 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. It's virtual this year because of the pandemic. We're not there in person and in real life. We're remote. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're theCUBE virtual. As we continue to cover the three weeks of AWS re-invent and analyze the keynotes, we bring it in from our CUBE alumni network experts. And we have here great guest, Steve Mulaney, CEO of AVA Tricks Industry Executive Legend, former entrepreneur, done startups, been very, very successful, luminary in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto Networks, Nacir, Cisca, all the companies you've worked for. Steve, great to see you again. Oh yeah, hey, awesome. Even if it's just virtual, John, it's great to be back in theCUBE. Okay, Steve, what's up? Am I muted? I got you, I got you. Oh, okay. I just said it's great to be back in theCUBE. I had to shut up my volume. Got to love live CUBE TV. I wanted to bring you on because one, we've been talking with you guys and your company that you're now heading, you came off the board to take the helm of AVA Tricks. You really saw the vision early and before the pandemic, we were actually did a hybrid event with you guys, digital hybrid, and your vision of multi-cloud and hybrid was pretty much in line with what Andy Jassy and Amazon's now rolling out, except they're not calling it multi-cloud, they're just saying hybrid. But when you factor in the edge, the complexity there, you're really talking multiple environments. So I want to get your take as you look at what Amazon's done in their announcements, they're continuing to power along. What's your analysis? What's your industry take? Yeah, I think it's great. I think when we were a year ago, it was just a little over a year ago, we're at a multi-cloud conference. And I think people kind of thought, wow, is multi-cloud something that the vendors are wanting to happen because they don't want to be killed by AWS? And I mean, I saw this two years ago, I call it the Cambrian Explosion, the cloud, where every enterprise said, we are now going to move to cloud. And they've been talking about it for six or seven years, but they didn't really mean it. And two years ago I saw they meant it and I knew it was going to happen. It was going to go multi-cloud. It was going to care about day two operations, visibility, control, security, all the things that enterprises care about. And I think what we've seen really over the last year is AWS and all the other cloud providers recognizing this, that the world is going multi-cloud and day two operations matter. You've got to be able to operationalize this. And enterprises can't just, it's not just about wiring it and building it up. You've got to operate it. And so that's, I think, the thing that's really interesting is the maturity of the messaging, I would say, from AWS to recognize where enterprises are in their journey. You know, Steve, I want to just reflect on something. When I was 19 years old, my first job in New York, it was on a prime mini computer, my first exposure to the enterprise obviously then went on and worked IBM and HP and others, I've been around the enterprise and just go back 10 years in Silicon Valley, you could literally count on one or two hands the number of enterprise experts out there that you knew of that were out circulating that weren't retired. Because IT went through this kind of commodity stage of outsource everything kind of down to the bone, you know, just keeping the lights on. There wasn't really a lot of innovation in the enterprise. Now it's the hottest thing in the world. And you look at what's happening with cloud, they're redefining the enterprise. And Andy Jassy said to me, and I'm going to interview him later this week. And he said, we're done with IaaS and PaaS. We checked, that's inning, I say inning one, but he's kind of implying that we did IaaS and PaaS, we're targeting global IT. Yeah, well, you know, it's a whole nother ball game. Now the enterprise is super hot. And you know, it's a whole nother ball game to restructuring IT. Yeah, I mean, so AWS is marketing slogan, mark my words, I'll bet you a hundred bucks. Within the next year is going to change. They are not going to say, go build anymore, right? Guess what they're going to say, go consume, because no enterprise wants to build. And oh, by the way, here's the other thing that they're now also figuring out, because I know Andy Jassy announced this, there's a skills shortage of cloud. So they don't have the skills at the aptitude, but there's also a people shortage. It's not just the skills, it's the amount of people. They don't have the ability to go deploy this. And you're going to need solutions like ABA tricks that abstract away a lot of the complexities of the underlying clouds and deliver this architecture for people to be able to actually deploy. Where is the skill gaps in your opinion? Where do you see them? You know, I was just talking to a customer yesterday and he said, most of my team are CLI jockeys. And so for networking, that means the CLI, the command line interface that a human manipulates to control the Cisco router. That's the old operational model. The model of this these days are Terraform. You're going to infrastructure is code everything. You need scripters, you need developers that are going to be driving your infrastructure. But I can't fire all these people that I've had in my enterprise for the last 30 years. I got to bring them along. I got to bring them along in the tools and the platforms to be able to go do that. Andy's argument in Amazon's position is we eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. And we have all this training and content to bring everyone along. Do you buy that? Well, I mean, here's the thing that I think AWS and all the cloud providers are figuring out is the enterprise is a different beast. You know, when you go to a company, it's AWS and say, hey, you can get it as long as it's any color you want as long as it's