 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Washington D.C., this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. This is the reinvent for the global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and it's just too many minutes here as well. He'll be coming out. Our next guest is Jeff Valentine Chief Product Officer at Cloud Checker, a really hot growing company, really innovating with the cloud around security and data management, all kinds of great stuff around compliance. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having me. So we've been following you guys pretty, you guys are at all the re-invents and summits, huge booth, you guys are growing like crazy. You guys crack the code on using the cloud scale and really delivering great value property. Before we get into some of the public sector news and also new things for you guys, what's the core business for Cloud Checker and how are you differing in, why are you guys winning? Yeah, that's a great question. Businesses that are moving to the cloud have this huge problem. Once you get to the cloud, it's probably more expensive than you thought. It's probably less secure than you thought and you really don't know how to run it like you used to run your own data center. So we solve those problems. That's what CMP does, Cloud Management Platform. Our system controls costs for government. It actually helps you hit your budget for security. We're monitoring continuously for all these weird things that might happen. And of course, we're making a new announcement today around compliance. Yeah, I mean, one of the phenomenon that we've seen, this is a pattern with including us, we're on Amazon, we started using it. You don't really know what happens when you look at your bill. Oh, Dan, that's kind of elementary, but as it gets more complicated, new services are coming out, Amazon announces at every reinvent, zillion services. So you got Redshift, you got Sagement, all these new stuff's going on. You got to really manage that at a portfolio. You guys do that. We do. Now, how does that translate to the public sector? Because some companies actually can't translate and that's something that we look at for who's successful. If a company can be good in commercial enterprise and also move to the public sector, they got something going on that's right. The ones that can't don't. You guys are doing it. What's the unique public sector pivot or linkage or linchpin for you guys? That's a good question. Public sector to us is a large enterprise and we go to that market the same way we go to other large enterprises, we go through our partners. Sometimes agencies will come to us directly. That's great when they do. Oftentimes they need help from some of our partners around the show floor today. They're going to go to them for the people power and they'll come to Cloud Checker for the software, the automation. Jeff, you said earlier that sometimes you go to the cloud, you're all excited to get in and then you find out maybe it's less secure than you thought. Where are the gaps? Help us square the circle because you hear from large cloud providers, cloud's more secure. People like myself actually believe it's probably more secure than what I can do as a small business, but where are the gaps that you're filling? Yeah, here's the issue. It is inherently secure when it's used that way. Now you've got 3,500 developers, they're writing code for various agencies and if one of them forgets to close off a certain setting on maybe an S3 bucket for Amazon, all of a sudden somebody can get to that data. Our system is there to be a backstop. So we're automatically checking and alerting when there's a problem like that. But you automate that entire process. Look at the whole thing every second. How about the customer's challenges migrating to the cloud? How would you summarize the challenges that an agency or a group within the public sector migration challenges? What are the key things that goes through the customer that you guys can talk up to directly? Sure, I mean, there's really three categories again. On the cost side, they have a budget to hit and you really can't be over by a penny. It has to be matched up to the penny every single time. So we help them do that, spend exactly what you're supposed to spend without a penny more. The next problem they run into, of course, is the security. You need to be able to prove that you're secure. Not just think you're secure, but know you're secure all the time. Our software is there to automate it. And then they have to actually prove through an audit process that they're compliant with various federal standards like NIST 800-53 and others. They have to be compliant in that environment as well. Our software can automate that compliance. Tell me about the hard news you guys had. You know, Fresh Release has gone out this morning. You guys got some news. Share the breaking news here on theCUBE. Sure, yeah. For years we've always been a security product and a cost product. The third leg of that stool is now Total Compliance. That Total Compliance module is free for all our customers, free for all our current and future customers, but it automatically checks against 37 different compliance standards. So HIPAA, PCI, all the NIST standards, et cetera. We're giving you a scorecard and a dashboard, how you're doing, and lets you remediate those problems when you see them. And what's the impact of the customer base? Well, they literally can't pass their security audits unless they do a lot of work today to prove that they're in the confines with these standards. Our software now saves them the time to do that. So the trend is automation in this. It is. What's the secret sauce on the product side? Can you share a little bit of the cloud checker magic? Let me try to describe it this way. Amazon's price list, which is complicated to understand because there's 100,000 items on it, changes all the time. Nobody really gets that. They add new products, little variations, little instant sizes, little restrictions, little price changes for every different type of way you can buy it, whether it's a reserved instance or not. And being able then to unblend those to all your different customers, if you're a service provider and selling it again, you have to go share those costs. And by the way, you then need to calculate your own margin on top of that. That manipulation of 100,000 things every second, we actually generate terabytes of data per month from each one of our customers and we store it for seven years. That volume, it's a really big data problem. That's our secret sauce. Talk a little bit about the architecture of your products. When I think about security, cost management, asset management, governance, even just within those categories, oftentimes there's like a zillion point products. It sounds like your philosophy is to have sort of an all in one. Maybe talk about some of the challenges of developing that product and how you're approaching it architecturally. Yeah, it starts with being deep on everything that we do. Our cost only product, if you just look at costs, hundreds of functions and reports. Very complex product. Take that same level of complexity to security. We have 550 best practice checks, not 10 or 20. Amazon has 80. We have 550. Take that now to compliance. Not just a few standards, 37 different standards that we automatically monitor for. You have to have the depth in each one of those to be able to do any of them. And the depth comes from, obviously you got to have some domain expertise, but then you got to codify that. We do, yeah. I mean, it's honestly, we started in 2011. So it's a maturity. You can't do it if you just started six months ago. You have to build up. And how do you charge for the product? Our customers pay us on a percentage basis of what it costs them to run in the cloud. So if they're paying Amazon $10, they'll pay us a percentage of $10 to manage that. And that will vary by how many functions they turn on? Or like, for instance, the announcements that you had today, do I have to pay more for that or is that included in the cost? Maybe explain that. Yeah, it's all included. The philosophy has been, we don't want to nickel and dime our customers. They expect great value from our product. I have to keep adding value every day to keep them excited. So I'm going to continue to develop that product. It is an ongoing, it's never done. It's an ongoing process. And we're going to keep adding free features to the product. So you have a salute, basically they win, you win. That's right. Because you get a percentage of there. You get a percentage of all of cloud. I mean, Gartner says cloud's growing at 40%. We're growing it much faster because our customers are growing and they're getting new customers that are growing and you get this compounding effect. Even I always talk about software economics and then you add that to the cloud. It's amazing. All right, I want to get into one last area before you go. You guys are an advanced technology partner of AWS. What does that mean? Obviously you bring a lot to the table with the product. You win the detail on that. What does it being an advanced technology partner mean for agencies and potentially customers that are looking to work with you guys? Sure. Being a technology partner of Amazon means that we have security and government's competencies. So we're experts in what we do. It means we have staff that is certified on Amazon. We have top secret cleared staff. We have partnerships with top secret cleared agencies that work with us. Our software uniquely runs not only in commercial, runs on GovCloud and it runs in the IC region, the secret region Amazon calls it. That's completely air-gapped from the rest of the world. That C2S marketplace is something that we do get a lot of business from. It's funny, Amazon can't tell us who the customer is. Like we get anonymized data, but they're using us. We get the checks in the mail. You're doing the cloud checker thing. We're doing the cloud checker, but it's part of our business model to be able to serve being experts in Amazon. Last question by May. You know, the big talk about multi-cloud and different types of cloud. What are you seeing as the trend there and how does cloud checker help customers? Sure. I think today there's a competition amongst the cloud providers for the same workloads. I don't think that's going to be there in the future. I think cloud providers are going to specialize in certain areas. You're going to have some generalists that can do everything like Amazon. I think there are going to be some that are better suited to working only in certain regions or only with certain functions. If you just want to do real-time video processing for theCUBE, there's other ways that you might look at doing that. In the future, a combination of best-to-breed for multiple cloud providers needs a central management platform. And that's where we're at. And that's interesting dynamic. I totally like that approach, observation. But also, I want to ask you with respect to partnering because if you believe that to be true, which I think it's true, more providers are going to come into the space specialized, but also they're going to look like service providers and professional services. You saw Rean Cloud being very successful, although they got cut back on that contract on the DOD, a new kind of systems integrators are emerging. That's right. How do you talk about that? And what is happening with that model? Because we can automate it. We can. And that kind of takes away the labor piece. How is the SI market changing? No, it's a good question. Most of the SIs with Amazon are our customers. So they all use our software. They'll put their logo on it, but they end up using our software to help them complete projects. When you end up competing for a project amongst other SIs, they're all competing for the same business, right? So when you can go in with an automation solution that cuts your cost and maintains your margin, you're going to win that business more often. So they need to bring in automation to be competitive against the other. And also speed of deployment is another factor, scale. I think that's right. How is that changing the game? No, it's totally true. We're going from state and local workloads to federal workloads and this Jedi program. You're going to start to see massive movements from data centers to the cloud. That's going to take time, but it requires both people and technology. We're the technology piece of that. It's not going to be years. It's going to be weeks. Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cloud Checker, check them out. Great company, advanced technology partner with Amazon Web Services here on theCUBE. Talking about public sector, this is theCUBE here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.