 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Brian Gracely, Anderson Wikibon. We're here at AWS 2015 re-invent. 20,000 people, huge amount of energy here at the show. Glad to have, as our guest on today, we've got two guests for the show. Jonathan Thomas, VP and CIO of AVID. And also Bruce Coglin, Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners, one of AWS's premier integration partners. Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So much energy here. So many good things going on. What's your initial take on the show? What's your initial vibe? You guys have been around this for a little while. What's your vibe of the show in general? Yeah, for a brand new customer, this has been extremely exciting for us. It really, you know, really allows us to look at what we did on AWS and move into it as a new customer and come out here and see all the innovation that's happening. It really said that we made the right decision on AWS. And what was, you know, walk us through the business logic of, you know, you guys are in the video business, you're in the, you know, it's a business that's been around for a long time, but people want to scale, they want to use video. Walk us through the business logic of moving from running your own data centers to really leveraging, you know, the cloud and AWS much more. Yeah, it's a great question. And thanks for asking it. You know, we saw, we're seeing a lot of transformation in our business. We've been around for a while. We have award-winning audio and video technology that media companies use in the music industry. And so, but what we're seeing is a lot of change in our industry and a lot of change in our company. And so we've been a company that's been a traditional software-based company selling licenses, but now we've moved into subscriptions, free mediums. And pretty soon we're going to be doing cloud collaboration with our editors. And so that change meant changing our business models, but also changing IT. And so as a CIO, huge amount of transformation we've had to do to our department in terms of changing our compute in-house. So we've been working with a third-party, large data center in the past. And so some of the things we had to be is more agile, get value to the business and move quickly. And so we just couldn't do that with the model we had in the vendor in place. Yeah, we're hearing this theme of transformation over and over and over again. And then the other thing that happens is people go, do I have the right people to do it? Do I have the right skills and process? Talk about the partnership between the two of you. How are you helping each other move into the cloud? Yeah, well, I'll take that first. We definitely needed a trusted technology partner in cloud technology partners. I didn't have the resources in-house. I didn't have the knowledge, right? We're brand new going to the cloud. So it was meaningful for us to find someone that could really have the skills and capability to move us quickly through this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Bruce, cloud technology partners is one of the really well-known name brands. A lot of rockstar, great technologists. Talk about your business. I mean, we're seeing so many companies here that are hiring, that are looking for talent. You guys have got it. You've got a lot of successful invitations. Talk about what your business looks like and how you're helping customers. Our business is really exploding. This is personally my third year at Reinvent. You can really sense the enterprise transformation that's happening out there. So more and more mid- and large-tier enterprises are really trying to enterprise-ready their AWS environment. So we spent a lot of time helping companies go through that process of architecture, implementing, assessing the portfolio, migrating applications, and then helping folks build the operational framework around that. We also help people build net new cloud-native applications to run on AWS as well. Yeah, I mean, we've seen a lot of ISVs that are realizing they've got to move to the cloud. I mean, Adobe was a huge, very well-known, moving to the cloud. Hybrid's a big talk this week, right? Are you guys more in a hybrid model where you're trying to move and make this more seasonal? Does your business have a lot of elasticity? Or is this an all-in move? Andy's talked a lot about companies that are making an all-in. Where are you guys at in that transition? Yeah, for me, it's all in, and I really can relate to a lot of things that Andy was saying in the keynote. In terms of our journey, we're in a big, large data provider, third-party global data center provider, and as I said, we just didn't have that elasticity. We weren't able to move quickly. And so we said, hey, let's go all-in. Let's take all of our managed services and move to the cloud with the help of cloud technology partners. And so in terms of our business case, we had to really answer a couple of things. One, we understood the benefit of the cloud, but we didn't understand the cost benefits. And so what we asked Bruce's team to do is come in in a four-week assessment, really prove to us that we could have substantial savings moving to the cloud. I could have never done that assessment with my own teams. It would just have taken too long. I really didn't have the knowledge to be able to do that assessment and do it like for like comparison between what we had in their data center and what we could move to AWS. Right. Now, what does that mean? I mean, somebody, a lot of times you'll see clients will come to you and say, we want to prototype some things. We want to lighthouse some things. I mean, when they're talking about going all-in, how do you think about that? Because that's a huge transformation. It's technology, it's people, it's process. I mean, they're putting their business on the line. This isn't one application. Walk us through that process. How do you think about that? How do you guys do that jointly? What's that partnership look like? Yeah, and I think the first thing is there's got to be strategic alignment and support from the executive team on our client side. So once we were able to really get together and think about what does this mean for the business? What are the strategic goals? We actually utilize something that we call our cloud adoption program. So there's a formalized structure for going through doing the strategy, the economic analysis, making sure that there's a business case and we know where to target that business case. And then through a very structured process of building reference architectures in minimum viable clouds and then going through the process of analyzing the portfolio and migrating. So we use a, in a joint team perspective, we use a joint agile approach with Avid's team and we're using scrum methodologies to move very quickly through a series of sprints that are structured over the course of about a six month window. Yeah, and as we're looking at this, give us some data. I mean, you've been going through the process. Give us some data. People want to understand what does the transformation mean? Not just the bits and bytes and the technology. What's it mean to the business? Have you been able to quantify it at this point? Yeah, so in terms of our analysis, working with the CTP team, one of the significant drivers was certainly cost for us. We really had to answer the question, could we save significant costs and take advantage of all the cloud benefits? We were able to reduce our operating, IT operating expenses by 50%. This is a significant, significant change for us. All that savings is going right to the bottom line and so we're making our CFO very happy by making this move and also taking advantage of the technology. Yeah, once you move to the cloud, once you start to get comfortable with it, does it help in hiring and attracting new talent to be able to help you grow or move into new areas? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we couldn't take advantage of is all the innovation and attracting that new talent and so it's really a game changer for us. I expect going forward that we're going to be able to innovate. We're going to be able to move quickly as the business comes up and challenges which they do every day. Again, I have a full product backlog. I have a lot of requirements coming in on the side. We just don't have the ability to move quickly and bring that value to the business. So as a CIO, I hate to be the barrier and the blocker to the business and so we'll be able to move quickly now. We have a platform, we have a vendor, we have solutions, we have ISV solutions that will enable that quick innovation for us and so it's going to be very exciting for us to keep going down that journey. Yeah, so talk a little about the change. I mean, we always talk about when you're moving to the cloud, you're sort of now going from idea to execution. There's not the big procurement things. There's not the huge budget. I mean, there's budgets obviously. What is your interaction with your product teams look like now? I mean, how fast are ideas being iterated? How fast are you having to even improve the scrum process, improve the agile process? Talk about that sort of that iteration. How much better is it getting? Yeah, we have a lot of pressures to meet our software deliverables and our releases. My corporate IT, my team is very joined to the hip right now with the product teams and engineering teams. We're doing a lot of customer faces, facing changes for our applications and so we have to move rapidly. I don't have a big team. So it's absolutely crucial for us to be able to move quickly and take advantage of services that will enable that. And so it is something that will continue at Avid and we're really looking for Amazon to enable that going forward. Yeah, one of the things we get a lot from our clients and practitioners is they're going, what does that journey look like? You guys talked about the process. What are some of the things that, for either one of you, that if you had kind of gone into loan or you used sort of your gut instinct, that you look back on it and now you go, that would have been a disaster. Any sort of tips that you can pass along to people of whether it's the right partners to work with but the right sort of mindset or the right things to avoid, to get to this level of success? Yeah, I would, you know, formal say, hey, pick up a trusted partner, right? Someone that has capabilities, has a cloud experience that you can rely on, has a proven methodology. Bruce just talked about that the framework and methodology they use, that's very much a factory approach. That's been able, it's allowed us to move very quickly through our project. We're three months in, we got three months ready to go, left to go and we're on target. We're pretty excited about being finished in December and doing more work next year. And I think from our view, one of the things we worked hard pretty early on was just making sure that we understood the strategic imperative. So when we did this first analysis on the financial models, we went very to a very granular level to assess the application portfolio. And then we actually worked jointly with both Jonathan and the finance team at Avid to really make sure that we were looking at all dimensions of the financial model so that as we went through the approval process and then subsequently to implementation, we knew exactly what benefits were expected, how to target and sequence our migration to achieve those benefits. Yeah, so it's a lot of migration or a lot of communication, a lot of iteration on what's going on. Guys, sort of last question, this show's blowing up, you're here first year, you're here three years, what changes in your business when you've got a partner like AWS that grows this fast, it iterates? I mean, is it pushing you? Is it changing the way you think about business? What's your overall view on the show and what AWS is doing? Yeah, the show's been outstanding again. Being here for the first time, I mean, the expectations are just blown away, right? We've heard about a lot of announcements yesterday and so just affirms what we did here. We made the right decision and so we're happy to be here, we're very happy to be an AWS customer and we are just seeing white glove service from the AWS account team. It's one of the things that I didn't expect from AWS to really get that customized level of support to bring in new offerings, show us how to do it. Our engineering teams have been on AWS for the last year and so they've seen those benefits and now I'm going to start to be able to enjoy those benefits as well. So that's huge as a CIO to be able to know that that service is just outstanding, yeah. And from my view, the most exciting parts about some of the announcements that were highlighted by Andy yesterday is we're at the forefront of a lot of enterprise adoption of cloud and what I typically picked, what I picked up especially was the two biggest areas that our customers constantly tell us that they need help with are migrating data and migrating it quickly, effectively, securely and then the whole ongoing security, risk, compliance attributes and most of the new services announced are really going to help accelerate which will ultimately mean that people can move quicker and more securely. Right, right. Yeah, no, we talked about that. Some of the announcements, while they may not be as sexy as IoT, I mean, you've got to move data. You've got to be compliant. You've got to have security. Having all those baked in, I think they eliminate a lot of the, is it enterprise ready? Can I move my production applications there? I think they're really knocking down a lot of those barriers. Yeah, that's right. Guys, I'm going to wrap it up with that. Thank you so much for being on for both Bruce and Jonathan. Guys, exciting the stuff you're doing, exciting to see the transformations. Love to see the smile on your face. I get the sense that you're going from the office of no, which sometimes IT was to, you're driving the business, which is fantastic. So with that, we're going to wrap up folks. Continue to watch us here at AWS re-invent 2015. theCUBE's covering this wall-to-wall day three. Stick around for the next guest. We'll be right back.