 Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit 2016. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We are live in Santa Clara, California at AWS Summit, Santa Clara. It's one of many AWS summits. They do all over the country and all over the world. We're excited to be here. It's been a wall to wall day of craziness. 4,000 people walking around getting bits and pieces and hats and toys and fun from the ecosystem. But it's a lot of serious business because it's about enterprise. Amazon continues to do great. The Dr. Wood keynote, which you didn't see it, make sure you see it on demand was fantastic. Amazon just keeps innovating. Bezos just keeps innovating. Andy Jassy just keeps innovating. And it's just a relentless patience. We've been coming to this thing for like four years now. So we're excited for our next segment. Lisa Martin is joining and our guest, Stevan Garten, director of cloud service, Corp Info, welcome. Thanks, great to be back on the show. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it's October. So give everybody kind of a background on Corp Info. They're not familiar with the company. What have you guys been up to since we saw you reinvent? Absolutely, yeah. So the background on Corp Info is that we're a 33 year old consulting company reborn in the cloud for our partnership with AWS. And ultimately, we specialize in making sure that customers have a successful experience and successful journey in their adoption of AWS. So it's been very busy for us. When we last spoke, we were forecasting that there was going to be a lot of migration activity happening and really sort of pleased to say, eight, nine months later on, we're seeing the forecast prove true and it's been a very busy time for our business. Now it's funny that you mentioned the migration and the mass migration, right? Because before it was always kind of test dev and shadow IT was kind of where AWS got started. And then last year, the big news that reinvent was the snowball, which I think is making a return appearance, which is when lights just too slow and you got to load the thing up and put it on a truck and ship it in. But you're talking about big migrations. You're talking about significant production, data center loads moving out. Indeed, indeed. Probably anywhere upwards from at the smaller end of the spectrum, a hundred or so servers, but right the way up to the thousands of machines now and moving those up in pretty rapid time frames as well. It does feel like for a large part of 2015, CIOs were doing the research, kind of understanding the public cloud and getting comfortable with it. And now that decision is made, it's all in really and it's going to be lights out for a lot of large in-house data centers, I believe over the coming months and years. It's funny, because we hear often where the conversation is no longer if cloud, but now the conversation is why not cloud. But you're saying it's not only the why not cloud for the new native, but why do we still have a data center is what you're saying. Correct. I mean, the phrase the new normal is being used a lot these days and I really do believe that cloud is the new normal. It's the de facto standard for any business, any technology company that's launching today, they would never consider building a traditional data center. And we have the full spectrum of customers from those businesses are born in the cloud companies through to the traditional enterprises. And some of the most traditional enterprises that you would imagine, the manufacturing, healthcare businesses, they're the ones that have the most to gain. So they're really moving very, very quickly right now. Talk to us about that. That's a really interesting, the concept of mass migration is interesting in and of itself, looking at some of those enterprises, how are you seeing the cultural shift internally moving them in that direction? What are some of the things that are changing dynamics-wise between the IT folks and the C-suite? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think one of the characteristics of a successful migration is always the C level buying and sponsorship. Anytime you're changing anything about a business, there's a transformation happening, both technology process and to the people. And for me, what we've seen be very successful is the creation of these cloud senses of excellence and to really sell the opportunity of change to the people that are gonna be involved in making it a success from the business. So one of the biggest selling points, I believe, is that in embracing the cloud as a business and your teams learning and gaining new skills, coming to events like today to learn about AWS, they themselves are enhancing their own career profiles and becoming very attractive with their resumes to future customers and potential career options for them. Tell us about some of the things that you guys are doing with Amazon in terms of mass migration. I talked about that in the keynote and there's a mass migration or migration competency program. Talk to us about what Corp Info was doing with that. Excellent, well Amazon is very well known for responding really quickly and well to customers needs and requirements. And Amazon obviously foresee the mass migration effort and requirement coming about quite a while ago. So they set about launching a migration competency where they work with partners on the consulting side like Corp Info and they help us get the skills that we need to go to clients and say, okay, here's a tried and tested framework. Let's utilize pieces of this for your own organization. So we qualified as one of the founding partners of the competency framework a couple of months ago and we've been leveraging that very heavily for our customers to help them with a streamlined process. There's also quite a few technology vendors as most of them are here today that have built products and services or mainly products around automating that migration journey and making it somewhat seamless for customers. And what are some of the priorities from the customers? Is there a particular type of workload that are low hanging fruit that they can move over? Is there a certain kind of cost profile or workload profile that is the place that they start? These are huge companies with big giant systems. Where do they get started? Where do they find success? I mean, as extreme as this may sound that the C level agenda and the C level direction has really been assume everything. And then if there's something that specifically it should be qualified out for a reason, that's an exception. So really I have seen many large scale enterprises now making that commitment that everything should go in less special approvals required. And it used to be completely the reverse. You'd have to get a special exemption or it'd have to be a net new workload or service to move to the cloud. And now it's just flipped and it's cloud is our de facto enterprise architectural strategy. Everything should be going. And if we need to leave something there should be a defined business case behind why it's being left. And everything should be cloud first. And where does hybrid fit in? Is that a step on the way? Is that a particular type of workload that for regulatory compliance, whatever's got to be kind of still within our four walls? Are you to find that? How does hybrid fit? And again, how are they kind of progressing down before they just turn the lights out on the data? I think originally people saw hybrid as a technology decision. This may run better on-prem. This might run better in the cloud. It's now increasingly as Amazon is investing in widening the platform capabilities and people are getting more comfortable when things are actually running a lot better in the cloud. It's actually now becoming just a business case situation. Okay, we invested in this architecture. It still has X amount of years left in that life cycle. Therefore it makes sense to kind of run that out traditionally as it is today. But it's more and more now driven by a business financial decision as opposed to, hey, this should run here locally because we need this information closer to us. Certainly the idea of restricting and holding things back from a security perspective we barely hear that at all now. People are very comfortable with the security of the cloud and feel like that's an enhancement to their experience when they do move to the cloud. Interesting, that's one of the things that really caught me was you said it's assume everything and there might be some exceptions which is a considerable flip. It's a 180. Talk to us about what you've experienced at the thought process of these, maybe it's the C-suite making these business decisions. What is that thought process to go from one side completely to the other when it comes to migrating an entire data center? I think there was a real awakening that happened for a lot of CIOs. I think they went back and revisited their data centers. I think they had a look around how the operations were happening and managed there. I think they had incidents that were maybe swept under the carpet. Some were very public big incidents with traditional on-premise data centers. And that was a big trigger point at the board level. And we've had more conversations with CFOs in the past 12 months than ever before in my career. So really it's, I think it's been driven by an acknowledgement that maybe the current world that they were operating in wasn't quite as robust. And now that they've seen that Amazon has, I hear this term world-class a lot from customers saying they want to be in a world-class data center. Amazon has proved that they have world-class data centers. So it was a natural driven change of direction there. So how long is the process for one of these types of projects where maybe a small, medium, large, kind of what's the scale of the effort? Usually the timeframe is largely driven by how much the customer currently knows about their architecture. So if they have a very good feel for where a thing is and where a thing's set today, that streamlines things, makes things move a lot quicker. Also, if the customer has the right kind of culture developed within the team, if the team wants to be successful with this and wants to make this happen, they'll move very quickly. I'm seeing data centers shut down in the month, definitely in the months now with some of these large scale moves. Like two or three months, one or two months? Four or five months will be a good conservative estimate. Some run a lot longer, others run a lot sharper. I mean, the smaller co-locations that we were closing down back in sort of 2013, 14, we were shutting those down in as short as six, eight weeks and you're having customers moved out of those environments and safely, securely into AWS. And then I assume it's kind of a phased approach, right? You do either by data center, by workload, by application, but some parsing. After you finish one of these things and you come back for the follow-up of the post-mortem or to start the next one, what's the feedback once they've actually executed a migration? What's the impact to the organization? Obviously, I don't think they're not firing people, they're not getting rid of that resource, they're probably redeploy. Well, what is kind of the enlightenment that comes after doing one of these things? They typically find they're able to free up large pockets of resources and skills within the organization to actually focus their effort on different things and Amazon always uses the term undifferentiated heavy lifting and that work really does disappear very, very quickly and they suddenly find that the number of faults, issues, incidents decreases. It should do that, that was one of the primary goals for a lot of people to get to AWS and these teams now have kind of a reinvention themselves of what they can spend their time working on and doing. And that's very exciting for a lot of businessmen. We personally went through that having a team that some people have been with our company since our foundation in 1983. So we have gone through this experience ourselves and it really brings a new life and excitement to people's jobs and careers when they're able to learn these new things and have this new time to work on new initiatives. Yeah, I'm glad. Thanks, Jeff. So for enterprise customers here today, those that are listening, talk to us about, we talked about that thought process a bit, but explain to us a little bit more what advice you would give to the next CFO that's about to knock on Corp Info's door about how to tackle this problem from a cultural perspective, from a management perspective. What's that advice like? Yeah, definitely getting the right bind and the right stakeholders, communicating the efforts. I think there's a lot of resources available, be it consulting partners, be it bringing in your own team in-house to kind of help manage and control things. I think dip into Amazon's ecosystem of resources, do a lot of reading. There's some great articles published online around the way to approach it. And then my advice really is embrace it. This is a very transformational period that we're living through right now. It's disruptive, it's exciting, it brings risk. It's fun if you get it right and you have the success that you're looking for. And I think once you've made the decision, I would, my advice is go with it. And don't try and make this decision with the same methodologies and thought processes that you used six, five, six years ago when you were building your data centers or refreshing your data centers. You really have to challenge yourself to think differently about how to utilize the cloud. Otherwise you just won't see any real benefit from it. It's a really great point because the decision factors, the measurements of success, the KPIs are different, right? It's apples that oranges a little bit and you can't necessarily use the same methodologies to measure, execute and define success as you did before. I'm just curious about the one guy that's in the corner of the room when this conversation is going on who's holding on the last bastion guys, holding on, what's kind of the final objection that they're trying to hold on to? I mean costs, I've heard a lot of people describe OPEX as being a negative about moving to the cloud. We presume that it's much better to pay as you consume and scale and decrease your architecture, spend based on usage. But actually understanding the complexities of, Amazon probably has 10,000 or more different product SKUs and different ways you can consume the services. So that's something where we've put a lot of investment into partnering with a technology company called Cloud Checker on helping customers actually feel comfortable in modeling out their cloud spend and making sure that they track and control where are things going and actually you can build out a forecast because it's very difficult to just price out a data center in the cloud because it's just not going to be one size for the next three years. It's going to grow, it's going to contract, it's going to be very flexible. Okay, so I want to follow up on the last thing you talked about in terms of transforming your own company. You talked about Corp Infra's old company and you guys have reinvented yourself around the concept of the cloud and AWS particularly. How has that really helped transform your company and your enthusiasm comes through pretty naturally? And then how is Amazon as a partner? Because you basically hitched your wagon to that horse. How has that worked out? How are they to work with? We did indeed. So we effectively went all in with AWS three years ago, made a very strong defined commitment to building out that as a single partnership. We did that because we researched ourselves the way the market had grown and how Amazon was reinventing basically the IT infrastructure market. So firstly, I think it helped us to make that all in decision because everyone in the company almost overnight had a very clear direction that this is how we want it to evolve. And we do have a history. We've partnered with many of the major technology companies over the past 30 years and that's one consistent thing is that we always choose our bets carefully and then we put all eggs in one basket and do our best to become basically world class in that expertise. But it has, you're right, it has brought a whole new life to the organization. It's great to have the history that we do. All the time we go and meet with a customer and they laugh, they say, oh, I bought PCs from you back in 1993. And that's a very real situation that we run into quite a bit. Awesome. All right, Stephen. Well, thank you for stopping by. I guess we'll see you in September, October and re-event coming up. I love the way you work the plug-in. That was very creative. It's going to be fun. All right. Well, thanks for stopping by and as always, sharing your insight. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks guys. Absolutely. All right, I'm Jeff Ricks. She's Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be back from AWS Summit Santa Clara after this short break. Thanks for watching.