 Welcome back to London everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We're here with a special session in London. We've been following the career of Teresa Carlson around. We asked, hey, can we come to London to your headquarters there and interview some of the leaders and some of the startups and innovators, both in public sector and commercial. Andy Isherwood is here. He's the managing director of AWS, EMEA. Andy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Dave, great to be here. Thank you very much for your time. So you're about a year in, right? So that's plenty of time to get acclimated. What are your impressions of AWS and then we'll get into the market? Yeah, so it's nearly a year and a half actually. So time definitely goes pretty quickly. So yeah, I'd say it's pretty different. I'd say probably a couple of things kind of jump out at me. One is I think we just have a startup mentality in everything we do. So if you think about everything we do kind of works back from the customer room, we really feel like a kind of startup at heart. And we always say within the organization, we should always make it feel like day one. If we get to day two, the game's over. So we always try and make day one something that's kind of relevant on what we're doing. I think the second thing is customer obsession. I think we are truly customer obsessed. And you could say that most organizations actually say they're customer obsessed. I'd say we're truly customer obsessed in everything we do. So if you think about our re-invent program, if you think about London, the summit coming up, what you will notice is that there will be customers everywhere speaking about their experiences. And that's really important. So we start with the customer and we always work back. So super important that we never forget that. And if you think about how we develop our services, they start with the customer. We don't go out like a product company would and make great products and sell them. We start with the customer work back, develop the solutions, and then let the customer use them, and we iterate on those developments. So I'd say it's pretty different in those two aspects. I'd say the other thing is it's just hugely relevant. Every customer I go into, and I've seen hundreds of customers in the last year and a half, we're hugely relevant. We are at the heart of what people want to do and need to do, which makes it important. Yeah, so we've been following the career of Andy Jassy for years. And we've learned about the working backwards documents. Certainly you guys are raising the bar all the time. It's sort of the mantra. And yeah, customer centricity. You said it's different. We do over a hundred events every year and every company out there talks about where we focus on the customer. But what makes AWS different? I think it's the fact that we truly listen and work back from the customer. So we're not a product company. We don't make products with great R&D people and then take them and sell them. We don't obsess about the competition. We start with the customer. We go and speak to the customer. I think we listen intently to what they need and we help them look around corners. We help them think about what they need to do for them to be successful. Then we work back and probably 90% of what we do is fundamentally developed from those insights that the customer gives us. That's quite different. That really is a working back methodology. We run most of our business on AWS and it's true. So I remember we were in a meeting with Andy Jassy one time and he started asking us how we use the platform and what we like about it and don't like about it. My business partner, John Furrier, he's kind of our CTO. He starts rattling off a number of things that he wanted to see. Andy pulls out his pen and he starts writing it down and he was asking questions back and forth. So I think I've seen that in action. One of the things that we've observed is that the adoption of cloud in EMEA and worldwide is pretty consistent and ubiquitous. There's not like a big gap. You used to see years later, Europe would maybe adopt a technology and you're seeing actually in many cases, certainly you see it with mobile. You're seeing greater advancements. GDPR obviously is a template for privacy. What are you seeing in Europe in terms of some of the major trends of cloud adoption? Yeah, I don't think we're seeing major differences. People talk a lot about, well, Europe must be two years behind North America in terms of adoption. We don't see that. I think it is slightly slower in some countries but I don't think that's kind of common across the piece. So I'd say that the adoption and if you think back to some customers that were very early adopters, just from an overall global cloud perspective, companies like Shell, for example, they were really early adopters and those were kind of European based companies. You could say they're global companies, absolutely. But a lot of what they did was developed in Europe. So I would say that there are countries that are slower to adopt, sometimes driven by the fact that security is an issue or was an issue, that data sovereignty was a bigger issue for some of these countries. But I think all of those are pretty much past now. So I think we are very quickly kind of catching up with regards to the North American market. You mentioned sort of a startup mentality. You mentioned BP. Is it divisions within a large company like that that are startup like? Is that what you're seeing in terms of the trends? No, I'm seeing three patterns. So I'm seeing a pattern which is large organizations that go all in very quickly. Typically, strong leadership, clear vision, need to move quickly. We're going cloud. Yeah, we're going cloud and we're going all in. And that may be like an NL would be a great example. So NL is a really good example of a top-down approach, very progressive, CIO, very clear thinking CEO that's driven adoption. So I'd say that's pattern one. For me, pattern two is where large organizations create an entity alongside. So almost a separate business. So probably Open Bank is probably a good example, part of Santander. And now that organization has about one and a half million customers obviously started in Spain, but they built a digital bank, clearly tapping into all of the data and customer sets within Santander, but building an experience which is fundamentally different. So Skunkworks that really grew. Correct, absolutely Skunkworks that grew, but grew quickly and now it's becoming a key part of their business. And then the third area, or the third pattern for me is very much a kind of a bottoms up led approach. So this is where the developers basically love the services that we have. They use the services. They typically put them on their credit card or Amex and then they'll go and use the services and create real value. That value is then seen and it snowballs. So those are kind of the three patterns. I'd say the only kind of outlier to those three patterns is a startup organization. And as you know, we've been hugely successful with startups from Pinterest to Uber to Kareem to all of these organizations. And those organizations it's really important to influence them early on, to make sure that they are aware and the developer community and the founders are aware of what we can do and we have a number of programs to really help them do that. And they start to use our services and as those organizations are successful then our business grows alongside them and they typically start to use a lot more of the services. One of the defining patterns of three, the bottoms up and four of the startups is they code infrastructure. And sometimes the one, the top down, may not have the skill sets and the disciplines and the structure to do that. What are you seeing in terms of that whole programmable infrastructure, the skill sets, programmers essentially coding the infrastructure? Are you seeing CIOs come in and say, okay, we need to reskill? Are they bringing in new staff? Like kind of the number two, the open bank example might be some rock stars that they want to sort of assign to the skunk work. How is the number one category dealing with that in terms of their digital transformation? Yeah, so skills is something that's critically important, having the right skills in the right place at the right time. And if you think about Europe, it's a big outsource to market. So a lot of those skills were outsourced typically to a lot of the outsourcing companies, as you'd expect. What you're seeing now is organizations, BPs are a good example of this, where they're building the innovation capability back into their organizations to make sure that they can create the offerings and create the user experience and create the business models for the new world. And what we're doing is really trying to make sure that we're enabling those organizations to build the skills. So probably at a number of different levels, kind of at a very basic level or at a very junior level, we're kind of influencing people in schools. So we're going to be announcing or announcing at the SAMHIC, Get IT, which is basically a program to train up year eight students. So you start there and basically you go all the way through to offering training and certification. We have a very big function associated with that to make sure that we're building the right skills for organizations to be successful. And also then working with partners. So all of those training and certification skills, we are working with the partners like the cloud reaches of this world, but also the DXCs of this world, the Accentures of this world, the ATOSs of this world, really to make sure that they have the right skills and capability, not only around our services, but around the movement to cloud, which is what these organizations need to do to help them innovate. And it sounds like your customers want to learn how to fish, they see that as IP in a sense. They'll work with partners, but help them transfer that knowledge and then continue to innovate, raise the bars. As we like to say. One of the biggest challenges that we see, we talk to customers about all the time is the data challenge. Particularly companies that have been around for a while, they have a lot of technical debt, the data is locked into these hardened silos. Obviously, I'm sure you see that as a challenge. Maybe you can address that, how you're helping customers deal with that challenging. Some of the other things that you see cloud addressing. Yeah, so we're really trying to help customers be successful in doing what they do in the time scale that they're kind of setting themselves and we're helping them be successful. I think from a data point of view, we have a lot of capability. So just to give you a perspective, so since I've been here that year and a half, we started with 125 services. That number of services has gone to 170-odd services now. And the innovation that we have within those services has now reached, I think, last year, just over the 1900 level. So this is iterations on the product. In addition to that, we are continually building new offerings. So if you think about our database strategy, it's very much to create databases that customers can use in the right way at the right time to do the right job. And that's just not one database. It's a number of different databases tuned for specific needs. So we have 14 databases, for example, which are really geared to make customers use the right database at the right time to achieve the right outcome. And we think that's really important. So that's helping people basically use their data in a different way. Obviously, our S3, our core storage offering is critically important and hugely successful. We think that as is the bedrock for how people think about their data, and then they expand and use data lakes. And then, you know, underpinning that is making sure that they've got the right databases to support and use that data effectively. I mean, at the start of this millennium, there was like a few databases. Databases are a boring marketplace, and now it's exploded. He didn't even say it's dozens. I mean, it's actually amazing how much innovation there's occurring in that space. What's your vision for AWS in Amir? Yeah, so, well, you know, the overall Amazon vision is to be the world's most customer-obsessed organization. So, you know, here in Amir, that holds true. So, you know, we start with the customer, we work back, and we want to make sure that every single customer is happy with what we're doing. You know, I think the second thing is making sure that we are bringing and enabling customers to be innovative. You know, this is really important to us, and it's really important to the customers that we sell to. You know, there's many insurgents, kind of attacking historic business models. It's really important that we give all of the organizations the ability to use technology, whether a small company or a big company. And we call that the democratization of IT. We're making things available that were only available to big companies a while back. Now, we have made those services available to pretty much every single company, whether you're a startup in a garage, you know, to a large global organization. So, that's really important that we bring and we continue to democratize IT to make it available for the masses so that they can go out there and innovate and do what ultimately customers want to do. You know, customers want people to innovate. Customers want a different experience. And it's important that we give organizations the tools and the wherewithal to go and do that. Well, you've been in the industry long enough and you've worked at product companies and prior to this part of your career. And you know the innovation engine used to be Moore's law. It used to be how fast can I take advantage of that curve? And that's totally changed now. You see a number of things happening. It's get rid of the heavy lifting so you can focus in your business. That's what cloud does for you. But it's kind of this combination, the cocktail of data plus machine intelligence. And then the cloud brings scale. It attracts innovative companies. How do you see, first of all, do you buy that sort of new cocktail? And how do you see customers applying that innovation engine? Yeah, you know, to answer the first bit first, you know, we definitely see that cocktail. So, you know, the kind of undifferentiated work that was historically done to kind of build servers and, you know, make sure that they ran and all of those things. People don't need to do that now. We do that really, really effectively. So they can really focus their time, attention, their money, their efforts, their innovation on creating new experiences, new products, new offerings for their customers. And they should also, you know, work back from customers themselves and work out what's really required. Every single business model, every single offering, you know, needs to be questioned by every single organization. And I think that's what we do. We give the ability to organizations to really think differently about how they use, you know, what we have to do the really important things, the things that differentiate them and the things that ultimately give customers a different experience. And that's why I think we've seen so many very successful companies, you know, from Airbnb to Pinterest to Uber. It's giving people a fundamentally different experience. And that's what people want. So, you know, we're here to, I think give people the ability to create those different experiences. It's kind of amazing when you go back and you remember the book, Does IT Matter? The Harvard Business Review, famous. It couldn't have been more wrong. At the same time, it couldn't have been more right because it really underscored that IT was broken. And that preceded 2006 introduction of EC2. And now technology matters more than ever before. Every company's a technology company, you know, you have Mark Benioff talk about self-reseeding the world. It's so true. And so, as companies become technology companies, what's your advice to them? I mean, obviously you're going to say, let us handle the heavy lifting, but what do they have to do to succeed in their digital transformation in your view? Yeah, you know, I think it's about, you know, changing the mindset and changing the culture of organizations. So I think you can try and instill new processes and new tools on an organization. But fundamentally, you've got to change the culture. And I think we have to create and enable cultures to be created that are innovative. And that requires, I think, a very different mindset. That requires a mindset which is about, we don't mind if you fail, you know, and we'll applaud failure. You know, we in Amazon have had many failures, but it's applauded. And if it's applauded, people try again. So they'll dust themselves off and they'll move on. You can see this in Israel, which is, you know, very much a startup nation. You can see people start a business, they might fail next day, they start a new one. So I think it's having this culture of innovation that allows people to experiment. Experimentation's good, but it's also prone to failure. But, you know, out of 10 experiments, you're going to get one that's successful. That one could be the make or break for your organization to move forward and give customers what they actually need. So break things, move fast, right? Exactly. Love it. All right, what should we expect tomorrow at the London summit? We've got a big crowd coming at the Excel Center. Yeah, I think you'll see us, you know, continue to innovate. I think you'll see a lot of people. And I think you'll see a lot of customers talk about their experience and share their experience. You know, these are learning summits. You know, they're not kind of show and tell. They're very much about explaining what other customers are doing, how people can use the innovation. And you'll see, you know, lots of experiences from different customers that people will be able to take away and learn from and go back to their offices and do similar things. But probably in a different way. So, you know, there'll be lots of exciting announcements. You know, as you saw from ReInvent, we continue to innovate at a fair clip. As I said, 1950 odd innovations, you know, significant releases last year. So not surprisingly, you know, you'll see a few of those. These summits are like, they're like many re-invents, aren't they? And as you said, Andy, very customer focused, customer centric, a lot of customer content. So, Andy, if you would, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to have you. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE.