 Good morning, welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Morning, Dave. Good morning. Here we are, two sets, two live sets, two remote sets, a hundred guests on the program this week. This is day, second full day for us. We were here- Right, but day three officially, I guess. Exactly. The number of announcements has my head spinning. Typical for AWS. So many, we won't even recap all of them for you, but really from a thematic perspective, one of the things that I think we've both noticed the theme here is if you're not a data-driven company, if you're not a data company at your core, you're going to be left behind. Yeah, that came through in Swami's keynote this morning. That was the key setup for the announcements of all of the tools that are being rolled out to be able to achieve those goals. And we've had a number of AWS folks on the program this week, customers, partners, and from another theme is this customer obsession, this customer centricity. Really working backwards from the customer first to help them understand, how do we build a data core? How do we build our redefine, reinvent, how about reinvent our business around a data strategy because there is a competitor in the rear of your mirror in every industry waiting to take place if somebody doesn't have, and they really were very clear with, if you don't, if you're not a data company now, you're going to be left behind. Yeah, absolutely. The whole, especially the keynote this morning, it felt like they were very, very careful to set up the pins and then knock them all down, talking about exactly what customers want to do, what customers have said in surveys they need to do, and then, oh, by the way, we have all of these tools. So, exactly what you mentioned, not talking about technology first, but talking about the requirements that customers have, where customers say they want to be, where customers need to be, and then proving out that, in fact, AWS has the entire toolkit. I mean, it is mind-boggling. I wouldn't want to be another cloud this morning, waking up and seeing that it looks like I fell months behind somehow while I was sleeping. Well, one of the things you and I were talking about as we walked over here this morning is that it's no wonder AWS, and they say they don't look in their rear-view mirror. They don't need to. One of the things, thematically, that Adam talked about in his keynote yesterday was, like, they kept saying the phrase, but you wanted more, you being the customer. You did this, but you wanted more, so we did this, but you wanted more, so we did this. The fact that they start backwards, that customer flywheel, the thing that, another theme that got me is all of the innovation that's coming out of AWS that comes from the customers enables AWS to do so much more, enables customers across every industry to do so much more, and to really competitively differentiate themselves if they truly lean in to the power of AWS and the partnership that can deliver. Yeah, no, no, completely agree. From sort of an analysis perspective, I think it's interesting, part of the theme this morning had to do with artificial intelligence, and I just personally like to think of it more as augmented intelligence, because essentially what they're doing is they're building tools that are powerful that amplify human intelligence. It's not that AI replaces human intelligence, maybe it does for certain things, but machine learning, most of that is really machine training, humans training the machines. Yeah, we'll get to a point, yes there are science experiments where the computer is learned on its own, but essentially all of the pieces that Swami was talking about putting together today, sources of data, various databases, everything together, that equals an amazing amount of opportunity for human beings moving forward. So this isn't about machine technology replacing the value of what people do. Data scientists, I mean I'm texting my kids, data science, used to be plastics, right, during the graduate, now it's all about data science, be a data scientist. Well another thing from a data perspective is the idea of data democratization, we talk about that all the time. It's interesting, I was talking about DataMesh yesterday, as a really facilitator in unlocking technical debt, facilitating the democratization so that, because data is so scattered these days, I mean it's one of the things that we saw when the pandemic started, people scattered, we're still scattered. Data sources are only proliferating, data volume is only proliferating, customers need to be able to harness the value of it in real time. I think another thing we've learned in the pandemic is that there is no, real time is no longer a nice to have. It is absolutely essential. We've also seen the acceleration and talked a lot in the last couple of days about the acceleration of cloud adoption, and just thinking about the sheer volume of announcements the last couple of days that AWS has achieved during a global pandemic is phenomenal, obviously we saw every business have no choice but to go digital, and those that aren't here anymore weren't able to do that fast enough, and with the scale at which they need to meet customer demand. Yeah, when you talk democratization, often it's a question of not only can you do it technically, but what is the cost associated with doing it? So when you lower the barrier to entry, you lower the friction associated with all sorts of transactions, not just financial transactions, but a transaction being teasing important information out of a pile of otherwise meaningless data. When you lower the cost of that, like what AWS is doing with all of these tools. I mean really, that's the end result of this. I look at these things through the lens of an economist, and it's about decreasing friction and increasing efficiency, and when you do that, you can't imagine what the effect of that is on the entire world, just by lowering the cost of teasing out important information from otherwise useless data. Yeah, and another thing that we talked about, the vision of this company, this is the 10th re-invent, 15 years of AWS, but the 10th re-invent, I wanted to get your take on the last, the first 15 years, we'll say, of AWS. The vision, obviously, this is the first year with a new head, new CEO, Adam Salipski, and we're used to the Jassy era. This is now, we're looking at like, what's the next 10 years of cloud innovation going to look like at AWS? Yeah, I get a chill when you ask that question. I was there working with Amazon before there was an AWS. So in the early 2000s, we're working at a very large data storage company, and we're working with then Amazon to help them figure out how they might someday put together something that they could not only use for themselves, but also rent out to others, sort of this novel idea. And so that feels like yesterday to me. The idea that AWS was EC2, S3, science experiment, not ready for enterprise, all of that feels like yesterday. Those claims, most people at the time realized that they were going to be disruptive. I don't think a lot of people realized how relatively quickly it was going to happen, and I don't think anyone could have predicted that in 2021, they would be as dominant as they are with such a small share of the overall IT market. So on stage, they'll say five to 15% of IT is in the cloud. Not five to 15% is in AWS, five to 15% is in the cloud. So you think that AWS is a large organization firing on all cylinders, now they're just at the beginning of addressing the total addressable market. So Dave Vellanti had a great article on the subject of the natural inclination for people to worry when certain things get to a certain size. I think that that's going to be a part of the conversation moving forward. What does it mean when so much critical infrastructure is being handled by a single entity? From a user's perspective though, hey, it's all good. The more they integrate, the more they bring things together, the easier they make my life as an IT practitioner. So I have no idea five years from now what we're going to be looking at. No, and one of the things that I think I've done maybe three or four re-invents in one of the themes always or really kind of taglines is early innings, we're still early days. You talked about only 15% of IT spending being in the cloud. They have, and they're so massive, but they're so much. The TAM is enormous, absolutely enormous. And we're seeing the need for as data volumes we're only going to continue to proliferate. We have to have the artificial intelligence and the machine learning to help the humans process the data to be able to unlock all that value. Otherwise organizations risk being left behind when they simply cannot get value out of the data either at all or fast enough. Well, you know, let me make one prediction actually, okay? Okay. I think that the definition of cloud, which is different in a lot of people's minds already, is increasingly going to be broadened out to include what AWS at a certain period of time said didn't matter and that was what's going on on premises. It was clear that in the early days, AWS adopted an attitude that their stratospheric growth could be maintained on the back of net new stuff only. Let the stuff on on-premises die. The stickiness associated with that on-premises stuff has caused them to change direction over time in a very, very smart way. And so my prediction is that in five years, we might not be using the term cloud at all. We might be back to just calling it all IT because when you think about it, cloud represents this idea that the physical location isn't important. It's all virtualized. So if that's the case, why does it matter if it's in a data center that I own or a Colo or a data center that AWS owns? It doesn't matter. So when you look at things like Snowball and Outpost and all of these other things where they're taking essentially AWS and they're sticking it wherever it needs to be fit for function. You have latency, sovereignty, governance issues. Fine, we'll run it as a black box in your data center. You don't touch it. You consume it, you interact with it just like it's in an AWS data center. So that's my prediction is that it's not that, we're going to start thinking about this comment that X percentage is in the cloud as being sort of like a, well, what do you even mean by that? Is it in the cloud if it's in an Outpost in my data center? Is that included in the 15% or is it not? Is that on-prem or isn't it? I think within five years, we're all going to agree that it just doesn't matter. It's all IT and I think AWS will be still dominating the IT space. That's an interesting prediction. I like that you were bold in that, but it also shows what you talked about shows how focused AWS is on the customer. Really leaning into everything in the public cloud, no more on-prem years ago. And then what is Outpost announced two years ago? So I think it's been a couple of years, two or three years ago. Yeah, I confuse announcements with deployments and things like that, but it's been years. It's been years now and I guarantee you that inside the halls of AWS, there were people who said, no, no, no, we are not going to be involved with boxes being shipped to raised data center floors. But like you said, customer, it's about the customer, what the customer needs. And the reason why there is, if the number is 85%, whatever the number is, there's a reason why that still remains in on-premises data centers. And it's not primarily because IT people are stupid slash fearful. There are good reasons for it. You know, it has to do with the ROI of going through modernization and migration. And so what does AWS do? They figure out how to make the math work so that it makes sense for people to do things. And we've been talking for the last couple of days with a lot of the really, really important, we'll continue to, the really, really important service providers that are partners, because AWS and the rest of the cloud providers can come up with as much technology as they want to, but they need partners to bridge the divide, to tease out the human value, the business value from the technology they provide. So again, opportunity. People who look at AWS and say, wow, that's scary, they're so big. No, no, no, no, no. They're creating an ecosystem of opportunity around them. So that's just my thought. Yeah, no, their ecosystem is huge. We talked about this cube being sponsored by AMD, but we talked about the ecosystem of partners at the beginning of the segment. It's massive. We've talked with a lot of different partners, huge partners, smaller partners, overall at the end of the day, what we see, what they create, all of the technologies that they're creating in response to customer needs. You know, we have to address that the more data we have, the more things grow, the more complex, and complexity has to be dealt with. And there's a lot of their ecosystem partners that really have business models designed around helping customers. What does seamless actually mean? How do you actually become efficient? How do I do this in a frictionless way? Those are all great marketing terms, but they need this ecosystem of partners to help the customers actually make those reality. Yeah. And otherwise there are just words on a piece of paper. And it's not easy. Implementation is not easy. Sales is easy. Implementation, not easy. And the risk associated with failure can be very, very high, especially from a financial perspective. You know, the endless project that you're sinking money into that doesn't deliver any ROI, just doesn't work. You can't do it. So yeah, I'm blown away by just today. Today's keynote, going through, knocking down those pins, just one after the other. Oh, SQL? Got it now, you know, for certain environments. Where before, yeah, we've got Oracle database support for this function. Now we have SQL also. It's just, you know, it's like this thousand by thousand grid check box. Check, check, check, check, check. And I can imagine all of those service providers just salivating. Because they're thinking, oh my gosh, practice. New practice that we need to spin up to be able to do this. Which points to a huge challenge. And that is, actual practitioners where the rubber meets the road, all of these things require smart people to be able to implement them. And the good news is, a lot of those smart people are on the program. This week here, you're going to be able to get to hear so much more about the innovations that AWS and its ecosystem of partners are doing. We have a full day again today, Dave, and again tomorrow, looking forward to hearing about the conversations that you have. I'm looking forward to interviewing guests and we look forward to having you continue to watch theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.