 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE virtual. We're not there in person, but we're going to do our job with the best remote we possibly can, we're wall-to-wall coverage on the AWS re-invent site as well as on-demand on theCUBE's new 365 platform. We've got some great power panel analysts here to dig in and discuss partner day for AWS, what it means for the customer, what it means for the enterprise, the buyer, the people trying to figure out who to buy from, and possibly new partners. How can they re-engineer and re-invent their company to partner better with Amazon, take advantage of the benefits, but ultimately get more sales. We've got Tim Crawford, Sarbite, Joel, and Dave Vellante, friends of theCUBE. We all know him on Twitter. You guys, the Posse, theCUBE Posse, thanks for coming on. I'm sure it's getting entertaining and... Wish we were hanging out drinking beer. Oh my gosh, that'd be awesome. It's great to be on theCUBE again. Glad to be here. Guys, great to have you on. I wanted to bring you on because it's a unique cross-section of perspectives. And this isn't, this is from the end user perspective. And Tim, you've been talking about the CXOs for years. You've expert in this. Sarbite, you're taking more from a cloud perspective. You've seen under the hood what's happening. Let's all put it together. If you're a partner, first question to the group. I'm a partner. Do I win with Amazon or do I lose with Amazon? First question. Tim, you want to go? Yeah, I'll jump in. I'll say, regardless, you win. You win with Amazon. I think there's a lot of opportunity for partners with Amazon. You have to pick your battles though. You have to find the right places where you can carve out a space that isn't too congested, but also isn't really kind of fettered with a number of incumbents. And so if you're looking at the enterprise space, I think that there is a ton of potential because let's face it, Amazon doesn't have all of the services packaged in a way that the enterprise can consume. And I think that leaves a lot of fertile ground for SIs and ISVs to jump in and be able to connect those dots. So I'd say it's win-win. Star B, if you're so cohesively on stage, Jesse's coming out talking about Chai, the chips and data. If you're a vendor, an ISV, you're a startup or you're a company trying to reinvent. How do you see Amazon as a partner? Yeah, I see Amazon as a big market for me. It's increased by sort of TAM, if you will. The one big sort of trend is that the lines between technology providers and service providers are blurred. Actually, it's flipping. I believe it will flip at some time. We will put consume technology from service providers. They are becoming technology providers actually. They are not just being pipe and power kind of cloud. They are purely software, very high sort of highly constructed machinery if you will behind the scenes with software. That's what Amazon is, a big machine, if you will. And you can leverage that and then you can help your customers achieve their business goals as a partner. I think it's a win-win. And the role of actually SIs is changing, I believe. SIs, I thought they were getting a little sidetracked by the service providers but now they have to actually change their roles the way they used to get these shrink-wrapped software and then install and configure and all that stuff. Now it's in cloud and they have to focus a little more on services. And some of the SIs are building tools for multi-cloud consumption and all that. So things are changing under this whole big shift to cloud. I mean, I think if you're an SI and you're lifting and shifting, you make a few bucks and helping people do that and deal with the tech. But I think with the real money is the business transformation. And you find the technology is there. It's another tool in the bag. But if you can change your operating model, that's going to drive telephone numbers to the bottom line. That's a boardroom discussion. That's where the real dollars are for SIs. That's why guys like Accenture are leading into the cloud big time. All right, so go ahead, Tim. I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I think that's one aspect that we have to call out is you can be one of those partners that is focused on the transaction and you'll be successful doing that, but you're absolutely right. If you focus on the long game, I think that is just like I said, completely fertile ground. And there are a lot of opportunities because historically Amazon was a Lego parts type of cloud provider, right? They provided you with the basic building blocks, which is great for web scale and startups, not so good for enterprise. And so now Amazon is starting to put together and package parts so it's more consumable by enterprises, but you still need that help. And as Sarpit just mentioned, you also have to consider that Amazon's not the only aspect that you're going to be using. You're going to be using other providers too. And so I think this again is where partners, they pick a primary and then they also bring in the others where appropriate. All right, I want to get into this whole riff. I have a Jerry Chen on day one. He came on a special fireside chat with me and we talked about the cloud errors before cloud, Amazon and now I'll call it post-COVID because we've seen this kind of whole new, in the cloud kind of generation. And so he said, okay, this pre-cloud, when you had Amazon generation where it's lift and shift, a lot of hybrid, and then you have everything's in the cloud, like a snowflake kind of thing. And he kind of