 Live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at AWS Summit 2015. Live in San Francisco at the Moscone North for Amazon Web Services Summit. This is one of their shows that they do, real technical in nature, but they get all the key developers here, all their partners, and they go geek, they go deep, they go talk about technology, and of course we're here covering it live, but this is different than reinvent the big, the ancient lot of the big show for Amazon. This is one of the fun shows we get down and dirty. Look under the hood. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon Hill. My co-host, Mark Farley. Our next guest is Colin from Time Inc. Come Bodell, CTO of Time Inc. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you, son. Great to see you. You were up on stage in your keynote. I kind of sneak out to kind of get ready for prep here, but you are the grand finale of the fireworks for Andy Jassy, which had a lot of patterns in it, and the pattern was a word that he toss around, really teasing out the theme of the show, more power, more compute, more agile, machine learning, big data analytics, more of a buffet of more goodness from Amazon today. So, share with the folks out there, what you're on stage, and what you're talking about, and we'll get into some of the analysis of the horses on the track here. So, and full disclosure, I used to work at Amazon. I was there for eight years from 2006 until 13 months ago. I moved from Seattle out to New York to be the CTO of Time. And, you know, the reason I was on stage is part of my job at Amazon, I used to run all the website application platforms, so the rendering stack on which all the Amazon retail site runs. And probably about five years ago, my memory gets hazy as I age, about five years ago, we moved all of the Amazon retail sites up onto AWS. And we actually did it, you know, treating AWS as a vendor and we were the customer. And, you know, it helped us save a lot of money and a lot of flexibility. It helped AWS, you know, further test out how to work with customers before, you know, the big marketing push. So- This was just a throwaway opportunity. This is real money on the table. Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, we're all right. We're supposed to order magnitude of- Yeah, we're running hundreds of thousands of servers within the fleet, so get them on. And, you know, the key thing for us was the ability to do reactive auto scaling. So at two o'clock in the morning when there aren't that many customers, provide the hardware back to AWS. They sell it on the spot market when people wake up in the morning, traffic increases, we can pull it back. And that was a huge saving. You know, at some points of time, you know, 40, 50% of the hardware, we could pass back. And that's hundreds of thousands of servers. So yeah, it's big bucks. So when I, when I walked into time, I think there were a couple of things. One, you know, when you're a new CTO coming in, you want to, you want to quick win. And also, you know, I wanted to take advantage of some of the low hanging fruit. And because we had five major global data centers that were just sucking up a lot of held capital, they were inflexible. Some of them, you know, we owned and operated others. We were working with third parties. There were three P co-location facilities. So we didn't have the control that we wanted. I said to the team, I want to be out of the data center business. And it was funny, I, I got down to a quick win. Oh yeah, you wanted a quick win. Yeah, let me just throw that one back. No, I wanted a quick win. You're out of the data center business. That's a quick win. Yeah, but we said, you know, we did some back of the envelope numbers. And it, you know, it was going to show, you know, millions of dollars of return. I think next year our hosting costs have dropped by about $6 million. This is the bubble year, when we're still running some of the data centers where, you know, we're finishing off our work with AWS. Next year we're in the clear. And it's about a $6 million annual saving, which, you know, is not a bad deal. You know, time is a three, three and a half billion dollar annual revenue company. And, you know, that's a good chunk of my budget that I can apply to other things. So, you know, when I came in, you know, I said to the team, I was thinking about saying, well, get 80% of the way there. And I thought, well, if I say 80%, they'll get 60%. So I'm going to say 100%. Let's see where they get to. And they can argue and talk me out of parts of it. And some of the- And get to 60 where you want it to be. Yeah. And, you know, some of the stuff we've got to have on-premises. You know, when you're dealing with, with, you know, video, video editing, you know, it's not an Amazon issue, it's just the intra-webs issue. We're just not getting the bandwidth. So we have those local systems. Everything else I want to get up on the cloud. Or if it's a third-party application that we are hosting in our own system, I want to move to that vendor and take their managed system. And if they don't have a managed service, then fine, I'll find somebody else that does. But I want to get out of that hosting business. So are you migrating applications or are you rewriting them or redoing them? What's- Yes. All of the aforementioned. A number of them are lift and shift that we'll move across. They fit very well inside the Amazon ecosystem. Others were re-engineering as we go to take much better advantage of the breadth of services that Amazon has. Others, you know, we've still got a bunch of mainframe applications. And these do, you know, a yeoman's duty, they're running, you know, big parts of our subscription business. And you know, we're committed to them for, you know, a long period of time. There's probably millions of man-hours or person-hours gone into them. So we'll still run those, but we'll re-engineer parts of them and the re-engineered parts will go on AWS. And we may bring in some additional packaged applications. So, you know, we're just making, we're doing the right thing for the business. It's not a one-size-fits-all, but it is based on the premise of get out of the data center because it's just expensive and unwielding. How big is the timing? Operations, employees, you got brands, obviously publishing, media, a lot of media action. Yeah, 80 brands worldwide. 120 million unique views of our print every month. 120 million unique... Like print, print, not online print. Print, print, not digital. Like real hard, yeah. Real, honest to God, magazines. That's right. That's exactly right. Oh, it's cool. See, you got your books. See, Amazon's not killing everything. So yeah, 120 million uniques on that and 120 million uniques for digital. And when you put the numbers together, it's probably 140, 150 million uniques. Large audience. But there's a lot of crossover between digital and print. So yeah, I mean, it's big. It's a three and a half billion dollar brand of fortune, right? So fortune, time, sports illustrated. People are going to hate me if I forget. Entertainment Weekly, People. This old house, Essence Magazine. Actually, some of the people that watch this might not care so much about people. Any video, do you accept video operations? Huge video operations. So yeah, I think about 12 months ago, I remember the number was about 80, 8,000 unique pieces of video. And I could be getting that number completely wrong. But you know, it's doubled, it's quadrupled. It's gone up significantly over the last 12 months. From the media profits, do you have a TV brand? Yeah, so you know, there's SI now, there's People Today, the shows that stream out. But that's not a broadcast TV kind of thing. It's not broadcast, no. It's part of the existing, yeah, because they're all blurring together anyway. And you know, we have a property called the Daily Cut that aggregates all of the video that we have. So you can watch that video on Sports Illustrated, on People, on Time. Daily Cutter, you know, it's our aggregation location. We do a lot of live streaming on it as well. But that's on web, it's on iPhone, it's on Android, it's on Roku, and we're going to be rolling out Xbox and Surface and Microsoft phones. Yeah, more distribution channels. Yeah, I mean, it's just wherever our customers are, we want to meet them there. I think you're on Snapchat too, if I remember correctly. So I'm sure we're everywhere. Yeah, you're on one of the tiles there. Anyway, so you got a lot of stuff going on in real time. So what is Amazon doing? See, when you walked in, what was the, what was the pointing at all the cobwebs? Let's get that out of there, rip that out, go to the cloud. Where was your low-hanging fruit, and then where was your more strategic work done? Yeah, a lot of the low-hanging fruit was duplication. Time had been a collection of companies under the Time banner that was owned by Time Warner. We spun out as our own public company about nine months ago. So there was a lot of duplication to remove, but that's straightforward. It's not a strategic play that's just tactical, you just got to get it done. The strategic play was websites and mobile applications, getting them onto a single content management system. So when I joined, there were probably about 10 or 11 different CMSs in use, and we'd made the call to get them all, get everybody onto Drupal. So we take an open source stack, we can extend it, and that made people much more fungible. We could move engineers around, we could also move editorial and journalists around that can work at different brands as appropriate. So partnering up with people like Acquia, who of course run a wonderful Drupal instance, getting to know VAM, getting to know Dries, the creator of Drupal, that's the caliber of resource they've got. We got that as part of the, coming into the Amazon ecosystem for AWS. So that was incredibly valuable. And getting those properties up, so all of our UK sites now, and that's probably 45 brands, as of the end of last year, we're all running up on AWS. So our hosting costs went from 70,000 US dollars a month down to 17. So this is hosting cost. So this is our own data centers or 3P co-location data centers. So to go from 70 to 17, in the universal scheme of things for a three and a half billion dollar company, it's not huge, but it's a number of additional staff that I can hire, it's removing distraction. And this is why the whole journey for us has been, technology, getting out of the data center business, leveraging more Amazon web services, so our staff can focus on things that are really important to our customers. Our customers don't care that we've run data centers. Our customers don't care that we've built services now that somebody else can build for us. But the other thing that's been going on is that cultural shift. As our engineers now have been able to do things much faster using AWS, it's been much easier to bring in DevOps. It's been much easier to spread agile development methodologies across the business. Probably easier to hire too, right? Oh yeah, no kidding. This is why, one of the other reasons why I can speak at events like this is, yeah, I'll get a bunch of resumes and a bunch of people contacting me because they want to be part of an organization. When I graduated, I was in university college, computer science in the 80s, it's like, oh, you want to go work on some cutting edge languages or COBOL and Fortran. And you look at it and say, hey, that's not my generation. It wasn't even punch cards. That was way off the radar. I want to work on some cutting edge lists. We got some C++. I mean, Mark, this is now the model where he's old school storage. We know the days where people were actually loading Linux. Right now, young kids come out of school, they've never loaded Linux on anything. Never loaded a patch. So this culture shift is here. So the reality is it's here. So I got to get your take on this. Okay, you're in the middle of a transformation yourself, digital transformation, ironically, double entendre, time, and double digital, double digital. But reality is, is that other people are scared of it. Okay, and there are other vendors out there. So compare, contrast, what are the, what's the old school guys? Who's, who's, don't, you know, the name needs, you can name names, but like who's losing, who's winning? What does it look like when someone's transforming and when they're standing still? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I'm, you know, I would consider myself an old school guy. I mean, when I came out of college, I was working for a company writing backends for cobalt compilers. So, you know, if that doesn't date me, I don't think anything does. There you go. I'll tell you why, you know, and again, of course, clearly I had the bias of Amazon coming into time. And, you know, you go with what you know and you go with what's been successful. If it hasn't been successful, at least you know it, you can avoid it. The thing that I particularly like, that you know is not being done by other folks and certainly to the level of sort of purity of Amazon is it's my, you know, it's my data center. It is a very clean and crisp stack. I can roll an army. I can launch, you know, a Linux-based application. I can write it in whatever language. I can monitor it. I can manage it. I can roll it back. I can catch it in all the ways that I could do if I held the data center. Some of the other cloud vendors, you've got to twist the way in which you do things. And there's also a lot more vendor lock. You know, we do a little bit, we dabbled a little bit with Azure. And it's a great system. It's just, it's not for us at this time, at this place of our evolution. Because historically all our applications have been Linux-based applications. We run a few Windows-based applications. But our ecosystem is all Linux. It's Unix-based. And open source. Oh, absolutely. You know, that's a huge part of it. So, you know, not only the technology and also it's the corporate culture as well that the people we're building relationships with, that kind of sets that forward. Hey, you know, Microsoft have got great folks internally that know an awful lot about open source and drive an awful lot of open source. And I meet up with them at open source think tank and other events. It's just, it's not the right landscape for us. And you know, at some point in the future it might be and we come back and take a look at it. I'll never say never. But at the moment, for what we wanted to achieve in terms of cost saving or flexibility, the picking up and moving and dropping down on AWS was just straightforward. It's what we knew. We had the skill set internally. We had to build out subject matter expertise in AWS and bring in some third parties. But- How about personnel? Did you have to swap out personnel? Or was there a migration, natural? There was, you know, the business was going through an evolution anyway. You know, new leadership team in time over the last 18 months or so. And you know, we needed to, I certainly brought in, you know, brought in some new people, you know, married them up with the expertise, the experience internally so you get the best of both worlds. I brought in some cloud experts, but maybe I was going to say surprisingly, maybe unsurprisingly, some of the engineers that we had at the time when I came in looked at the opportunity to learn more about the cloud, looked at the power and control it gave them and just went running forward. So in fact, the reason that we're all up on our websites in the UK is because our UK team, Elliot Moore and Simon Loxham and that organization out across in the UK, they just dove in. They solved a lot of problems, they worked out a deal with Cloudreach to come in and get them up to speed because they knew they couldn't do it on their own at the speed that I wanted it. But now they've become deep subject matter experts and are teaching the rest of the organization on how to go about doing it. So, and it's not been just the cost savings and efficiency and the cultural change, it's been a lot of fun. And that allows me to attract people, it allows me to retain people. Folks can see very clearly the direction we're heading and if it's for them, great. If it's not, that's okay. There's plenty of other opportunities. I'd like to ask about the whole industry, right? The media industry. So you've got this group that spun out time from Time Warner and they had an idea of remaking media, it sounds like. And so part of the reason I'm sure they brought you in was bringing somebody that had cloud experience, Amazon experience because if you're going to have media, you're all about content, you're about content distribution, you're about getting things, preparing content, coming it into pieces, making it available in all these other places. So you have to have a different type of model. I assume that that was part of the thinking that went into it, you know. Absolutely. People will ask me, why did I join Time? 22 years in the valley, working for startups and retrats, eight years at Amazon. I've worked all my life for tech companies. Why would I go to a media company? And when the recruiter came to me, I looked at the content and I was familiar with Time and Fortune. I had no idea about the breadth of content and how well it respected it was around the world. Then I looked at the technology and it was okay. But it certainly wasn't world beating. And my logic was, if I can take some of, if not a lot of the best content in the world, marry it with the best technology in the world, then that's world beating. And you know, you've got a lot of new media companies, you know, the buzzes, the vices, great technology, not as much original content. And I'll bet that I can build more, or my team can build, and I don't know, but I bet my team can build, you know, better technology faster than those sort of companies can build up that journalistic editorial discipline. That takes a long time to put together. Well, we're going to be a formal competitor to you. We're going to really compete with you head to head, you know, with Q. Bring it on. We've got to crowd chat. I mean, we're tiny. But the point is, we're doing it the same way. We're born in the cloud. I mean, we're fast. I mean, our costs are lower. So that gives up more freedom to do things. So as time transforms themselves, they got to be fast. So as someone who's been at Amazon knowing what's available and what might be coming, I mean, I thought you have inside information, but you can see the dots connecting. And you go to time, you say, hey, guys, Stone Age, printing press, trucks to distribute stuff, that may hang around as, you know, novelty. But at the end of the day, digital distribution will win everything, right? So that's the future. So let's talk about, can we have a second? Do we still have time to talk about editors, video producers, you know, these kinds of things. Have you had much interaction with them and what do they think? You know, the people creating the content, what do they see? A huge amount of interaction because it's, you know, and the objective is when an idea comes in, a news story comes in, an article comes in, especially if it's one of our news brands, from the minds of the editor or the journalist, you know, how fast can we get it out? Because if you don't get it out fast, somebody else has scooped you and the world moves on. And, you know, shortening that chain. And, you know, once upon a time, it could take, you know, hours if not days. Now we can turn stuff around in minutes by putting the right tools in the hands of the editorial staff, the journalist staff. And yeah, changing the way. And, you know, a bunch of them are reacting very, very well. Others, you know, have been used to, you know, the speed and the pace of print, but are now beginning to see the opportunities and speed and how they can reach, you know, their existing customers or existing readers, but also a different type of reader as well. So, you know, they're going to think a little bit differently about what it means. And, you know, what are they doing? Long form, short form, is it, you know, how's the best way to tell a story? And what's the best way to get that story out in front of the customers? And it's our job to understand what they want to do in terms of telling their story and give them the tools to do it. I'm not an editor. I'm not a journalist. I can only begin to appreciate the value that they bring. But what I can do is listen to them and give them the tools that are going to make their job better. Yeah, standardizing the CM mesh, that's a good call. But I wanted to get to the question I was going with distribution. Yeah. You know, security omni-channels is permanent listed from a security standpoint. You hear about that in the cloud, but that opens up more distribution. So if you're a digital asset, you got to be in every channel possible. Absolutely. So with APIs, with mobile, with aggregation, what does Amazon have to make that future possible? What do you see technically like, okay, machine learning can be more predictive, patterns on audience, aggregation, it's all free form? I mean, you know, a number of things for us. One is, you know, when I came into time 13 months ago, a lot of our assets were held in multiple different places. So bringing it all together into a single dam, a single digital asset management system with rights management built in. Because ironically, there were times when we were dealing with photography, we were dealing with text, we didn't know who owned it. And we couldn't do reprints, we couldn't republish, we couldn't syndicate. So solving all of that problem, EC2, S3, the relational database products at Amazon, gives us a platform that's massively scalable. We got a lot of assets that we need to bring together. And we want to put it in the hands of our editors and our journalists immediately. So they can't be having to go to four or five different systems, we want to give them a central system they go to wherever they are in the world. So it brings that. We then collect a ton of data from our customers online and also print. We print as a very well oiled machine. So we collect all of these data and again it lives in different silos. Bringing that together, we've got a big data strategy. That could be really interesting. Things like Redshift, we've got a really good relationship with Pivotal, that's a great open source play, plug and play, they're doing great things with them. The Redshift is out there, the announcements today on machine learning. That's the kind of system that we need to get in, root around in that data. And not only advise channels of distribution, but also advise editorial staff, this is what people are interested in. And of course those data we can syndicate, we can license out, there's a whole bunch of things we can do to unlock the power of the knowledge or the data, turn those data into knowledge for our organization. Yeah, I mean single sign-ins, is that a challenge for you guys? Across the properties or is that? Yeah, I mean, it's a challenge. I mean, we're on the road to solving it. And there's plenty of good single sign-on solutions. So now we've been fragmented and honestly people that read Southern Living are unlikely to be, I'm trying to think of maybe a fortune reader, probably insulting somebody terribly. So, you know, but they're our solace, but you know, if you're a sports illustrator, you're likely to read fortune, you're likely to read time. I mean, there's appropriate groups where we've got, you know, sort of pockets of single sign-on. But I want to give people the freedom to serendipitously discover different parts of our content, wherever they are. You know, if you look at time.com these days, a year ago, it was just, it was news. Now we tease celebrity stories from people, we tease stuff out of fortune, we tease stuff out of money. And it gives people a chance to see it and go and explore those brands. So, yeah, a lot of fun things. Super exciting to chat with you. I mean, we were, you know, we were born out of this new wave and you know, we're a growing small media company. So we know the opportunity. And it is really a technology dev ops mindset in media. I mean, you think of a mobile connected consumer, people are things and internet of things is data, right? So, super exciting. And you know, I've been a big fantasy and fortune for instance, doing really well. We read that a lot in our beat. So, Colin, thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Congratulations on a great keynote. Again, super exciting conversation. Really all positive Amazon is just continuing to extend their lead in the cloud business. And again, just in there, and their strategy is very clear. Just be faster and just move faster and just keep outpacing the competition. And that is ultimately their competitive strategy. And I think their scale is their lock in. And we're seeing examples of enablement and if anyone can catch up, that's second place is available. So, I'm sure people are going to give me some hate mail for that. I'll be right back here in theCUBE after this short break.