 Well hey everybody, John Walls here with theCUBE continuing coverage at AWS Rangvent 22. It has been three really fantastic days here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and we still have more to come. With us to talk about persistent systems is the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent, Dominique Bastos and Dominique, good to see you. Thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Oh you bet, you bet. All right, tell us about persistent systems. First off, core focus, what you're up to and then we'll jump in from there. Sure, sure. So persistent systems is a digital engineering solutions and services provider. They've been around for 32 years doing software engineering, innovating in several areas within different verticals. There's over 22,500 people at Persistent now as of my last count. We're in 18 countries. And in October, we hit the $1 billion annualized recurring revenue mark. Oh that's a good number right there. It's a good number, it's a great company. It's been such an interesting journey. I was with AWS for almost seven years before recently joining Persistent, and it almost felt like such a logical transition in terms of bringing what I've seen in my entire career of interacting with customers and businesses to what Persistent can provide as people are looking to make their journey to the cloud, whatever stage they might be at. And we should point out it's a SVP of cloud but your focus is AWS. My focus is AWS. Other options, other opportunities for your AWS all the way. Right, it's a multi-cloud company because we really don't believe in dictating to a customer what they need. I think one of the differentiators for Persistent is the amount of legacy history that they have across these industries and customers, I mean 32 years is a lot, and in terms of software engineering. So it's like really doing the hard work, the heavy lifting. And then seeing what can actually be commoditized, repeatable building solutions within these verticals to help customers accelerate their transformations. So. You know, when we talk about cloud, I mean this has been something that's been on the forefront for a long, I feel like a long time, right? But yet there are still many, and maybe you can tell me how with that percentage, whatever of companies who are either having begun yet, are just beginning, they're really in a nascent stage of this transformation. And yeah, I find it, I found it curious this week as we've talked with different people about where are you in your journey and so on and so forth. A lot of people are way back just starting past go and aren't as mature as I would have thought. I mean, do you find that to be the case? Absolutely, and there's many reasons for that. I mean, I think what I've started, I mean, I've been seeing it over the years, but we all know IT and business back then was very much kept separate. Two separate animals. Two separate animals, IT made the decisions, not in a vacuum, but almost in a vacuum, right? Now, obviously companies who know it's necessary and have embraced it, bring together the function of looking at the technological solutions that they're adopting to solve a business problem, but that business problem really is dictated by the customer need. So I think I have seen in terms of the life cycle of a business adopting technology post-cloud, there's a lot of enterprises that are still, they've made such big investments in their legacy infrastructure and in actually the developers and the people that are maintaining those systems and the different connections to put it in layman's terms between their systems and their customer systems, right? So that entire scenario makes it very difficult for them to move, it's like moving a mountain. So there's, I would say there's like three ways of looking at it, you have those that kind of want to revitalize their technology, right? They're backend systems, they want to optimize costs, and my background in technology is specifically in data. I kind of, I came up as a DBA and built data models and I've always loved data before it was a thing to love data. So- You were so far ahead of the crowd. I was ahead of the crowd, I was a trend setter. What a trend setter. I'm a trend setter. So I think from that perspective, they're looking at these enormous amounts of data that they've been capturing in these legacy systems that they're so heavily invested in, but they're not able to derive the insights to better serve their customers or to even innovate new revenue streams from that data. But they're taking the first step to say, look, we can actually operate more smoothly at a lower cost by moving to the cloud. So there's that. Then there are those that are looking to actually innovate and create new revenue streams, monetize their data, look at opportunities to integrate feedback that they've been getting from their customers to provide new services. So they're using the cloud journey, they've probably already moved into the cloud. They're starting to look at analytics and potentially using AIML to facilitate creating these solutions and services. And then there's those that want to pioneer and break into new inventions and ways of solving the big world problems, right? I mean, I think that's one thing I noticed in this reinvent that I thought was so special is there's like a really big focus on humanity, on humans, as we were talking earlier, everything, and I myself, like holding books and I don't like people being on their phone or having a conversation. But I think we are where we are. The reality is the world has evolved in such a way that community is no longer, it takes a small village, everybody knows each other, you have face-to-face interactions. You're not doing that with your customers either. There's digitally native businesses that have, for a long time, cropped up in the fintech space in, you know, you name the space, there's a startup that was born in the cloud that can reach customers immediately and can provide a service that an enterprise that's kind of like weighed down with their legacy systems, they can't pivot fast enough. So I think, you know, the pioneers think beyond that, how do we use quantum computing? How do we use 3D simulation to anticipate solving big world problems? Whether it's, you know, people no longer, I don't know what the statistics are, but it's very sad that elderly people, you know, the amount of human contact that they have is very little, you know, and if you could provide, I don't know, an experience, an immersive experience where their memories are triggered, you know, to help them with dementia, Alzheimer's, and those types of things, those are the things that I think that's what excites me about the launches that I see at re-invent. And I think the innovation, you know, you have to take that journey. Unless you're born in the cloud, you do have to kind of take that journey. You've got to get there. You have to get there, but it's so worth it. So how about, let's just say, if I'm a health sciences company or I'm a pharmaceutical or whatever, and so I've got this desire to create this new opportunity, you know, with a human, if I say, but yeah, but if you're also, if you're persistent systems and you're working with, you know, somebody in Fintac or somebody in Ag or whatever, you can't really understand my challenges or my problems. I mean, how do you wear those different hats so you can identify not only what the focus of that client is, but also their technology and how you're going to get them to marry up so they can achieve their goals? Well, the beauty of being, you know, in a company with teams of people that you work with, my, I cut across industries, right? So we have vertical leaders that have very deep subject matter expertise in any one of, any number of those areas. You know, we're working with Genomics, for example. So for example, you know, we engage with a customer that we've been helping over the past 32 years use technology to bring services to their customers. And now we're seeing an opportunity to help them innovate, to keep up for their business for obvious reasons, but also to supply their customers with the new, the new innovative solutions within that industry, right? Cause that's, you need that vehicle to kind of deploy and deliver what customers need. The way we do it is from end to end, right? So we can, we have in the partnership with AWS, we're a partner of AWS, and as such, we're able to collaborate with AWS and their customers or bring our customers to the cloud, all the way from assessment to planning to execution. And even within persistent, we have ways to operationalize the maintenance of these solutions. So it's really a very easy managed services type framework that we work under. In terms of like migration planning, we have competencies within AWS for looking at migrations. We have AIML, we have DevOps. So we have the various competencies aligned with AWS to be able to execute at whatever stage the customer is, but also in terms of like the accelerators that we provide or the frameworks to look at total cost that cuts across, right? And then we don't kind of like, here's what you needed and buy, never speak to us again. I mean, I think the beauty of this company and what I really loved when I was first speaking to them is the depth of the relationships with their customers and the longevity of them. So they've really seen their customers grow. And you can only do that if you're there for the long run. You've got to be present. You have to be present. So how do you handle that? If people are making this transformation and they're moving into the cloud, but the people they have on staff might not be familiar with it, right? They have great expertise in what they've been doing on these legacy systems, but now you're moving, you're migrating to a new world, new culture, new environment. And you got to get them up to speed and that's not easy, right? So what do you do or what does persistence suggest or what are you doing with regard to closing that gap and to making that bridge so that they can maintain a little bit on their own? They can execute and implement on their own a little bit. They don't need somebody there to stand over their shoulder the whole time. I won't geek out on having joined AWS in professional services way back when to migrate a major company to the cloud and having lived through painstakingly all those problems and blockers and adoption roadblocks that you speak of. I think the way persistent handles it is what I would have done myself, right? If I were to start a company and say, how do we help customers simplify their cloud journey and remove the complexity? I think that's what persistent systems does. We, there's training programs that we're aligned to with AWS. So there's upskilling of development teams, application developers. We collaborate from the top down with executives to look at the resources that they have available. Obviously mission critical systems that cannot sacrifice having engineers pulled away for a new project. You take that into account. I think when I spoke earlier about assessments, you're not just assessing what needs to be lifted and shifted or refactored or rearchitected. You're looking at all these applications that are going to move to the cloud. Who owns them? Do you have a CI CD pipeline or data pipeline built? Well, we're going to need that, right? So the continuous integration, continuous development of applications, that type of DevOps, obviously security also, DevSecOps, we look at it from end to end as well. We have a very strong security practice. So all those advisory pieces we have, but we also have the capability to execute on it. Where we're not just coming in and saying, well, this is what you should do. We're kind of in there saying this is what you should do. Here's how we can get you started. And then, you know, it's a collaborative effort with our customers to see how much they still want us to stay versus how much they want to take over. Right, it's nice to have a friend. Yeah, who doesn't need a friend? And persistent systems is your friend. Dominic, thanks for the time. Oh, my pleasure. I appreciate it. Thanks again for being here on theCUBE. You bet. Absolutely. You are watching theCUBE. As you well know, the leader in high tech coverage.