called it the reptiles versus the amphibians. You're on sea, you're inland, you're hybrid, and then you're all you're in the water. I mean, so he kind of went on, took that another level meaning that, okay, there's always going to be hybrid, but there's a unique differentiation for being all in the cloud. You're seeing different patterns. Amazon certainly has an advantage. You see DevOps guru, that's just mining the data of their entire platform and saying, okay, yeah, do this. There's advantages for being in the cloud that aren't available hybrid. So amphibian on land and sea hybrid and then in the cloud. How do you guys see that? If you're a partner, you want to be on the new generation, what's the opportunity to capture value? You know, hybrid certainly co-exists, but in the new era. You remember Scott McNeely used to talk about car makers and car dealers, and of course, son's gone, but he used to say, we want to be a car maker. It's car dealers, they got big houses and big boats, but we're going to be a car maker. Well, I think it's some similarities here. I mean, there's a lot of money to be made as a car dealer, but you see companies like Dell, HPE, you know, they want to be car makers, obviously Google and Microsoft, but there aren't going to be a lot of successful, really big car makers in this game. Yeah, I believe, I believe, I always call that Amazon is the maker's cloud, right? So they are very developer friendly. They were very developer friendly for startups. As Tim said earlier, but now they are very developer friendly and operations friendly now actually in a way for enterprises, I believe. And the whole, the jerry cans sort of, are you all in cloud, are you sitting just in the dry land right now? I think every sort of organization is in a different sort of mature, different maturity level, but I think we are all going towards a technology consumption as a service. Mostly I think it will be off-prem. It can be on-prem in future because of Edge and all that. And on that note, I think Edge will be dominated by tier one cloud providers like crazy. People who think Edge will be nominated by telcos and all that. I think they're just smoking enough mirrors. If I may interject for a second for the folks watching that might not be old enough to know who Scott McNeely is, he's the founder of Sun Microsystems, which was bought by Oracle years ago. Yeah, basically because of mini-computed data. There's a lot of young kids out there that don't even know who Scott McNeely is. But remember. Now do your homework. Scott McNeely. You have to know who Scott McNeely also said, and because Bill Gates was dominant, Microsoft owns the tires and the gas too, and they want to own the road. So remember, Microsoft was dominating at that time. So Tim, gas, data, is that, I mean, Amazon might have everything there. I was going to go back to the comment. McNeely came out with some really, really good analogies over his tenure at Sun. And Sun had some great successes, but unfortunately cloud is not as simplistic as buying a car and having the dealership and the ecosystem of gas and tires and the rest. You have to think about the whole journey. And that journey is incredibly complicated, especially for the enterprise that's coming from legacy footprints, monolithic application stacks, and trying to understand how to make that transition. It's almost in a way more analogous to you're used to riding a bike and now you're going to operate a semi. And so how do you start to put all of the pieces into place to be able to make that transition? And it's not trivial. You have to figure out how your culture changes, how your processes changes. There are a lot of connected parts. It's not as simple as the ecosystem of tires and gas. We have to think about how that data stream fits in with other data streams, where analytics are going to be done. What about tying back to that system of record that is going to stay on a legacy platform? Oh, and by the way, some of that has to still stay on-prem. It can't move to the cloud yet. So we have this really complicated, diverse environment that we have to manage, and it's only getting more complicated. And I think that's where the opportunity comes in for the SIs and ISVs is step into that, understand that journey, understand the transitions. I don't believe that enterprises, at least in the near term, let alone short term, will be all in cloud. I think that that's more of a fantasy than reality. There is a hybrid state that is going to be transitory for some period of time, and that's where the big opportunity is. I think you're right on, Tim. I think just to double down on that point, just to bring that to another level is, Dave, you remember back in the days when PCs were the boom, many computers where most clients there was just getting started, there was a whole hype cycle on hard drives, right? Hard drives were the thing. Now, if you look at today, there's more observability startups than I could count, right? At this point, this monolithic breakdown and componentizing, decomposing monolithic apps or environments with microservices is complex. So to me, the thing that I see is that, that I can relate to is when I was breaking in in the 80s, you had the mainframes as being the young gun. I'm like, okay, mainframes are old. That's monolithic client servers, a different paradigm than you had PCs and internet working. I think all of that change is happening so fast right now. It's not like over a 10 years to Tim's point. It's like mainframes to iPhones, it's happening in like a three years, right? Imagine crunching