 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here live on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the Bellevue Hilton for the AWS Marketplace Seller Conference. It's kind of like the one and a half inaugural event. They had their first event in 2019 and now with the pandemic, they're rebooting it. But it's really all about AWS's Marketplace and partner network coming together, creating an experience for how people will be buying software and how people will be selling through with their ecosystem. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Megan Puntain, who's the VP of Cloud at the Seek who's a seller and partner of AWS. Megan, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. It's nice to be back in person and it's great to be with you. So watching the progression of how Amazon Web Services is evolving the marketplace and the partner network, you start to see some patterns. One is, obviously they have their own stuff and they're addressing that in the room, but they're really letting the thousand flowers bloom in the ecosystem. You hear that every year, reinvent. Even when Andy Jassy, who's now the CEO of Amazon would say, no we want the best of breed, best product wins. Adam Sileski is the same view, new leadership here. The combination of APN, partner network with the Marketplace now partner organization, APO, is the big news. They're open, they're building an API service layer between their old Marketplace to create this new model here. What's your take? What's your seller view? Yeah, so our Marketplace and APN journey started with AWS about three years ago and I think something that was the most profound to me out of the keynote this morning was that Chris Gruz, who runs the APO organization, he's talked about Marketplace as the automation layer for how AWS will partner going forward. So an independent software vendor like C, we see that as opening up the door for two things. When we get to leverage the great global scale and platform of AWS, but then secondly, it really brings together this idea that we will sell together to the end customer through the Marketplace and we will also sell as partners through closed sell and APN. You know, I love these kind of new development models around channel, partners, ISVs. At the end of the day, buyers are buying software and they're on a cloud journey. You're the VP of cloud at the company, your company, C, take a minute to explain what your company's known for, what you guys do, your relationship to the market, you're an ISV. Where are you guys? Because you guys have a good thing going on here. What do you guys do? What are you're known for? Sure, so C is market leading software for advanced analytics for the manufacturing industry. So we're squarely in that industry ISV. We sell SaaS solutions to business buyers who want two things. One is they want technology that they can deploy quickly in their organizations, drive that great business value ROI that drives the next level of investment in technology. C's unique offering in marketplace is that we've solved a lot of the challenges around that operational data in manufacturing. So manufacturing, the industry, it's going through massive transformation, supply chain disruption, we're coming out of that, the globalization of manufacturing, and yet they have data that they've stored for 20, 30 years that they're still in the first generation of trying to gain insights from. So that's why C exists, is really to bring the insights out of that data and then help the manufacturing customers we work with get to the cloud. What's interesting, I like your perspective and I want to follow up on that because data analytics used to be this thing, well, I got a database. You hosted on some storage and you got structured data, unstructured data, okay. You got scale, but now you've got data platforms, you got data mesh. I think Gardner actually has a different term but that's a whole nother conversation. Data platforms are diverse, they're pervasive, they're part of core infrastructure in cloud. It's not like a point solution anymore, it's got to be integrated and customers are trying to work on. This isn't one of the hardest problems today in cloud transformation is the data layer, the relationship to other services. Yeah, so the dataverse common data models, how APIs will interact with data, the trend there though is something that it is the ecosystem that will bring value to customers because no database is going to serve every need, right? And you think about the data layer, it really has to solve the problems whereby any application, any user, any insight can be generated almost seamlessly and we're really on the first wave of that journey but I think an element per se that we certainly understand with our customers is that data alone is not an end objective, right? If it doesn't lead to a decision and an action and a workflow that humans can take to go drive and improvement in their business process, then you haven't tapped into the value of that technology. When a buyer comes to the marketplace and they see your listing and solutions, what are they getting? What are they buying? So for Seek we've radically simplified that, we really embrace this idea of simplification, we just sell Seek. So we have one Seek listing in the AWS marketplace, all applications of Seek, they're all available there. We really leaned into the enterprise procurement models, so private offers are how we do the most of our business on marketplace and it really went from a stage of experimentation where a couple of customers, what is this marketplace? Maybe we'll buy a few of our business applications there all the way through to now we're starting to see the demand side come through for customers