lot of startups and a lot of innovators moving to the cloud. You saw large corporations maybe doing a little shadow IT. You saw IT maybe throwing up some crapplications. You know, he used to jokingly call them in the cloud. Now the cloud is essentially running, you know, any workload, any application, any anywhere in the world. What are you seeing in terms of some of the trends in terms of what people are doing with the cloud, what they're putting in the cloud, who are they? What's your customer base? Yeah, I mean it's been a fascinating journey over the last kind of 10 years really. You know, I remember going back 10 years ago and you know, enterprise organizations were, yeah, this cloud thing, not sure, they'd give you a million reasons why they wouldn't do it and then you'd have some parts of the organization, generally, you know, lines of businesses that were, that were a bit stuck with their own IT departments around speed and agility. Hey, we need this now, but you guys are telling me it's gonna take four months just to deliver some servers and then another month to build it out. I can't wait six months to be able to, you know, accelerate our business so we need a different way. So that's when we started seeing the shadow IT aspects and especially with AWS. Right, well, I've got a credit card. I can get the resources that I need within 30 seconds. I've just logged in, right, I've got all the resources here, right, now we can accelerate and now we can go and that really started the revolution, but also became a bit of a challenge to enterprises because now they've got unregulated IT spend, we've got lots of different silos of applications that starts to become a challenge to manage that at scale, which really started to turn enterprises into understanding, well actually, digital transformation for us, cloud fixes are the core part of those strategies. Okay, so now let's start bringing that in, how do we start utilizing that to the best of our ability and we've seen that shift over the last 10 years to really get to a point where I are today with some really cool things happening with, you know, large scale enterprise mission critical applications now being deployed in AWS. SAP ERP applications, for example, 10 years ago, I don't think anyone would have realized that you could have run that in AWS and here we are today, where you can. I don't know if you saw the keynote this morning, but the guy from Sainsbury said that they moved an Oracle Rack instance into AWS and I got a lot of questions for him, but he ran off and there were a number of examples of Oracle, it's not trivial to move Oracle in, but SAP, of course, is not as antagonistic with regards to AWS as Oracle are, but so there's a better partnership there. So you're seeing those types of applications now move to the cloud. What's the motivation for people doing that? Are they able to change the operating model? How are they able to affect their business by doing that? Well, I think the fundamental change in the last maybe five years is that the boards of the enterprise organizations have actually woken up to the fact that we can start delivering transformation at speed and at scale, utilizing services like AWS and the broad ecosystem of specialist partners that sit in and around AWS to be able to deliver that value and the board and steering committees of the large enterprise customers are kind of sat there going, right, the time is now, disruption is quite prevalent in our marketplace now, so we need to change, we need to become more agile, we need to change our cost base, we need to change our operations model, we need to be thinking more about the customer experience and how do we deliver new services quickly to remain relevant and you kind of have this tidal wave of everything aligning and the realization that there is a way to be able to do this and realize the benefits of that and I think that's really what we've seen in the last few years or so. Now, you guys obviously, talk about your AWS partnership. How did it start? How's it going? What's the relationship like? What's that journey been like? Centralink, as I said before, is provides global network services and also provides hosting, cloud and managed services that combine with that with a security wrap and a managed security service that goes across network infrastructure and applications. That's the core of our business globally. Let's say for us, at Centralink we made a pivot around three or four years ago, which was to say, do we really need to own our data centers anymore or do we just want to be able to provide the expertise and services that come from a data center? So rather than building all of our own cloud infrastructure and trying to take that to market, actually what we are experts in is being able to deliver value with that infrastructure from an application standpoint and being able to manage that and optimize it in the most economical model to be a service provider for those customers. So we've been on that journey ourselves for probably the last three or four years and that led us up to the point where a lot of our customers were asking us, hey, I've got some applications and some kind of traditional hosting with Centralink, but we're also looking at AWS for some of our newer workloads. Hey, Centralink, are you able to help us across both of these? And then we kind of saw the magnification of the hybrid IT kind of platform come in. I've got applications that I need to sit in a private cloud or some legacy infrastructure. I'm also looking at my AWS public cloud and actually what I need is a service provider to be a consistent provider across all of these different infrastructure types now as we transition. So Centralink made that pivot. We joined forces with AWS about three years ago now. It's a fantastic partnership for us and we deliver all of those core capabilities that we have for years with the AWS platform as part of their partner ecosystem delivering that value for our mutual customers. So Mac Armand said this morning in the keynote that he firmly believes, AWS firmly believes that over time the vast majority of workloads are going to live in the public cloud. Having said that, he said something that you didn't hear AWS recognize several years ago, which was hybrid. You just mentioned hybrid. And then he laid out a number of things that they're doing for folks on-prem. I think you mentioned snowball, which I think was one of the first ones. You know, and then a number of other ones, of course outposts, grab a little attention. So my point of this question is that, and it's sort of observation, and then question is AWS never say never when it comes to AWS. You know, years ago people said, no, they'll never do on-prem, never do hybrid. Of course now they're going to become a leader in hybrid. We've predicted that on theCUBE for a while. There's also this world of multi-cloud. Of course AWS doesn't want to talk about, you know, non other clouds, but there's a multi-cloud world every show you go to. Everybody's talking about multi-cloud. It's a huge opportunity for you. I've contended that multi-cloud is largely a symptom of multi-vendor and line of business and shadow IT. And as we said now, we've got this mess out there that IT's got to deal with. But it's an opportunity, you know, chaos is cash for you guys. So what are your thoughts on multi-cloud? How real is it? How far are we into the journey of multi-cloud? Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question. And actually we see that more and more in the enterprise space now. I think as the thinking in enterprises is matured, there's a realization that, you know, it's not always that one thing fits everything. So it's about understanding, you know, the workload that I've got today and where's the best platform for that workload to reside on that delivers the scale, the performance, from a compliance perspective, am I compliant with this workload and which platform is the most compliant around that? So there's a number of factors that come into play which leads to, you know, some platforms being, we call it the best execution venue, comes the best venue to deploy that application. You know, public cloud is fantastic and provides the agility, speed, innovation, but sometimes isn't necessarily the right platform for some of the legacy workloads that actually just need to transition out of a customer's data center because they don't want a data center anymore. So there is movements today where, you know, as that market's maturing, that organizations are sort of staying themselves, well, I need a staging post to now understand what I do with these workloads before I can then do a level of migration and transition and refactoring so that I can get to private cloud. But generally that comes down to, you know, sometimes it's capex avoidance. I don't want to refresh my whole data center. I actually don't want to own bricks and mortar anymore. For us, we just want to be able to consume a service under an SLA that's outcome driven. So that's where we start seeing the hybrid cloud model and that's a mixture of private cloud and sometimes a mixture of public clouds as well. Sometimes enterprises look at it and go, well, if I put all my eggs in one basket, does that plus my risk compliance? Or do I split it out and, you know, basically have two public clouds that we mitigate the risk and can move one workload into another? There's a number of different factors that are driving that, but generally it's around risk mitigation, speed and economics. I'm glad you brought that up too. And as well, horses for courses, you know, you were saying that sometimes there's a workload that fits best here. So we've predicted in theCUBE that eventually Amazon will get into that business. You'll see because once it gets big enough and if it's real, Amazon will have a solution because their customers will ask for it. Absolutely. Amazon says they're customer driven. They actually are, the customers. Enough customers say that's how things like Outpost occur. So take us back to sort of what's happening in your business today, where you see the sort of next, you know, near term to midterm going for CenturyLink. Sure. So, you know, for us, our focus is on really, you know, delivering great customer outcomes and customer experience. And it's about delivering the value add in partnership with AWS. So combining the strength of Centrelink with the strength of AWS delivers great customer experience. Also delivers great customer business outcomes, which keeps, you know, our mutual customers together with us for many, many years, hopefully. And that's really for us focusing on delivering, you know, our core innovation on top of AWS around how we deliver our automated managed services. We're looking at simplification, automation of operational functions for our customers because if we can streamline that, the economics become better, SLAs increase, their business productivity and performance increases along with that. And it's a mutual win-win-win for all three parties involved, which is what we're all striving for. Well, as somebody once said, the network is the computer, you guys are the network. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Dominic. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, live from London, AWS Summit. We'll be right back.