all that complexity and change down to a short window. I think Amazon has kind of brought that to, I'm just riffing on that, but that's fine. Yeah, you're absolutely right, John. But I think there's another piece and we can use a very specific example to show this. Another piece that we have to look at is we're trying to simplify that environment. And so a good place to simplify that is when we look at serverless and specifically around databases. Historically, I had to pick the database architecture that the applications had right on. Then I have to have the infrastructure underneath and manage that appropriately so that I have both the performance as well as security, as well as architecture. And I have to scale that as needed. Today, you can get databases as a service and not have to worry about the underpinnings. You just worry about the applications and how those data streams connect to other data streams. And so that's the direction that I think things are going is, and we see this across the enterprise. We're looking for those packaged, packaged might be a generalized term, but we're looking for a more packaged scenario and opportunity for enterprises rather than just the most basic building blocks. We have to start putting together the preformed applications and then use those as larger chunks. And this is the opportunity for SIs. I was talking before about business transformation. If you take Tim's database example, you don't need somebody anymore to set up your database, to tune it. I mean, that's becoming autonomous. But if you think about the way data pipelines work and the way organizations are structured where everything goes into this monolithic data lake and it's like generic content coming in, the generic data where the business owner has to get in line and beg a data scientist or a quality engineer or to ingest a new data source. And it's just like the old data warehouse days where I think there's tremendous opportunities for SIs to go and completely re-architect the data models. Sarbjit, this is something you and I were talking about on Twitter. It's why I like what Snowflake's doing. It's kind of what AWS is trying to do with the elastic glue views. But there's a whole business transformation opportunity for SIs, which I just think is huge number. I think we all talk, go ahead, sorry. Now if I finish your thought. Yeah, I think we all talk about, we all agree on one thing, that the future is hybrid for, at least for next 10 years, if not more. And hybrid is hard. The data proximity is very important. That means latency between different workloads, right? That's super important. And I talk about this all the time, almost in every conversation I have about such scenario, is that there are three types of applications. Every enterprise has systems of record, systems of engagement, and the systems of innovation. And my theory of cloud consumption tells me that sooner or later systems of record will move into SAS world. That's how I see it. There's no other way around, I believe. And the systems of engagement or systems of differentiation, sometimes I call it, they will leverage a lot of platform as a service. And in that context, I've said it many times, that to be a best of the breed platform as a service, you have to be best of the breed infrastructure as a service provider. And that's Amazon. And that's also a zero to some extent. And Google is trying to do that, too. So the feature sort of a gap between number one cloud and two and three is pretty huge, I believe. I think Amazon is doing great. Data democratization through serverless. I just love serverless for that. I think serverless- Serverless is a winning formula. There's no doubt about serverless. I totally agree. But I think one of the things that Amazon has done is they've taken serverless. They brought, they're putting all the IaaS and the chips and then moving all the value up to the service layer, which gives them the advantage over others because everyone else is trying to compete down here, they're going to be purpose-built. If you look at what Apple's doing with the chips and what Amazon's doing, they're going to kind of have this chip to chip scenario and then the middleware in between is the containerization and the microservices and Lambda. So if you're a developer, it's programmable at that point. That could be a lock spec, I think, for Amazon. It absolutely could be, John, but I think there's another aspect here that we have to touch on, especially as we think about partners and where the opportunities come in. And that is that we often talk about non-cloud to cloud, how to get from on-prem to cloud. But the piece that you also have to bring into the conversation is the edge-to-cloud continuum. And so I think if you start to look at some of the announcements this week from AWS, you start looking at some of the new instance types that are very AI focused. You look at the two new form factors for outposts, which allows you to bring cloud to a smaller footprint within an on-premises situation, different local zones. And then the other piece that I think is really interesting is their announcements around ECS and EKS anywhere, being able to take cloud and Kubernetes across the board. And so the challenge here is, as I mentioned earlier, complexity is paramount. It's a concern for enterprises just moving to cloud. You start layering in the edge-to-cloud continuum and it just, it gets exponentially more complicated. And so Amazon's not gonna be the one to help you go through that, not because they can't, but frankly, just the scale of help that