 Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada this week at AWS re-invent. I am joined by analyst and 10 year re-invent veteran, John Furrier. John, pleasure to join you today. Great to see you, great event. This is 10 years, we've got great guests coming on theCUBE, three days after this, wall to wall, we'll lose our voice every year, Thursday. Can I feel the energy? Can you feel the volume already? I mean, just everyone's getting bigger, stronger in the marketplace, seeing a lot more activity, new players coming into the cloud, ones that have been around for 10 years are growing up and turning into platforms and just the growth of software in the industry is this phenomenon. Our next guest is going to be a great chat about it. I know, it's funny you mentioned marketplace, we're going to be talking marketplace in our next segment. We're bringing back a CUBE alumni. Chris Casey, welcome back to the show. How are you feeling today? Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, this week is the most exciting week of the year for us at AWS and it's just the fantastic energy you mentioned before to be here in Las Vegas at Reinvent and thank you very much for having me back. It's great to talk to John last year and lovely to meet you and talk to you this year. It is our pleasure. It is definitely the biggest event of the year. It's wild that Amazon would do this on the biggest online shopping day of the year as well. It goes to show about the boldness and the bravery of the team, which is very impressive. So you cover a few different things at AWS. You're talking about and across industries as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about why the software alliances and the data exchange are so important to the partner organization at AWS? Yeah, it really comes back to the importance to the AWS customer. As we've been working with customers over the past few years especially and they've been embarking on their enterprise transformation and their digital transformation moving workloads to the cloud. They've really been asking us for more and more support from the AWS ecosystem and that includes native AWS services as well as partners to really help them start to solve some of the industry specific use cases and challenges that they're facing and really incorporate those as part of the enterprise transformation journey that they're embarking on with AWS. How that translates back to the AWS marketplace and the partner organization is customers have told us they're really looking for us to have the breadth and depth of the ecosystem of partners available to them that have the intellectual property that solves very niche use cases and workloads that they're looking to migrate to the cloud. A lot of the time that furnishes itself as an independent software vendor and they have software that the customer is trying to use to solve an insurance workflow or an analytics workflow for your utility company as well as third party data that they need to feed into that software. And so my team's responsibility is helping work backwards from the customer need there and making sure that we have the partners available to them ideally in the AWS marketplace so they can go and procure those products and make them part of solutions that they're trying to build or migrate to AWS. A lot of success in marketplace over the past couple of years especially during the pandemic people were buying and procuring through the marketplace. You guys have changed some of the operational things date exchange, enterprise sellers or your sales reps can sell in there. The partners have been glowingly saying great things about how it's just raining money for them if they do it right. And some are like, well, I don't get the marketplace. So there's kind of a new game in town in the marketplace with some of the successes. What is this new momentum that's happening? Is it just people getting more comfortable? They're doing it right. How does the marketplace work effectively? Yeah, I mean, marketplace has been around for 10 years as well as the AWS partner organization. Just like our coverage, what a nice coincidence. Decades all around, happy anniversary everyone. Yeah, everyone's celebrating the 10 year birthday. But I think to your point, John, we've continued iterating on features and functionality that have made the partner experience a much more welcoming digital experience for them to go to market with AWS. So that certainly helped. And we've seen more and more customers start to adopt marketplace, especially for some of their larger applications that they're trying to transform on the cloud. And that extends into industry verticals as well as horizontal sort of business applications, whether they be ERP systems like Infor, that customers are trying to procure through the marketplace. And I think even for our partners, it's customer driven. We've heard from our customers that the streamlining the payments and procurement process is a really key benefit for them procuring by the marketplace. And also the extra governance and control and visibility they get on their third party licensing contracts is a really material benefit for them, which is helping our partners lean in to marketplace as a digital channel for them to go to market with us. And also, you guys have this program, it's what's called enterprise buying or something where clients can just take their spend and move it over into other, probably it's like a MongoDB, more Mongo, give me some more Splunk, give me some more Influent. I mean, all these things are possible now, right? To some of the partners, isn't that, that's like found money for the partners. Yeah, going back to what I said before about the AWS ecosystem, we're really looking to help customers holistically with regard to that. And certainly when customers are looking to make commitments to AWS and move a large swath of workloads to AWS, we want to make sure they can benefit from that commitment, not only from native AWS services, but also third party data and software applications that they might be procuring through the marketplace. So certainly for the procurement teams, not only is there technical benefits for them on the marketplace and, you know, Forest's total economic impact study really helped quantify that for us more recently. 66% of time saving for procurement professionals, which is, when you calculate that in hours in person weeks or a year, that's a lot of time on undifferentiated heavy lifting that they can now be doing on value-added activities. It's a massive shift. Yeah, massive shift. So that in addition, you know, to some of the more contractual and commercial benefits, is really helping customers look holistically at how AWS is helping them transform with third party applications and data. I want to stick on customers for a second because in my show notes are some pretty well-known customers. And you mentioned in for a moment ago, can you tell us a little bit about what's going on with Ferrari? Sure. So in for is one of our horizontal business application partners and sellers in the AWS Marketplace and they sell ERP systems, so helping enterprises with resource planning. And Ferrari is obviously a very well-known brand and, you know, the oldest and most successful. They have heard of that. Yes, right. The most successful Formula One racing team. And Ferrari, you know, a really meaningful customer for AWS from multiple angles, whether they're using AWS to enhance their car design, as well as their fan engagement, as well as their actual end car consumer experience. But as it specifically relates to Marketplace, as part of Ferrari's technical transformation, they were looking to upgrade their ERP system. And so they went through a whole swath of vendors that they wanted to assess. And they actually chose in for as their ERP system. And one of the reasons was because in for actually have an automotive specific instance of their SaaS application. So when we're talking about really solving for some of those niche challenges for customers who operate in an industry, that was one of the key benefits. And then as an added bonus for Ferrari, being able to procure that software through the AWS Marketplace gave them all the procurement benefits that we just talked about. So it's super exciting that we're able to play, you know, a part in accelerating that digital transformation with Ferrari and also help in for, in terms of getting a really meaningful customer using their software services on AWS. Yeah, putting a new meaning to turnkey or push start. You mentioned horizontal services earlier. What is it all about there? What's new there? We're hearing, I'm expecting to see them in the keynote tomorrow. Horizontal and vertical solutions. Let's get the CEO to be the best. What's the focus there? What's this horizontal focus for you? Yeah, I think the big thing is, is really helping line of business users. So people in operations or marketing functions that our customers see the partners and the solutions that they use on a daily basis today and how they can actually help accelerate their overall enterprise transformation with those partners now on AWS. Historically, you know, those line of business users might not have cared where an application historically ran, whether it was on-prem or on AWS, but now just the depth of those transformation journeys their enterprises are on, that's really the next frontier of applications and use cases that many of our customers are saying they want to move to AWS. And what are some of those horizontal examples that you see emerging? So Salesforce is probably one of the best ones to call out there. And really the two meaningful things Salesforce have done there is a deep integration with our ML and AI services like SageMaker, so people can actually perform some of those activities without leaving the Salesforce application. And then AWS and Salesforce have worked on a unified developer experience, which really helps remove friction in terms of data flows for anyone that's trying to build on both of those services. So the partnership with horizontal business applications like Salesforce is much deeper than just to go to market. It's also on the build side to help make it much more seamless for customers as they're trying to migrate to Salesforce on AWS as an example. It's like having too many tabs open at once. Everybody wants it all in one place all at one time. And it makes sense that you're doing so much in the partner marketplace. Let's talk a little bit more about the data exchange. How is this intertwined with your vertical and horizontal efforts that the team's driving as well as with another big name example that folks know probably only because of the last few years, excuse me, with Moderna? Can you tell us a little more about that? Sure. I think when we're talking to customers about their needs when they're operating in a specific industry, but it probably goes for all customers and enterprise customers especially, when they're thinking about software, almost always that software also needs data to actually be analyzed or processed through it for really the end business outcome to be achieved. And so we're really making a conscious effort to really help our partners integrate with solutions that the AWS field teams and business development teams are talking to customers about and help tie those solutions to customer use cases rather than it being an engagement with a specific customer on a product by product basis. And certainly software and data going together is a really nice combination that many customers are looking for us to solve for and looking for us to create pairings based on other customer needs or use cases that we've historically solved for in the past. I mean with over a million customers, it's hard to imagine anyone could have more use cases to pull from when we're talking about these different instances. Right. The challenge actually is identifying which are the key ones for each of the industries and which are the ones that are going to help move the needle the most for customers in there. It's not an absence of selection in that case. Right. I can imagine that's actually the challenge. Yeah. But it's really important. And then more specifically on the data exchange, I think it goes back to one of the leadership principles that we launched last year, the two new leadership principles, success and scale bring broad responsibility. Yeah, we take that very seriously at AWS and we think about that in our actions with our native services, but also in terms of the availability of partner solutions and then ultimately the end customer outcomes that we can help achieve. And I think Moderna is a great example of that. Moderna have been using the mRNA technology and they're using it to develop a new vaccine for the RSV virus. And they're actually using the data exchange to procure and then analyze real world evidence data. And what that helps them do is identify and analyze in almost real time using data on Redshift, who are the best vaccine candidates for the trials based on geography and demographics. So it's really helping them save costs, but not only costs, really help optimize and be much more efficient in terms of how they're going about their trials from the vaccine perspective. Yeah. And more importantly, getting the analysis and the results back from those trials as fast as they possibly can. Yeah. And data exchange is great with a trend that we're going to hear on the keynote tomorrow, more data exchanging, more data being more fluid, addressable, shows those advantages that are a great example, a great call out there. Chris, I've got to get your thoughts on the ecosystem. You know, Ruba Borno is the new head of partners, APN, Amazon Partner Network, and Marketplace comes together. How you guys serve your partners is also growing and evolving. What's the biggest thing going on in the ecosystem that you see from your perspective? You can put your Amazon hat on or take your Amazon hat on, your personal hat on. What's going on? There's a real growth. I mean, seeing people getting bigger and stronger as partners, there's more learning, just more platforms developing. It's kind of the next gen wave coming. What's going on there? What's the keynote going to be like? What's this reinvent going to be for partners? Share your thoughts. Yeah, certainly. I think we're really trying to make sure that we're simplifying the partner experience as much as we possibly can to really help our partners become more profitable or the most profitable they can be with AWS. And so, certainly in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday, you're going to hear a little bit about what we've done there from a program's perspective, what we're doing there from feature and capability perspectives to help really push the digital partner experience, sorry, I should say, as much as possible. And really looking holistically at that partner experience and listening to our partners as much as we possibly can to adapt partner pathways, to ultimately simplify how they're going to market with AWS, not only on the co-sell side of things and how we interact with our field teams and actually interact with the end customer, but also on how we build and help co-build with them on AWS to make their solutions. Whether that be software, whether that be machine learning models, whether that be datasets most optimized to operate in the AWS ecosystem. So you're going to hear a lot of that in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday. There's certainly some really fantastic partner stories and partner launches that'll be featured. Also some customer outcomes that have been realized as a result of partners. So make sure you don't miss it. More action than ever before right now. It's jam packed, certainly. And throughout the week, you're going to see multiple launches and releases related to what we're doing with partners on Marketplace, but also more generally to help achieve those customer outcomes. Well said, Brian. So your hot take, what is the future of partnerships, the future of the cloud, if you want to throw it in? What are you going to be saying to us? Hopefully the next time you get to sit down with John and I here on theCUBE at ReInvent next year. Yeah, I think Adam was quoted today as saying that the partner ecosystem is going to be around in a foundation for decades. I think he's 100% right. For me, in terms of the industry verticals, the partner ecosystem we have and the availability of these niche solutions that really are solving very specific but mission critical use cases for our customers in each of the industries is super important. And it's going to be a foundation for AWS's growth strategy across all the industry segments for many years to come. So we're super excited about the opportunity ahead of us and we're ready to get after it with our partners. If you could do an Instagram reel right now, what would you say is the most important? Well, the Insta challenge, but go John. The Insta challenge, real. Chris's Insta challenge. Insta challenge here. What would be the reel if you'd say to the audience about why this year's ReInvent is so important? I think this year's ReInvent is going to give you a clear sense of the breadth and depth of partners that are available to you across the AWS ecosystem. And there's really no industry or use case that we can't solve with partners that we have available within the partner organization. Anything is possible. What a note to close on. Chris Casey, thank you so much for joining us for the second time here on theCUBE. John. He nailed the Instagram challenge. He did. Did he pass the John test? I'd say so. I'd say so. And he certainly teased us all with the content to come this week. I want to see all the keynotes here about some of those partners. You teased them in the gaming space with us earlier. It's going to be a very exciting week. Thank you, John, for your commentary. Thank you, Chris, one more time. Thanks for having me. And thank you all for tuning in here at theCUBE, where we are the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier with the CUBE team and live from Las Vegas, Nevada. AWS re-invent will be here all week. And we hope you stay tuned.