black. And guess what? I'm a service and the beautiful thing is you don't need to know anything about how we do anything. And just trust me, it's all going to work. That does not go over well with an enterprise because they say, I'm the guy that needs to know. I will get fired if this infrastructure goes down. You know, we saw US East one go down two weeks ago where Google had outage two days ago or whatever it was. Shit happens. I don't know if I can say that on theCUBE, but stop. We're not going to actually see regulated at this point, but who's going to know? And you know what? I've got to have that visibility and controls in enterprise and I need the granular controls and the visibility to troubleshoot and the security controls and the performance controls that I used to have on-prem because I'm a regulated enterprise. I need that visibility and control. And the cloud providers just say, look, I've delivered a service and I delivered to everybody and it's the same service and you don't need to know. That does not fly with the enterprise. Well, certainly you're seeing more regulated industries. It used to be just public sector. I just talked with Theresa Carlson. She now took over all the industries. So fintech is regulated, energy is regulated, telecom is regulated. The only thing that's not regulated is a VC and startup sectors, right? So this, you know. Well, and every good CIO of an enterprise knows nothing good comes from your infrastructure that gets outsourced. We tried that. It doesn't work. Now, maybe in 20 years I can outsource my infrastructure if I'm the CIO of a major enterprise corporation. But right now I am not outsourcing that. I have to have control. Now, am I going to leverage services and basic infrastructure from the cloud providers? Absolutely. I'm not going to build it on my own data centers. That world is over. But what I'm going to maintain is the visibility and control. Yeah, and that's what we heard from Werner Vogels around observability, systems thinking, control versus observability, evolvable systems, things like reasoning. You know, these are innovations, right? So let's get back to that builder's thing because you mentioned that earlier. I think there might be an opportunity and I think this is where I think Jassy will either look brilliant or it might not pan out. So go big or go home moment. Can Amazon create a market for companies to say, instead of bringing along everybody, I'm going to bring along some people and hire more builders? Because there's rewards, there's spoils to be had for those builders at this point in time. Given the pandemic, it's kind of put everything on full display in terms of what to do. What's your thoughts on that? I think outside in, meaning I look at the customer and I sit at the same side of the table with the customer, I think, what did they want? And every enterprise customer right now is building out their private, it's just like in 1992 when they built out their private infrastructures, global infrastructure and they did it with on-prem, on-data centers. I bought my stories, my compute, my networking, my MPLS and I built my infrastructure and it was my infrastructure. They're doing the same thing. It's just they're architecting on top of cloud and they're doing it in a multi-cloud world because they're not going to be locked in to just one cloud. And they're going to have some applications that run better on GCP, some on better on AWS and some on Oracle and all of our customers are doing this. And what they want though is a common infrastructure that's their architecture and their infrastructure, not an AWS architecture and a Google architecture and an Azure architecture, one architecture abstracted away above the clouds. That's my architecture and it's common for my global network. That's what enterprises want to do. And I think each of the individual clouds are going to have to understand that they are a piece of the puzzle. They are not the puzzle. And I think they're going to have to come to that realization. Steve, I really appreciate your expertise and insight into the commentary real quick. Last 30 seconds, give a quick plug for Aviatrix. What are you guys doing? What's new? Give the quick update. I mean, it's crazy just since I've been the CEO for two years and the logos of large enterprise that we're getting right now, the Cambrian explosion that I saw two years ago is real. We're executing on that strategy. It's a who's who of logos right now. We've got 450 customers now, we're exploding. And more importantly, enterprises are now hitting that deployment phase. They're done with the architecture phase of, hey, let me check this whole thing out in cloud. And now they're pushing the button and they're accelerating, which my guess is it's not a coincidence that AWS is now talking about operations. And what Aviatrix does is does gives that visibility and control cloud networking, but in a very cloud native way with Terraform simplicity agility because agility is part of mission critical infrastructure. Now it can't be like it was in 1994 with a Cisco infrastructure where IT said what year do you want your infrastructure, Mr. Customer. Great, and the biggest thing people should pay attention to this year for around the enterprise dynamics with cloud and scale. What should people be watching in your opinion? Just the continued movement of big enterprises all into cloud. The center of gravity is now into cloud and they're going to be completely running away from everything on-prem. All right, Steve Mulaney, CEO of Aviatrix, proven success entrepreneur CEO back in the game. Two years of the helm of Aviatrix. Great to see you. I wish we were in person. Yeah, me too. One of our last events was your altitude event. It's on YouTube. Everyone's interested in watching. We had a great time. Steve, thank you so much for your candid commentary. Yeah, thanks John. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE virtual here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching.