 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests joining me next. Chris Gruz, Director of Business Development, AWS Marketplace Service Catalog and Control Tower at AWS. Chris, welcome. Thank you, welcome. Good to see you. Likewise, and Matthew Pauley is an alumni of theCUBE. He is back VP of Worldwide Business Development, Alliances and Channels at CrowdStrike. Matthew, welcome back. Great to be here, Lisa. Thanks for having me. And I see you're in your garage, you're an F1 car in the background. Very jealous. Yeah. So we're going to be talking a little bit about not F1 today, but about what's going on. Some of the news that's coming from the partner keynote. So Chris, let's start with you. What's going on, the AWS Marketplace news and also give our audience a real good understanding of what the marketplace is. Yeah, sure. So AWS Marketplace is actually an eight year old service within the AWS family. And our charter is really providing a fine by deploy and manage experience for third party software. And so what our organization does is we work with ISVs like CrowdStrike and we really try to get them to package up their software in that same consumption format that other customers are buying AWS services. So our AWS customers are used to buying services like Redshift and S3 in a consumption format. And they want to be able to buy third party software in that same manner. And so that's really been our charter since we were launched eight years ago. We've had a lot of great momentum since our launch. We now have over 8,000 listings available in the catalog. And we have over 1.5 million subscriptions going through the catalog. One of the things that we announced earlier today is that we are up to 300,000 active customers. That's actually up from 260,000 which was our previous number. So we continue to see really good momentum in terms of adoption from both our ISV community, publishing listings and then from our customers that are actually buying out of the catalog. We work on all types of formats of software. So we provide machine images in an Amazon machine image format, but we also publish and make available SaaS products, container products and algorithms and models to run in things like our SageMaker environment. And then as of this morning in the Global Partner Summit we announced the ability to sell professional services through AWS Marketplace as well. So lots of expansion, lots of growth. I'd love to get Chris your take on this expansion into offering professional services. What does that mean and how have your 300,000 plus customers been influential in that? Yeah, and so what we've seen is as Marketplace has evolved is the transaction sizes have actually gone up dramatically. A couple of years ago we launched a feature called Private Offers, which allows ISVs to do a negotiated subscription and submit that to an AWS customer and if they accept it goes right on their bill. We've seen very good adoption on that. We've got thousands of private offers now going through the system. And what we found when the transaction sizes started to grow, both our ISVs that were using the platform as well as the consulting partners that are partners with us through Amazon Partner Network, they typically attach services to those transactions. So if you're an ISV, you might wanna package on something like an installation service, training services, or it could just be a bespoke statement of work that goes along with your technology. And then on the consulting partner side, resellers wanna attach those same type of services to the software that they resell. And up until this morning we weren't able to do that. And so it provided a lot of friction to our customers or buyers because what they had to do is they actually had to bottom line those transactions or they had to do those transactions outside of marketplace. And that wasn't a good experience for either our ISV community or reseller community or our customers. So now with this launch, we can actually allow customers to buy those services from those ISV partners and those resellers by virtue of doing that through marketplace. And basically how it works is it's similar to our private offer experience. They just submit a private offer to that customer. They can upload a statement of work. And if that customer accepts, it goes directly on their AWS bill and the AWS marketplace takes care of all the collection and the billing that goes along with that transaction. And so we're really excited about this. We had over a hundred launch partners that were ready to go as of this morning. And we think this is gonna be a great feature. It's gonna get a lot of adoption. CrowdStrike, which is a company that Matthews with is one of our launch partners. For that feature. And so we just think this is gonna be a game changer for us on a number of levels. It's really gonna open up the type of transactions that we can now do to marketplace. Well, you mentioned a good F word frictionless. That's something that every business really aims to do to make that experience just as seamless as possible. So Matthew, talk to us about CrowdStrike being part of this professional services launch. The opportunities that that opens up for the marketplace customers and your customers. Sure, so just a quick background on CrowdStrike. We're an endpoint protection cybersecurity company that has historically been protecting laptops, desktops on premise devices from breaches. Basically identifying indications of attack or indications of compromise that may surface on those endpoints. We do that by having agents run on those devices and point back to our massive body of data that runs in the cloud, AWS in fact. And so collecting tons and tons of data, petabytes upon petabytes of data, literally trillions of events per week. We're able to easily identify and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to that corpus of data to be able to identify when there is adversary activity on those devices. Now we've gone through a bit of a digital transformation ourselves and we're looking at now not only or we have launched products here recently that not only protect those on premise devices like the desktops, laptops and on premise servers but also protect workloads that are running in the cloud, EC2 instances or RDS instances, what have you in AWS. We've also launched what CrowdStrike calls our Falcon Horizon product which is a cloud security posture management product to be able to give people visibility into configurations that may create risk for their cloud environments. And we've been leveraging marketplace for about two years now. It's been a fantastic opportunity for us to really leverage that frictionless sales motion that Chris talked about, reducing sales cycles for us and for our channel partners. We have a number of our channel partners that leverage the CPPO capability within the AWS marketplace to actually transact business with their customers. It's been a fantastic mechanism for CrowdStrike for our partners and for our customers. We've been part of the enterprise contract scenarios where we don't have to go through that process of negotiating an end user license contract. We've signed up for the enterprise contract. Many of our customers have signed up for that enterprise contract so it reduces the legal iterations to get a transaction done. So that's been fantastic. And what we're doing now with the professional services offering is we're standing up a few of our professional services offerings on the AWS marketplace so that our customers and our channel partners can actually transact business through the AWS marketplace to acquire those particular professional services offerings. And the one that I think is most interesting is a kind of cloud security assessment where our professional services team will go in and actually evaluate are their configurations, are their unmanaged accounts running in AWS or what have you that could represent a security risk and make recommendations about how to improve the overall security posture of that cloud environment, leveraging something like CrowdStrike's Falcon Horizon, as I mentioned earlier or our cloud workload protection offering. So it really is about streamlining the procurement, offering customers the ability to acquire through the AWS marketplace, whether that's the CrowdStrike product or the CrowdStrike service offerings. And so Matthew, I imagine given this year that we're all not sitting together face to face in Las Vegas, the events of this year have also brought a lot of challenges from a security perspective. We've seen ransomware going up dramatically but also in this massive pivot to working remotely, I can imagine your customers big opportunity for CrowdStrike to help them when end points just scattered. So in terms of that, as well as the impact with what you're doing with AWS marketplace, seems like a great opportunity to provide your customers with faster access to ensuring that they can guarantee the security of their all of their data, which is business critical. Yeah, 100%. So the kind of global pandemic and work from anywhere has driven demand for CrowdStrike's capabilities in two ways. Number one, people leaving the office and going home, there's a proliferation of physical devices, laptops for people to actually work from home, which obviously need to be protected. And a lot of times these are people that were working from home for the first time, no longer within the protection of the corporate network, maybe they're using a VPN or what have you, but they needed the added protection of an endpoint protection capability like CrowdStrike's. And the second is a lot of this digital transformation has been accelerated. We've had a few customers tell us they had a three year plan for their digital transformation. And a lot of that involves moving on premise servers to the cloud and they've had to accelerate that to months or even weeks in cases. And that's driving huge demand for understanding how to ensure they're maintaining the proper security posture for those cloud environments. So speed is key right now, making sure that you're protected and transacting those sales cycles quickly. Leveraging the AWS marketplace all is accelerating. Yeah, speaking of that acceleration, and we've talked about that a lot, Matthew, this acceleration of digital transformation years now crammed into months. Chris, let's wrap with you, in light of that acceleration, how has that affected positively the AWS marketplace, bringing in professional services, allowing your customers to have much more available to them to transact directly and in a frictionless way when speed is so critical. Yeah, I mean, what it really leads to, it just gives us more selection, right? So if you take a step back and you think about the infamous Amazon firewall, one of the key components of what makes a firewall go is selection. And there was a lot of solutions that we had it yet, that we just couldn't sell through marketplace without having some kind of services attached. Now, while there's a lot of products that you can just point, click and go, there are a lot of technology that do need to have some kind of hand holding. And so by virtue of launching services, this actually opens up the aperture in terms of the selection that we can bring into the catalog. One of the things that we've been focused on as of late is bringing in business applications as an example. And a lot of times a business application might need services to go and actually wrap around that solution cell and be part of that implementation. And so that's the other great thing about this is it's going to give us more selection and that's just going to let our customers buy more and more products out of this marketplace but do that in this very easy format where it literally just lets them put these transactions directly on their AWS bill. So we think it's going to be great, not only for moving deals faster but also providing more solutions to our customers and just giving a better selection experience to the AWS customer. And being able to do that all remotely which is these days is table stakes. Chris, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what's new with the Amazon marketplace, what you guys are doing with professional services and CrowdStrike, we appreciate your time. Yep, thank you. Thanks, Lisa. Yep. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2020.