 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. Oh, welcome back to the sands. We're live in Las Vegas here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of AWS re-invent along with Justin Warren. I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Dave Chakoshis, who's a vice president of product, the hybrid IT at CenturyLink. Dave, good to see you again. Yeah, great to be back. Good to be back on theCUBE. Good to talk to you again, John. Excellent, and by the way, you win the GQ award. I mean, everybody raving about that black velvet. A 50,000 people here at re-invent. That's, if I'm in the lead, I'm in the lead at the turn. That's good to hear. Very nice. All right, well, big news though for you guys. Obviously, being designated as the managed service provider, reaching that certification with AWS, tell us about that process and what it's meaning to your business and what it means to your customers. The AWS is such a customer focused organization. They're very passionate about their end customers and solving problems, but they've also built up a huge partner network and what Terry Wise and the team have built is a real partner relevant organization. And what they've really done to make it a level playing field, but to be as passionate about their partners as they are about their end customers, hopefully intending to solve problems for customers as well, is really to put a lot of thought into making sure that when they have a competency or a certification, that it's no joke to get through. It's a serious exercise to go through something like a managed service provider or an MSP certification. We had that get finished up for us several months ago and we've been rolling that into our managed cloud practice and really helping our customers with the three key criteria of what AWS really wants to have its partners do, which is really design and plan and be able to orchestrate workloads and model workloads for customers and understand how and where they're going to deploy and migrate into the cloud. They really want to see and make sure that you're doing next generation work during the operation run phase. Not just are you monitoring and managing those workloads in those environments, but are you doing predictive analytics? Are you starting to take a look at trends inside the data? Are you using big data to actually augment your management practices? Not traditional ITIL just in a cloud location, but really next generation managed services. They measure and they certify all that. And then the third thing they want to do is take a look at how are you reporting? How are you helping the customer optimize and analyze costs and become as efficient as they can with their deployment of AWS services? So it's a significant exercise to go through. It really made our service better. And quite honestly, that's a great example of AWS being customer focused by making sure that the partners they want to work with can hit a certain level, hit a certain bar to be able to drive that value for their end customers. So for the customers who are choosing CenturyLink to come to something like AWS, what is it about CenturyLink that they like that they would rather deal with you than go say direct to AWS and try to do everything themselves? Yeah, I think there's really sort of two or three real differentiators for CenturyLink when we work with our customers. Probably the first and foremost is sort of that hybrid nature of how we can meet the customers where they are. CenturyLink has been running and managing and working in the data center space for good 15 to 20 years. We've been running and managing private clouds and hosted and compute environments for as long as there has been such a category in the industry with all the different heritage that rolls into CenturyLink from an IT services perspective. So they really come for the experience and the pedigree and the complexity friendliness. But they also come for the fact that we can meet them where they are, whether it's inside their corporate, their current data center, help them do data center consolidation, help them move into hosted centers and then help them on that journey. There's so much of the enterprise is still very much on a journey. There may be projects that are firing up to the cloud. There are a lot of organizations that are ready to make the full leap and go all in on the cloud. But by and large, there's some kind of a hybrid environment where they're still looking at the different form factors and they're very much on a journey to get from where they are today to where they can be more agile. So there's the experience that we have but then what we're really, and there's lots of companies out there that have good experience, they have good tools, they have experience running and managing and monitoring. There's a lot of other companies that have the MSB certification. What Centrelink has that's really a deep investment is all the network optionality and the network control that we have. So not only can we do managed services inside AWS, we can also do the managed network that gets the traffic and gets the workload to AWS. And that's a real critical differentiator. Not only can we get those connections set up and configured, we can also manage those environments and then secure those environments. So there's a lot of investment that Centrelink has put into our managed cloud practice, augmented by managed networking and managed security that can really, the assets that Centrelink brings to bear with regards to our security portfolio and our network portfolio come from years of significant investment. One of the largest global IP backbones in the world. We've been gleaming network and security telemetry from that network and building threat patterns and threat management services inside the core of our network. So really customers who work with us have a secure, consistent, reliable path to the cloud and then they get the managed services, the MSP certified managed services once they're there. Yeah, so speaking of connections, I believe that you've got, you've announced a product and I think it was October called Direct Connections. Is that right? Tell me more about what that is. Sure, so that's that sort of, for those of you tracking my hand waving at home, you know, the network stuff over here that inside our network portfolio, there is our cloud connect service is one of the most deeply connected to AWS services out there. So we're a significant direct connect partner. We drive an ethernet based service into AWS in all their major regions and then we have that cloud connect service run to hundreds of global multi-tenant data centers as well as hundreds of thousands of enterprise locations. So we have what we launched there back in October was the latest version of cloud connect which we call dynamic connections. It's a feature within cloud connect that allows us to take a global ethernet circuit tying into AWS and make that happen in minutes that didn't exist before. So a lot of people think about AWS Direct Connect and they can configure direct connect and tie it up to their VPC. And then they start the telecom process that could take weeks and or months and it depends on who they're working with and who they're buying from. If you're in a building that's on net with us or your traditional data center is one of the data centers the many, many hundreds of data centers that are on net with us, we can go and get that connection turned up all via automation. And now once you get that circuit created you can dial it up and dial it back, you know, a gig, 10 gigs anywhere in between. You can go below a gig wherever you need to. You have complete control over the creation of a new circuit which is great for retail locations. Retail customers like this as they're bringing new facilities and bringing mixed use facilities on net and they're bringing new facilities that they need to be able to chunk back to their data center in the cloud. We can use dynamic connections to go and help them create new locations. But then as the business needs change at those locations they can dial up and dial down bandwidth and really have a rich level of control for how the traffic is being routed and passed. Yeah, having spoken to customers in the past that is actually quite valuable. It has been quite painful to go through that process. A lot of big cloud migrations once they're done with them, you know, a lot of the problems you run into is I never really thought through and anticipated what the network path would look like after I made that move to the cloud. And so that's one of the things we try to do with our customers at the onset of an engagement is not just say, let's start stamping into the cloud right away. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but let's think through the network design first. How are you, who are your users? What are the new traffic patterns going to look like? And what are the hybrids that you're going to be building where something that's in the cloud needs to talk back to your corporate data center? Do you have enough bandwidth and do you have a low enough latency connection between the two? Yeah. You know, earlier this week you were talking about milliseconds matter, right? You had a presentation that you were featuring that. So what does that mean to your AWS customers? And it's like, that's kind of intuitive. They do matter, but in terms of what was the perspective that you were bringing to that and the latency issues? So we did a presentation here earlier in the show where we really illustrated that combination I was referring to earlier of our MSP certified managed offering coupled with our CloudConnect network automation. So what we've really done a lot of work with around CloudConnect is creating a service that has a few different user experiences. If you're a network engineer, if you're somebody who's running a corporate network you really want to get in and really just get a layer to interface from CenturyLink, optimize your BGP routing and do all of the sort of the telecom grade configurations. You can do that with CenturyLink CloudConnect. But we also have a very straightforward version. You know, almost the, you know, in Andy's keynote this morning one of the things he was really talking about it really spoke to me was, you know, this idea of well there are builders who want to use the tools and there are builders who just want instructions. Right, you know, builders who just want, you know to dump the IKEA parts out and put the thing together. And then there's some people that want to sit there with a lathe and handcraft everything. So different types of builders. We have a version of CloudConnect that can appeal to the builder who doesn't necessarily want to get down in the weeds of networking. They just want to basically take a workload and connect it to the right private network link. So that higher level version of CloudConnect is what we demonstrated earlier today. And really the fundamental premise of milliseconds matter is network orchestration and cloud orchestration coupled together gives you different, gives you a whole lot greater level of control. And that's where we're starting to see all these emerging use cases where, you know you can certainly think about migrating everything to the cloud, but then you have to start thinking about where do those workloads need to run, what does the future look like in terms of IoT devices and sensors and video telemetry and environmental telemetry. All the different sources of data that organizations can use to go and innovate around the where you're going to run that business logic is going to run closer and closer to the edge for a lot of industries and retail and healthcare and a lot of government institutions and hospitality. So basically the fundamental premise of milliseconds matter is have control of your cloud, but then also have control of your network and hopefully have the two in concert with one another. And that's what we're fundamentally driving at with our service platform. Yeah, sounds great. So, and real quick, when you talk about all this in a 5G world, all of a sudden when you talk about edge, you talk about, you know that's a whole, that's a game changer, is it not? Well it is, you know, 5G is still so emergent there's a lot that's there, that's 5G, there's still 4G, LTE, there's still lots of different ways to go and get all that data trunk together and it doesn't stay on LTE forever. You know, eventually it all starts to get back to an IP backbone and then that's where you still have a lot of latency optimizations and route optimizations that you want to be able to deal with. So we absolutely look at LTE as something that we think is a huge opportunity with a lot of our partners that we're working with across our network footprint to be able to use LTE as a new access strategy, just like we've used just about all the other access strategies that are out there. Excellent, Dave, good to see you again. Yeah, great to see you, John. See you down the road soon, I hope. For sure. All right, thank you for joining us, Dave Chacoches. Joining us here from Citrine Lake. Back with more from AWS, re-invent, you're watching theCUBE.