is gonna be needed amongst enterprises is just not there. And so this is really where I think the opportunity lies for the SIs and ISVs and partners. Well, you heard how Jassy defined a hybrid, John, in the article that you wrote when you did your one-on-one with him, Tim, in the analyst call, where you answered my question and then I want to bring in Antonio Neary's comment. But Jassy basically said, look, we see cloud bring, we're going to bring AWS to the edge and we see data centers, this is another edge node. And Antonio Neary, after HPE's pretty good quarter, came out and said, well, we heard the public cloud provider talking about hybrid, welcome. You know, I can't- Yeah, welcome to the party. Yeah, they were first acquainted. And then Gelbin here jumped on that big time. But yeah, look it, hybrid, Tim nailed it. Complexity is the evil, is friction, is one friction area. If complexity can be mastered by the edge provider, closest to the customer, that's going to be valuable for partners. And then we can do that. Amazon's going to have to continue to remove the friction in putting that together, which is why I'm nervous about their channel partners, because if I'm a partner, I ask myself, how do I make money with Amazon? At the end of the day, it's money-making, right? So how can I be successful? Am I going to sell more in the marketplace? Will the customer consume it through there? Is it friction or is it complex? So this notion of complexity and friction becomes a double-edged sword, Tim, on both sides. So we've got five minutes left. Let's talk about the bottom side, complexity, friction. So you're absolutely right, John. And the other thing that I would say is for the partner, you have to look beyond what Amazon is selling today. Look at where the customers are going. And Dave, I think you and I were both in an analyst session with Andy Jassy several years ago, where one of the analysts asked the question, so what's your perspective on hybrid cloud? And his response candidly was, well, we have this particular service. And really what he was talking to is a service that helps you on board to Amazon's public cloud. There was not an acknowledgement of hybrid cloud at the time. But look at how things have changed just in a short few years. And I understand where Jassy's coming from, but this just exemplifies the fact that if you're a partner, you have to look beyond what Amazon is saying and think to how the customer is evolving, how the enterprise is evolving and get yourself ahead of them. That will position you best for both today and as you're building for the future. That's a great point. Dave, complexity on buying, I'm a customer. You can throw me a marketplace all you want, but if I'm not going to be tied into my procurement, how I'm consuming technology to Tim's point, Amazon isn't the only game in town. I got other suppliers. Yeah, well certainly for some technology suppliers, they basically can bring their on-prem estate if it's big enough into the cloud. What is big enough? That's a big question here. Guys like, Red Hat's big enough. We know that Nutanix, Pure, they're sort of the next layer down. Can they, do they have enough of a customer base that they can bring into the cloud, create that abstraction layer? And then you got the born in the cloud guys, Snowflake, Columio are two good examples. So you've got the technology partners and then the SIs and consultants. And again, I see that as the really big opportunity as Tim points out. Amazon is acknowledging that hybrid is real, in a newly defined way. They're going out to the edge. Fine, you want to call data center to the edge. How are they going to support those installations? How are they going to make sure that they're running properly, that they're connected to the business process? Those are, that's a SI white space, huge. Guys, we have to wrap it up right now, but I just, and we'll get everyone to go a little lightning round, quick sound bite on the phrase with them, which stands for what's in it from me. So if I'm a partner, I'm a customer, I look at Amazon, I think, what's in it from me? What's in it from me as a customer? What do I get out of this? Yeah, having done like more than 100 data center audits and I've seen what mess is out there and having done quite a few migrations to cloud, migrations are the messiest piece, right? And it doesn't matter if you're migrating 10% or 20 or 30, it doesn't matter how much you're migrating. It's a messy piece. And you cannot do with our partners that work actually. You need that know-how. You need to infuse that education into your organization, how to consume cloud, how to make sense of it, how you change your processes and how you train your people. So it touches all the products, people and processes. So all three tiers, you got to have partners on your side to make it. Hey, I'll go quick. And Tim, I'll give you the last word. Complexity is cash. Chaos is cash. Follow the complexity you'll make cash. Yeah, you said it, Dave. I think any way that you can help an enterprise simplify and if you're the enterprise, if you're the customer, look for those partners that going to help you simplify the journey over time, that's where the opportunity really lies. Okay guys, expert power panel here on KubeLive program part of AWS re-invent virtual coverage, bringing you all the analysis from the experts, digital transformations here. What's in it for me as a partner customer, help me make some money, master complexity and serve my customer. This is the Kube, thanks for watching. From around the globe, it's the Kube.