 Oh, welcome back to theCUBE here at AWS re-invent 22 as we continue our coverage here, the AWS global showcase, the startup showcase. John Wall is here hosting for theCUBE as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly. With us to talk about what's going on in the kind of the hotel world in IT and what's going on in the cloud, especially at IHG is Eric Norman, Head of Infrastructure, Architecture and Innovation at IHG Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, sir. Oh, thank you and thank you for inviting me. You bet. Glad to have your board here on theCUBE. First time, I think, too, by the way, right? It is, and can I just to tell you who IHG is real quick? Yeah, one and a second. First of all, another guest I'm going to introduce too, Rod Stuhlmuller, who is the Vice President and of Solutions Marketing at Aviatrix. And Rod, good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about IHG if you will. Okay, well, great. Well, IHG is a hospitality company. It's been around for 200 years that has 17 brands globally in over 100 countries. We sleep up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with all the hotel companies globally. So let's talk about your footprint right now in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned, obviously you have a lot of customers' needs. You have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out the products you want to launch as opposed to on the development side and the maintenance side? Yeah, I mean, we have focused our attention to our guests and our hotels globally and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. We have moved a large deployment of our mission-critical applications over the last five years, really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so I'm pretty sure you've seen people building mission-critical apps. Probably in the last three years, it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVH is seeing. Oh yeah, no, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business-critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore. It has to be a powerful capability that's business-critical can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud. You mentioned a couple different cloud companies. A lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want an infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across clouds. So how do you go about deciding what goes where? I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs, and different requirements, whatever, how are you sorting out delegating, you know, you're going to be working here, you're going to be working there. Yeah, so we built some standard space that says certain types of apps, transactional-based, going to go to this cloud provider and data analytics is going to go to another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and also coverage, because we're in China. Right. You know, I've got to be able to get into China and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to compete with compliance regulatory type activities. I mean, even in the U.S. market, I got California privacy laws. You know, you have globally, you've got to deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally. Right. So you got that compliance slash governance issue, huge issue, I would think for you. We've got to decide who's going to get to what, when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out, and not just there, but you've got a European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. So handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's AVH helping you solve that? Yeah, in the early days, we were using cloud-native constructs for networking and a little bit of a security-type angle to it. What we found was, you can't get the automation you need, you can't get the scalability, because we're trying to shift, left our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. AVHRX had come in and provided a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allowed us to build a mesh network across all our regions globally, able to deploy new landing zones or public cloud fairly quickly with my networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi-hybrid cloud, we introduced on the edge a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region and every public cloud and partner, because all our partners, we've moved a lot of stuff to SAS. Amadeus is our centralized reservation system, that's our key reservation tool. It's sourced out, I need to bring them in, and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region, to where it needs to land so I can process it. Right, and it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're not in your head, Rod. Talk about, if you would, share some of the Aviatrix experience in that regard when you have a client like this that has these multinational locations and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? Right, and it's about agility and speed and being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things. You want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around IT, swiping their credit card and saying, IT doesn't give me what I need, and so cloud is supposed to change that, so we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past, but at the same time giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need, and sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at the pace that developers needed to happen. What Rod said about, one of the big things, and you sparked my thinking, is it also, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that you didn't have from a developer or even a operations, day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls a management of that space a lot easier now. Yeah, I mean business critical applications, right? The people, the business does not care about networking. They see it as electricity, and if it's down, somebody else's problem to fix it, but the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry, they need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction, should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down, and that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that AVATrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. Yeah, because when you start building all these clouds now in multi-regions, multiple AZs, or different cloud providers, or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place and if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's going to be a zoo, it's not going to work. I was talking earlier with another guest and we were just talking about companies, in your case, IHG, kind of knowing what you have. And it's not like such a basic thing. He said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and awareness. So I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up. So sorry, Ken, but do you know what you have? I mean, are you learning what you have or how do you identify, prioritize, how valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for you? It's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we had the right road maps for each of the apps and products that we have, because we've turned to more of a product-driven organization in a DevOps and we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that a developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. I did that interview saying too, three years, right? You've been on this path. Going back then to 2019, all right? Pandemic hits, right? The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you and where are you in terms of where you expected to be and then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your eventual journey, how do you want that to end? By the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days to be able to bring up remote desktops, workspaces and AWS and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. It's no small task there, that's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it and agents were able to answer calls for guests. So it was a huge success to us. It did slow down, during the pandemic, it did slow us down from what gets migrated. Our focus is, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests. And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with that key audience? We measure it by one, occupancy, and we, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How many people do we have in the rooms, right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness of the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah, it gets back to uptime of our systems and being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guests. The longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. We measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to be able to. Surveying just to find out how they feel about it. Because we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG Connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and that kind of stuff. That would not be made, by the way, I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talked a lot about that this week, hearing that the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower, horsepower on your bench. What do you see in that regard? And first off, what do you see about it? And then I'll follow up with you. Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills. You didn't have the skills from an operations, engineering, architecture. So we went on, how do we build training programs? How do we get tools to do either virtual training, bring in teachers? We built weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. We've been on a roll of upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that. We have lunch and learns that we bring people to. And we tailor the content for that training based on what we're consuming and what we're using, as opposed to just a broad stroke of public cloud. It's almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. What do you need to know more to be better at what you're doing here, right? Sure. Yeah, and we have a program called ACE, which is Aviatrix Certified Engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past, it's like a CCIE, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. I'm one of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. And this is not necessarily about Aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, networking expertise, because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud, we're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think, right? If your whole career has been networking in the data center, and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code, and we're teaching people how to do that. Yeah, I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the marketplace. And they use the imagery of marathon runner. You know, a marathon runner, yeah, you could do a marathon by yourself. But if you want to improve and become a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionists, you need people running with you to make that engine go faster and farther. At least you're a little bit, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And having a partner like A.V.A. Tricks helps the team to be successful. Well, it is a marathon, not a sprint, that's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three-year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and have a pretty good partnership here. So congratulations on that. Eric, thanks for being with us and Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Walls, you're watching theCUBE, we're out in Las Vegas, and of course theCUBE, as you well know, is the leader in high-tech coverage.