 Good afternoon and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, where we're here live from the show floor all four days of AWS re-invent. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? Good. Beautiful and chilly Las Vegas. Can't wait to get back to New England. Balmy, New England this time of year in December. Wow, Dave. That's a bold statement. I am super excited about the conversation that we're going to be having next. And, you know, I'm not even going to tee it up. I just want to bring Dilip on. Dilip, thank you so much for being here. How you doing? Savannah, Dave, thank you so much. It's a joy to have you. So you have been working in Amazon for about 20 years. Almost. Yes. Almost. Feels like 20, 19 and a half. Which is very exciting. You've had a lot of roles. I'm going to touch on some of them. But you just came over to AWS from the physical retail side. Talk to me about that. Yeah. So I've been in Amazon for 19 and a half years, done pricing, supply chain. I was Jeff Bezos' technical advisor for a couple years. Casual name drop. But a couple people here for that name before. Yeah, humble brag, hashtag. And then I, for the last several years, I was leading our physical retail initiatives. We just walk out Amazon one, bringing convenience to physical spaces. And then in August, as those things were getting a lot of traction, and we were selling to third parties, we felt that it would be better suited in AWS. And, but along with that, there was also another trend that's been brewing, which is, you know, companies have loved building on AWS. They love the infrastructure services. But increasingly, they're also asking us to build applications that are higher up in the stack, solving key turnkey business problems. Just walk out Amazon one, our examples of that Amazon connect. We just recently announced supply chain. So now there's a betty of interesting services all coming together higher up in the stack for customers. So it was an exciting time. It was interesting that you're able to, you know, transfer from that retail. I mean, normally in historically, if you're within an industry, retail, manufacturing, automotive, whatever, you were kind of locked into that because it had its own value chain. And I guess, I guess data has changed that maybe that you can traverse now. Yeah, if you think about the things that we did, even when we were in retail, the tenants was less about the industries and more about how can we bring convenience to physical spaces? The fact that you don't like to wait in line is no more like likely, you know, five years from now that it is today. So it's a very durable tenant, but it's equally applicable whether you're in a grocery store, a convenience store, a stadium, an airport. So it actually transcends any supply chain. Think of supply chain. Supply chain isn't targeted to any one particular industry, it has broad applicability. So these things are very horizontally applicable. Anything that makes my life easier, I'm down for it. We're all here for the easy button. We've been talking about it a bit this week. I'm in the retail store. I mean, I'm in San Francisco. I've had the experience of going through. Very interesting and seamless journey. Honestly, it's very exciting. So tell us a little bit more about the applications group at AWS. So as I said, the applications group is a combination of several services. We have communication developer services, which is the ability to add simple email service or video and embed video voice chat using our Chime SDK. You know, higher up in the stack, we are taking care of things that ID administrators have to deal with where you can provision an entire desktop with our workspaces or provide a femoral access to it. And then as you go up even higher up in the stack, you have productivity applications like AWS Wicker, which we just did GA last week in AWS Clean Rooms, which we announced as a service in preview. And then you have Connect, which is our cloud contact center, AWS supply chain. Just walk out Amazon one. It just feels like we're getting started. Just a couple of things going on. So Clean Rooms, part of the governance play, part of data sharing. Can you explain, we were talking offline, but I remember back in the disk drive days, we were in a clean room. They'd show you the clean room. You couldn't go near it unless you had a hazmat suit on. So now you're applying that to data. Explain that concept. Yeah. So the companies across financial services or healthcare or advertising, they all want to be able to combine and pool together datasets with their partners in order to get these collaborative insights. The problem is either the data is fragmented, it's siloed, or you have data governance issues that's preventing them from sharing. And the key requirement is that they want to be able to share this data without exposing any of the underlying data. Clean Rooms have always emerged as a solution to that, but the problem with that is that they're hard to maintain. They're expensive. You have to write complex privacy queries. And if you make a mistake, you risk exposing the same data that you've been studiously trying to detect. Take advertising as an industry as an example. Advertisers care about is my ad effective. But it turns out that if you're an advertiser, and let's say you're a Nike, and you're some other advertiser, and you place an ad on the website, well, you want to stop showing the ad to people who have already purchased the product. However, the people who have purchased the product, that purchasing data is not accessible to them easily. But if you could combine those insights, the publishers benefit, advertisers benefit. So AWS Clean Rooms is that service that allows you very easily to be able to collaborate with a group of folks and then be able to gain these collaborative insights. And the consumers benefit. I mean, how many times do you search it? It happens all the time. And I'm like, I just bought that, guys, for weeks. And I'm like, you don't need to serve me that. And we understand the marketing back, and it's just a waste of money. And energy and resources, I mean, we're talking about sustainability as well. I don't think supply chain has ever had a hotter moment than it's had the last two and a half years. Tell me more about the announcement. So super excited about this. As you know, as you said, supply chains have always been very critical and very core for companies. The pandemic exacerbated it. So our way of sort of thinking about supply chains is to say that companies have taken over the years many like dozens, like millions and millions of dollars of investment in building their own supply chains. But the problem with supply chains is that the reason that they're not as functional as they could be is because of the lack of visibility. Because they've strung together very many disparate systems that lack of visibility affects agility. And so our approach in it was to say that, well, if we could have folks use their existing supply chain, what can we do to improve the investment on the ROI of what they're getting by creating a layer on top of it that provides them that insights connects all of these disparate data and then provides them insights to say, well, here's where you overstock, here's where you're understock. You know, this is the carbon emission impact of being able to transfer something. So like, without requiring people to re-platform, what's the way that we can add value in it? And then also build upon Amazon's years of supply chain experience to be able to build these predictive analytics for customers. So that's a good, I like that you started with the why. Yes. Right? Now, what is it? It's an abstraction layer and then you're connecting into different data points and injecting ML. You can take in, like if you think about supply chain, you can have warehouse management systems, order management systems, they could be in disparate things. We use ML to be able to bring all of this disparate data in and create our unified data lake. Once you have that unified data lake, you can then run an insights layer on top of it to be able to say so that as the data changes, supply chain is not a static thing. Data is constantly changing. As the data is changing, this is the data lake now reflects the most up-to-date information. You can have alerts and insights set up on it to say that what are the kinds of things that you're interested in. And then, more importantly, supply chain and agility is about communication. In order to be able to make certain things happen, you need to be able to communicate. You need to make sure that everyone's on the same page. We allow for a lot of the communication and collaboration tools to be built within this platform so that you're not necessarily leaving to go and toggle from one place to the other to solve your problems. And in the pie chart of how people spend their time, they're spending a lot less time communicating and being proactive. That's correct. And getting ahead of the curve, they're spending more time trying to figure out actually what's going on. And that's the problem that you're going to solve. Well, and it ensures that the customer at the other end of that supply chain experience is going to have their expectations managed in terms of when their good might get there or whatever is going to happen. Exactly. I feel like that expectation management has been such a big part of it. Okay, I just have to ask because I'm very curious. Yes. What was it like advising Jeff? Quite possibly the best job that I've ever had. He's a fascinating individual. Did he pay you to say that? Nope. But I would have done it for... It's remarkable seeing how he thinks and his approach to problem solving. You could be really tactical and go very deep. You could be extremely strategic and to be able to move effortlessly between those two is a unique skill. I learned a lot. Yeah, absolutely. So what made you want to evolve your career at Amazon after that? I see on your LinkedIn you say it was the best job you ever had. Curiosity? Yeah, so one of the things... So the role is designed for you to be able to transition to something new. So after I finished that role, we were just getting into our foray with physical stores. And the idea between physical stores is that you and I as consumers, we all have a lot of choices for physical stores. You know, there's a lot of options. There's a lot of formats. And so the last thing we wanted to do is come up with another MeToo offering. So our approach was that what can we do to improve convenience in physical stores? That's what resulted in just walk out at Amazon Go. That's what resulted in Amazon One, which is another in a fast convenient contact this way to pay using the power of your palm. And now what started in Amazon retail is now expanded to several third parties in the stadiums, convention centers, airport. Airport. I just said it was in the Houston airport and you got to do a humanless checkout. Exactly. And actually in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago as well too. Yeah, so we're going to see more and more of this. Yes. So what Amazon I think has over a million employees, I know a lot of this are warehouse employees, but what advice would you give to somebody who's somewhere inside of Amazon? Maybe they're in AWS, maybe they're in Amazon. What advice would you give somebody inside that's maybe, hey, I've been at this job for five, six years, three, four years, whatever it is, I want to do something else. And there's so much opportunity inside Amazon. What would you advise them? My single advice, which is actually transferable and I use it for myself, is choose something that makes you a little uncomfortable. Get out of your comfort zone. You got to do that. It's not the easiest thing to hear, but it's also the most satisfying because almost every single time that I've done it for myself, it's resulted in, you don't really know what the answer is, you don't really know exactly where you're going to end up, but the process and the journey through it, if you experience a little bit of discomfort constantly, it makes you non-complacent, it makes you sort of not take the job in the stride, you have to be on it to do it. So that's the advice that I would give anyone. Yeah, that's good. So something that's maybe adjacent and maybe not completely foreign to you, but also something that you got to go dig a little bit and learn. You're plotting a career change over here, Dave? No, I know a lot of people on Amazon are like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next. I mean, I love it here. I live by the LPs, and there's so much to choose from. It is, when I joined in 2003, there were so many things that we're sort of doing today, none of those existed. It's a fascinating company and the evolution. You could be in 20 different places and the breadth of the kinds of things that the Amazon experience provides is timeless. And you look at a company like Amazon, it's so amazing. You look at this ecosystem. I've been around a long time. The show floor says it all, but I've seen a lot of waves. And each subsequent wave, we always talk about how many companies were in the Fortune 1000 and aren't anymore. But the leaders survive and they thrive. I think it's fascinating to try to better understand the culture that enables that. You look at a company like Microsoft that was irrelevant and then came back. Even IBM was on death's door for a while, and they come back. But Amazon just feels, at the moment, you feel like, oh, wow, nothing can stop this machine. Because everybody's trying to disrupt Amazon. And then only the paranoid survive, all that stuff. But it's not like, past is not prologue. So that's why I asked these questions. And you just said that a lot of the services today that, although the ideas didn't even exist, I mean, walk out. I mean, that's just amazing. I think one of the things that Amazon does really well culturally is that they create the single-threaded leadership. They give people focus. If you have to get something done, you have to give people focus. You can't distract them with seven different things and then say that, oh, by the way, your eighth job is to innovate. It just doesn't work that way. It's like it's hard. And where would the energy come from that? Exactly. And so giving people that single-threaded focus is super important. Frank Schlubin, the CEO of Snowflake, has a great quote in his book. He said, if you got 14 priorities, you got none. And he asks, he challenges people, if you had to give up everything and do only one thing for the next 365 days, what would that be? It's a really hard question to answer. I feel like as we're around New Year's resolution times, and when we're thinking about that now, I know we can all share our one thing. So, Dilip, you've been with the applications team for five months. What's coming up next? Well, as I said, it feels like it's still day one for applications. If you think about the news that we introduced and the several services that we introduced, it has applicability across a variety of horizontal industries. But then we're also feeling that there is there's considerable vertical applications that can be built for specific things, like it could be in advertising, it could be in financial services, it could be in manufacturing. The opportunities are endless. I think the notion of people wanting applications higher up in the stack and a little more turnkey solutions is also, it's not new for us, but it's also new and accretive too. You know, AWS has traditionally been doing. So again, this relates to what we were sort of talking about before. And maybe this came from Jassy or maybe it came from Bezos, but you'll hear a lot. It's okay to be misunderstood or if we were misunderstood for a long time. So when people hear up the stack that think, when you think about apps in the last 10 years, it was taking on-prem and bringing it into the cloud. Okay, you saw that was e-mail, CRM, service management, data warehouses, et cetera. Amazon is thinking about this in a different way. It's like you're looking at the world saying, okay, how can we improve whatever, workflows, people's lives, doing something that's not been done before? And that seems to be the kind of applications that you guys are thinking about building. And that's unique. It's not just, okay, we're going to take something on-prem, put it in the cloud. Been there, done that. That S-curve is sort of flattening now. But there's a new S-curve, which is completely new workflows and innovations and processes that we really haven't thought about yet or you're thinking about, I presume. Yeah. Having said that, I also like to sort of remind folks that when you consider the entire spend, the portion of workloads that are running in the cloud is a teeny tiny fraction. It's like less than 5%, it's like 4% or something like that. So it's a very, there's still plenty of things that can sort of move to the cloud, but you're right, that there is another trend of where in the stack and the types of applications that you can provide as well. Yeah, new innovation that we haven't thought of yet. So Dilip, we have a new tradition here on theCUBE at Reinvent, where we're looking for your 30-minute Instagram reel, your hot take, biggest key theme, either for you, your team, or just general vibe from the show. General vibe from the show. Well, 19 and a half years at Amazon, this is actually my first Reinvent. Believe it or not, this is my, as a AWS employee now, as Reinvent with launching services, so that's the first. I've been to Reinvent before, but as an attendee, rather than as a person who is a contributing member of the workforce. Working, actually. If you will. Actually doing your job. I'm just amazed at the energy and the breadth, and from the partners, to the customers, to the diversity of people who are coming here from everywhere. I had meetings from people in New Zealand, like in the UK, like customers are coming at us from like many, many different places, and it's fascinating for me to see. It's new for me as well, given some of my past experience, but it's been a blast. People are pumped. People are pumped. They can't believe the booth traffic, not only that, the quality. All of our guests have talked about that. It's like, yeah, we're going to throw half of these leads away, but they're saying, no, I'm having really substantive conversations with business people. This is, I think, my tenth Reinvent, and the first one was mostly developers. And I'm like, what are you talking about? So now it's a lot more business people, a lot of developers too. The community really makes it. Dilip, thank you so much for joining us today on theCUBE. You're fantastic. I could ask you a million questions. Be sure and tell Jeff that we said hi. I'm sure you guys are. Time hanging out. And thank all of you. You want to go into space? Yes, yes, absolutely. I'm perhaps the most space obsessed on the show. And with that, we will continue our out-of-this-world coverage shortly from Fabulous Las Vegas, where we are at AWS Reinvent. It is day four with Dave Vellante. I'm Savannah Peterson, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage.