 From the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-event 2015. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon, joined with my co-host Brian Graceley, and this is theCUBE. Happy to have back to the program, repeat guest, Bill Saltis, VP of Operations at App Associates. Bill, good to see another New Englander here. Thanks for joining us back on the program. Great to be here. All right, so you guys work on Oracle solutions and of course, actually yesterday in the keynote, I mean, Andy for the first time gave a direct punch at the competitor with, you know, there was Oracle logo redacted, picture Larry redacted. Sure. Can you just tell us, you know, you're helping customers get Oracle into AWS. What's the update on your side? Well, first of all, let's define Oracle, which is so broad, as you know, applications and technology side. So the announcement yesterday was a direct hit at the database, if you will. And there's a lot of good options around there. Aurora being announced recently is an option that customers are looking for, but is it a real threat to the SQL servers and Oracle's? They're going to have momentum in the market, container market share, they're robust, feature rich. They'll be okay, but the customers are looking at viable options to commercial databases where they can start scaling, where they can start using the power of cloud computing. And those are, that's a nice sweet spot to look at those options for those customers and help them transform their business. And I think AWS has done a nice job with that. Yeah, one of our favorite practitioner interviews we did last year was Royal Philips who talked about how I want to buy everything by the drink. And that meant from an Oracle standpoint, I needed to work with partners that could help me buy it on-demand elastic and all of that. So it sounds like that fits into what you're saying. How prevalent is that in the customers you're talking to that they're pushing for that new consumption model? Well, the consumption model around cloud computing and the core utility computing is there. I mean, it's mainstream now. So the companies that aren't looking at are far and few between. The thing that in the Oracle world or any of the enterprise class applications are doing is it's holding them back, is they're sitting on long-term contracts with their hosted providers. There's a lot of friction, mission critical applications. It's not something you're going to do right out of the box. So initially when I was here a couple of years ago, we talked about that friction. We talked with Dave and brought up the fact that the first workloads were the DRs, the backups and so forth. Now, since that time and we had talked about forecasting, are they going to actually move their mission critical applications to AWS? The clear answer is absolutely yes. Apps Associates has been doing that for the last couple of years. We have lots of those customers, but it's not a conflict. We even have Oracle acknowledging, promoting their applications on a platform that A&M is where if you don't have their cloud solution or SaaS solution, it's not an option because maybe the applications aren't released yet. You can take your current applications and move them into a cloud environment, start getting out of your data center. It's a win-win for everyone actually. Yeah, so obviously we're here. We're all watching how fast AWS is growing, big database focus this week. Oracle has their own cloud play that's been evolving just maybe for the last 12, 18 months. As you talk to your customers, your clients, how much do they understand the difference between those clouds, what their options are? I mean, do you feel like they're well-educated around cloud or is that, you know, because Oracle wasn't driving their own conversation, maybe they don't understand the breadth of what's out in the market? Well, certainly if you look at the way the customers are organized, I'm talking about the upper-mid market into enterprise. Organizatially with the Neit, they'll have the infrastructure and cloud teams anyway, and they're very knowledgeable about what's going on. Again, the friction of what they can do and the pace that they can move things has to be a roadmap for that, so that's the only thing that's holding them back, but they're very knowledgeable. The thing that they're less knowledgeable about is the how and what should go first, and can I move my business applications over to the cloud, and what would that do, and if we think about it, it's usually a complex heterogeneous environment we're talking about. It's a subway map when you look at the connectivity between all of the different moving parts in the workflow and processes that they have. So when we go in there, you have to break that apart, and you have to go after the ones that are logical. That's the part that they're not that knowledgeable about, and there's industry expertise that's overlaid on top of that, where we try to help them that, and we say that foundation layer that AWS provides is actually a nice fit. So Bill, you brought up the word friction, and we talk about licensing, you talk about contracts. Big theme here at the show has been frictionless. Amazon's making it frictionless when you talk about how easy it is to work on things. Can you walk us through, how does App Associates help the typical practitioner, what does that look like to help them with their journey to the cloud, your partnerships with both Oracle and Amazon? Well, maybe the way I could answer that is, first of all, we've been doing AWS since 2011. In the context of that is, we didn't jump right in, we had a very viable, robust business that was growing 25, 30% a year. We were very happy within the Oracle ecosystem in doing lots of things. Certainly we recognize that cloud computing, the whole smack, was an area for a professional services organization. We needed to be there for our customers, but the thing that was driving it was business transformation. Our customers needed to be nimble. They needed to transform their businesses, and that's where the discussion triggered. What was happening is internally within App Associates, we were innovating. Our teams were already using AWS across the board for training, for POCs, for concept proofs and engagement with the customers to show them things fast. So we just moved that to the customers. If you rethink about it, they were first coming to us, how do I shrink the time to evaluate transforming my business? Whether it be in a line of business or it be, and then how do I shrink my deployment? And ultimately what they're really trying to do is how do I shrink my time to market so my customers can benefit from my new products and so forth. We packaged that all up into, hey, let's look at how AWS can support you. So let's go to the story in 2011 when my phone rang and one of our customers who was actually doing nothing with the cloud, but with Oracle applications, knew that we were in Oracle Business Intelligence, had expertise in Oracle Business Intelligence. They had a situation, the scenario was their HR department was on the latest revision of Oracle HR. The rest of the global organization was on an older version of their business applications. They had incompatibility. As they licensed the brand new HR applications, they were given a pile of seats for BI. How do they evaluate that? They would have to go through in a procurement cycle. There's a proverbial catch 22, that friction that you asked about. Go to IT, we don't have the servers and we can't bring this up so you could evaluate it. Well, let's do a demo. Let's call apps associates, they're experts in this. Let's just, we don't want to see a demo, we want to see our data. So, you know, it was a typical story. Yeah, agility of the cloud. The agility of the on demand resources, absolutely. We were all doing it, so that's the first story we just said, within two weeks, our cloud team had their business applications, BI applications running in the cloud, in AWS. They were able to show their executives their scrubbed HR data, sold them, they were able to then go in their budget cycle, and this was in weeks. They would never be able to do that. That I think is a good example of how we got pulled in, how we transformed those companies, and I think that's what companies really need to do. You summed it up perfectly, and I think we'll leave that as the bumper sticker for the interview. So, Bill Saltis, thank you for coming back and seeing us. Hope to see you in San Francisco in a few weeks at the Big Oracle Show too, and we'll be right back with our next guest here right after this quick break. Thanks for watching.