 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. Really excited to be digging into some of the cloud discussions. I've got two guests joining me now, one from across the pond and one from across the country. So joining me is Julie Baldwin. She is the senior director of Global CSB Alliance Sales with Sousa. Coming from across the pond and coming from California is Mikhail Prudnikov who is a principal business development at Amazon Web Services. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you, Stu. Really, really excited to be here. All right, so Julie, obviously, we know where Linux has been proliferating the cloud, something that most people, I think, really understand cloud, a big piece of the overall Sousa discussion. Bring us inside a little bit, your role and of course the long partnership that Sousa's had with AWS. Yeah, so my role is working with the major hyperscalers and the public cloud providers in offering solutions that's driving digital transformation and this modernization. Even more so in today's current climate, we're seeing modernization transformation as being driven out of necessity now due to the COVID-19 impact. So I really want to draw on, we've been working with AWS for the last 10 years. We've serviced thousands of customers between us who are looking at how they innovate and drive flexibility and agility into their IT and their accounts. So it's really important that we look at how we support our customers from an integrated support perspective and how we can move them forward in the digital transformation journeys. Awesome, so, yeah, Mikhail, when I hear what Julie's talking about, I think about when I look at AWS, you talk about builders when you go to the conference that Amazon hold, innovation is absolutely something there. So talk to us a little bit about how the Linux community in general and SUSE customers specifically are engaged and a piece of what AWS is doing. Sure, so in my role at AWS, I'm responsible for making sure that our customers are successful as they go through their non-transformation journey or business transformation journey. So those are all involved transformations and it's actually an interesting position to be in because you see it firsthand on the ground for all the challenges and all the interesting problems that customers get to solve. And then it's actually incredibly exciting that we're having this conversation in the framework of SUSECon because open source is incredibly important for AWS and AWS we understand how important open source is for customer success. And therefore we've been involved and contributed to the projects from very early on, such as Linux and KVM and Java and Kubernetes. So we see a lot of proliferation in this space and then another interesting, I guess parallel that I would say is if you think about the open source notion which is largely around community. So there is this sort of like juxtaposition of the cathedral and the bazaar, right? And then so the bazaar is the vibrant community of people coming with ideas and they're pursuing them and they're innovating. So something similar we see in the, I guess AWS community with several million customers day-to-day they're solving challenges and bringing lots of requests for innovation. And I won't call it put pressure on Amazon to innovate but it's a lot of inspiration, right? And then therefore it's interesting to see, right? That because of all that innovation and all those requests, customers get access on Amazon to all the features such as same as open source, right? So you capitalize on this innovation and here as well, customers have requests, let's say in financial service industry. And then so you get all the security features, all the controls, let's say like ISO, SOC, SOC compliance and then some of the most stringent compliance already like productized at AWS. That's one of the examples. Yeah, absolutely. I was just, sorry, sorry, Julie. That customer flywheel that you talk about is what we've really watched there. So Julie, you wanted to comment on what he was saying. Yeah, I was just kind of like, just to kind of like reinforce that whole community and that whole innovation piece as well because from an open source perspective, that sense of community is really driving those changes. And with the AWS platform, it's got a very rich functionality behind it. It's one of the first cloud platform. So it does have that pedigree of innovation from day one. And that's just being driven by our customers who are pushing the envelope saying, we want more. And that's where the relationship between SUSE and AWS has really started to excel, looking at how we move into that container space now as well and help the customers modernize not only the cloud native apps going straight to cloud but how do they modernize their legacy applications as well? And how do they take their on-premise environments and make them more effective and more efficient and by using public cloud to be able to do that? Yeah, Julie, I'm glad you brought that up because absolutely there's opportunity but there's challenges there. Customers really have, it's either hybrid or multi-cloud deployment, containerization, Kubernetes are absolutely enablers there. But I wonder if you can bring us inside, what's SUSE doing? Do you have any customer examples of how they're really making this change? We know that it is still, the majority of applications have not been modernized, they've not gone cloud native, they're not ready for these environments. So how are customers working through this ultimate journey? Yeah, I mean it's really, really complex and I did a presentation at our sales summit talking about Gartner's five Rs, about what applications can move to the cloud, how easy it is to do that. And I think there was some research done last year with 451 where the previous year there was, a lot of customers said, yeah, we're moving to cloud and it's easy. And then this year when they rerun the survey, it was no, it's really hard, we need partners, we need to look at how we do this. And so not every application is going to be able to be moved to the cloud. And it's really important that the customers have a strategy and look at what they're doing on premise and then start to identify what is cloud friendly, what do they need to do to kind of like go forward? Do they need to completely rewrite an application? Do they need to refactor it? Can it just be a lift and shift? And so what we're doing with AWS is, we've been working with some of the partners like Wipro, for example, who have built out a retail application platform to be able to migrate those customers quickly into a more cost effective and efficient way of delivering businesses because they're obviously, even more so in the current scenario, they're margin to be in squeeze, they need to be looked at, they're being able to deliver higher returns of investment and TCO with any of their spend. So that's one area that we are kind of looking at as well. And we've had some great success with it. We've also got quick start programs with AWS that allows customers who need to migrate quickly and easily to be able to take those applications and their environments and move them onto the public cloud. So that's a, those are two key areas that we're really looking at driving forward because it's critical because it is complex. You need to have a roadmap, you need to have a strategy about how you do it. And you need to identify and include the stakeholders when they're moving, when you're changing your environment to make sure that you haven't missed anything. So Mikkel, I would love to hear your viewpoint on this too. You know, when you look at the Amazon ecosystem, you've got a huge AWS marketplace, obviously the systems integrators help customers work through their various environments and how to modernize them, how to move there. You know, what are you seeing in the SUSE customer base, any customer examples you can help share as to how they're moving along in this term. One of the, we have to understand, right? A little bit of the context. So all this talk about, let's say, cloud migration and innovation, it's not an abstract sort of exercise and abstract discipline, it happens for a reason, right? If we look at the innovative companies at fast moving companies, effectively they see on average time to value metric, about 440 times faster, then let's say what we call like slow companies, right? And then so that puts a lot of pressure on companies to actually embrace this innovation and the digital transformation and engage with customers in a way that they have never done before, such as technology enables so many things, so many opportunities, right? And then with any opportunity, it comes, here comes the challenge and then as Julie pointed out, it's a difficult exercise, let's not mean sports here. So, and therefore we have to make sure that everybody is aligned, let's say customer goes through this exercise, right? They're trying to change their processes, the leadership sets new goals, the leadership sets new objectives, they have to change the culture, they have to train people. So that is the challenge that they're facing right there within the company. Then outside of the company, you want to make sure that effectively everybody, everybody comes to the table with a lot of value and very much aligned. And that is where we see, I guess, a lot of opportunity because as you go through this process, you have to have the right stakeholders, you have to have trained people, right? And then if you look at another statistics, I just, 86 companies or so, they have cloud first strategy and yet 86 infrastructure spend is still on premise. And the reason for that is companies cannot hire and train fast enough, right? So therefore on AWS side, we invest a lot in training programs and in certification programs, as well as we have the vibrant community of partners who can step in and help us with challenges such as we have a system of GSIs and ASIs, so we have like thousands of ASIs, MSPs, we have providers and then effectively, effectively what results here is that you have the synergy, not only the change going from the inside company, also have the support structure as Julia talked about week starts, we have training and then we have programmatic support, how to navigate customers through that. And then as they switch to Lyn, to match their new processes, this is where the power of the cloud comes in and power of the community. So all those challenges they have been sold, so you can take some of the blueprints and apply them as is and you can pick and choose what you apply. So for example, you can go with cloud native tools, with Amazon web services. At the very same time, you can also pick products, for example, a SUSE cloud application platform, which provides you this, I would call it a slightly more opinionated approach, how to implement your DevOps practices and agile practices. And then it still natively runs on top of Amazon Elastic Container Service. So yeah, and then as Julia mentioned, we prefer, for example, had a lot of success with it. And just touching on that point, Mikael, we talk about, we're not islands, we have to engage with the partners. We want to make sure that the customer success is at the heart of everything that we do. And we have to bring in the right skillsets at the right time to make that journey as easy as possible and as quickly as possible. And so that's the beauty of community. That's the beauty of partners. And Bender's coming together with the customer at the heart of everything that they do. And I know that's a very strong message that you're going to get from SUSECon, but it's also a strong message that we share with AWS as well about how do we do the right thing for the customer and how do we enable that success for them to be successful, which will drive ultimately success as partners as well. Excellent. Julie, one of the big themes we heard in the keynote was talking about the developer communities. Obviously, SUSE and AWS have a lot of developers. Anything specific for the developers out there that either want to highlight? So obviously we've got the cloud application platform and we've got the quick starts as well. So for me, it is, you've got a proven platform with AWS, the infrastructure available there. The ease of which cloud application platform can sit on top of that, of the EKS, the elastic compute services, is really, really critical. And for me, it would be just try it and give us your feedback as well. I think that's really important because the way that we drive innovation is through the feedback from our customers and people actually using the services. And I think Mikhail pointed to that earlier as well, that the innovation that they've seen has been driven by customers actually saying, we want this feature or we want this function. And from a DevOps community is, there are alternatives out there. And you should try and look at if that suits your needs better and look at how you can use a trusted partner like AWS and SUSE to actually meet some of those new needs that are coming aboard. And that's also to Julie's point, right? We cannot overemphasize the importance of builders, of people who own this innovation within the company. And the biggest thing that companies can do for their success is to enable builders. And as we mentioned before, right? So the process is challenging. There are multiple parties involved, but at the very same time, you empower people to drive this change. It's almost like instead of directing them, like, oh, there is this pretty, pretty interesting analogy. So instead of, if you want people to know how to build the ship, so you do not tell them, like, oh, go gather wood. And then like, this is how you hammer things together. You just make sure that they yearn for the sea. And then ultimately, this is what drives the innovation. And here we have essentially with, for example, SUSE CAP, you already can enable people and they can practice the DevOps, they can practice Agile and essentially align this with this fast time to value practices, right? So that is the pooling. And then you take Quick Starts and then you put literally innovation into those people's hands. For example, SUSE CAP, Quick Start allows you to bring up the whole environment in pretty much like minutes. Well, let's say if you want to innovate on SAP systems, again, you take Quick Start, and then well, SAP takes a little bit more involved. So maybe like in an hour and a half, you have SAP environment and then you can essentially start innovating there. And yeah. Excellent. Well, Mikhail and Julie, thank you so much for the updates. You know, love hearing about innovation companies, absolutely building is what differentiates is the companies that are ready for today's modern era. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, Mikhail. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, Julie. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage from SUSE CAP on digital 20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.