where it's not just their security software or their DevOps or infrastructure software, they want to buy solutions like Seek, including line of business buyers through a common catalog in the marketplace. Right, so I want to ask you, because I want to give you the opportunity to give the pitch, the customer watching right now, what's the pitch? Why Seek? Why this listing? Why should they hit the purchase button? I wish it was that easy. Why should they, why should they, what's the pitch? Sure, so the first thing is Seek through marketplace is a five clicks on three screens procurement experience. So compare that to months and months of back and forth with contracts and purchase orders and vendor setup. This is five less than five minutes, few screens, a couple of clicks and you can buy a multi-year subscription of Seek to cover your entire enterprise. The second pitch is that it's a SaaS application that now can be deployed within hours and then your users, your insights, your value is starting within the first couple of hours. This is not a heavy lift IT project that's going to take months. And then lastly, Seek specifically. So Seek because we're validated in the marketplace has been well architected for AWS Cloud, we have that stamp of credibility and we're leading in this space for manufacturing organizations who want cloud native secure software for analytics on their operational data. That's awesome and customers have the challenge when they think about data, the use cases, security, governance. There's a variety of different use cases. What are you seeing as the top three use cases for Seek? So on the, there's two lines of that question. The first is really the line of business use cases and those are all about what outcome are we going to drive? Are we going to approve efficiency in your factory or are we going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Those are the kinds of use cases on the business side that Seek works with our customers on. On the IT side, they want to know that we can access data securely, that we can be part of an ecosystem where they can bring in iterations and algorithms and machine learning and new applications. And they also want to know that we're sustainable. So meaning that we're driving constant innovation that is easy for them to consume and to gain access to to drive the next level of improvement. My final AWS marketplace seller question is, how does the procurement process through marketplace help you and your customers? What's in it for them? What value do the customer get going through AWS procuring? So there's really, really three. The first is you get a validated set of a catalog of solutions, right? That AWS says, you know, we undergo a rigorous process technically and commercially to be in the marketplace. The second thing for procurement professionals is that they can leverage their cloud committed spend with AWS so as they commit more expense and spend with AWS now these marketplace purchases can be credited to that committed expense. We found that brings IT and the business together with procurement to really work more collectively on that. And then the third piece is imagine buying software where you don't need legal, you know, back and forth, back and forth because we're using a standard ULA that thousands of other software companies are using in the marketplace today. I thought the keynote had a great line. We're not just a website of a catalog, we are a API service layer with automation more like a CICD pipelining of software. And we're hearing more and more about software supply chain more about scaling. This is kind of the future of procurement. Why wouldn't you by direct pick a few buttons and assemble your solutions at scale? There's some unintended consequences that we've really learned as well. It brings IT and the business closer together. So the IT person wants to know, well, what does this seek, you know, piece of my AWS invoice? And so they get more engaged earlier in the process with procurement, with the business. And we've actually found that it brings internally for our customers more people to the seat at the table around what are the applications and how will they govern them across the enterprise? Megan, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me here at the conference, the seller, Conference of AWS Marketplace. I have to ask you, we were talking before we came on camera and you made a comment. I'm lucky to share this comment with some commentary. You said, I'm the VP of cloud transformation and in the future that title might not exist. Explain what you mean there, because I think this is kind of a telling moment about where we are at this point in the industry. Sure, so maybe it's funny to sort of envision a future where your role doesn't exist. But I think a lot of innovators do that, right? And for us, we're a software company that's going through the transition on-prem to SaaS, you know, cloud-native sets of applications. But in the pretty near term for Seek, really the next two years, all of our business will be SaaS and cloud. And so we won't need a separate VP or a separate team or a separate function. It will just be how the business operates. Megan, thanks for coming on the queue. Megan Boutine, who is Seek. She's a cloud VP of cloud transformation, VP of cloud. And if she's successful, the title will go away and she'll move on to some other great valuable things like running the business at Seek. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Okay, this is theCUBE here in Seattle. We're covering theators marketplace seller conference part of APN merging with Amazon marketplace. Now called the APO Amazon partner organization. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.