 Good afternoon Cloud community and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We are at AWS re-invent. It's our fourth day. It's in the afternoon. We've got two more segments left. This is a serious marathon, but it's so exciting. It's kept my brain super curious. I'm Savannah Peterson joined by Paul Gillan today. Paul. Hello, Savannah. Are you as excited about how much we've learned this week as I am? I am. It's just taking on my mind is just bursting with all the new information I've absorbed over the last three days. It's amazing talking to all these smart people. It has really been so cool. And learning about all the permutations that we had to think about Cloud, but there are so many businesses that have been built around the Cloud, around making the Cloud easier to use, supporting the Cloud as our next guest can talk about, that there's this whole ecosystem element that you don't hear about so much, but it's very much the foundation of the people who are here. Speaking of ecosystem, our next guest, please welcome Garrett to the show. Runs ecosystem for Console Connect. How you doing, Eric? I'm doing very well. Garrett, sorry, excuse me. No worries. Look, few names on the show today. I'm sure. I do know your name. My mouth just doesn't want to participate today. Have you had a great show so far? It's been fantastic. The AWS re-invent show has always been a fantastic event, so. You're a veteran. You're also a CUM alumni, which is great. Yes. Thank you for having me back. Thank you for your time. Yeah. I'm most appreciated. It's going to be great. We'll try and do even better each time we have you on the show. So just in case those listening are unfamiliar with Console Connect, give us the pitch. Okay, so Console Connect is our software-defined interconnect platform. We also provide what we call a network as a service. This allows our customers and partners to take advantage of our global private network. On a pay-as-you-go basis, scalable and flexible. When you're not using the service, you can turn it off. So you only pay as you go. What a novel idea. Yes, yes. In the past you would have to have a year or multi-year contract. So we're making our services match cloud offerings around the world. The platform itself is in more than 1,000 data centers all around the globe. We're in a couple. And yes, just a few. We have about 45 terabits of network behind it. It's all on our private network, so none of it's accessible via the public internet. And we have a meeting place which allows our existing customers and partners to reach out across the platform and share services. So one customer needs to subscribe to another customer's services. They can do so right across the platform on a pay-as-you-go basis. So it's been very exciting for us. It's been very fast. It seems to me for the past five or six years that we've had the service. At what point in their cloud journey do customers typically realize they need a service like yours? That they're in the bandwidth they're getting, they're native bandwidth they're getting is insufficient. Yeah, and I think that's a great question. I think the customers themselves have seen a serious disconnect between their direct connections to the cloud service providers, where the cloud service providers are billing by the minute. And a traditional telecommunications connection is billed by the year or multi-years. And then you really lose control over your cloud connection when you forget about it. Right, because your service is always up. The connection's always up. And a lot of individuals in a company may have access to the cloud, that cloud service provider service. And next thing you know, you have a runaway group of services that are running that you're paying for and you don't really realize it. Because the connection's up, you've already paid the connection, the cloud service is up, you've already paid for it. So how do businesses get better control over that spend? Or how do you help them? Yeah, so how we help them is, our service is able to be turned off when it's not in use. So in the event that you don't need the service over a weekend or over a month, you can just turn it off and you're not paying for that. It sounds so simple, but it actually is kind of revolutionary in the industry, which is why I keep coming back to it. It's great. So we've heard a lot about hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. How is this increasing the complexity for customers? Well, I think the complexity for customers has increased due to the fact that you have a multi-cloud requirement or you have multiple teams accessing your cloud service provider. And there's no one really managing it from a central perspective. You can definitely get siloed really easy. Yeah, and then it runs away from you. And the next thing you know, you start to look at the monthly bills, but generally that happens on an annual basis. If any companies like mine, you're doing your annual reconciliation of your bills and that's when you notice something's not right. Yeah, definitely. I can actually see a Slack message I got once multiple times probably. Is anyone using this service? Why is it cost us that? That's exactly what you're talking about. Do you integrate with the Amazon Management Console or is it a separate service? It's our service is a separate service. We are API'd in with AWS. You do have a single console from our platform to manage your connections to the cloud. And then once you're connected in, you would still need to use the AWS console to manage your service. They're very, let's just say no one is offering a remote console, third party console yet for AWS or any other cloud service for that matter. How about for a hybrid cloud as obviously the way the industry is going, how do you enable companies to manage the hybrid cloud environments more intelligently? Yeah, and that's another great question. We allow that, you know, we're a global company. We have global access around the world. It includes not only traditional telecommunication services but also include satellite service as well as 5G and LTE capability to the platform. So in the event that someone is in a hyper cloud situation they have a lot of capability to enable their services. You talked about network as a service and we haven't had a chance to dig into it. So tell me a little bit more. How can this help reduce egress charges? How are people excited when they hear network as a service? Where are we often on that hype curve? Yeah, I think it's low on the excitement scale. Yeah. Network has become somewhat of a commodity in the world like electricity or water, you know, most of the world. And so network as a service, what has enabled is it has enabled the customers more control over what they're doing. As in the past, the weeks, if not months to get services installed. And then if you needed to make a change to that service to increase it or decrease it in accordance to your requirements, that might take a couple of days at the soonest. And you know, the console connect platform now changed that down to a few minutes. So within a few minutes you can enable services, turn it up, turn it down, scale up, scale down. Let's talk about time to value. There's no equipment installation required? No, it is our private network. And so there must be a direct connection to it. It's not available over the public internet. Generally a customer will connect to us via a cross connect at a data center or they can bring in a local loop or our existing customers. We just flip a little switch, so to speak, software wise and we give them access to the platform from their existing services. Do you work with co-location interconnects as well? Exactly, yes. And in fact, you can purchase those services across our platform with a lot of the co-location service providers. So if I'm already using a co-low, I can deploy your service directly from that co-low. Yes, yes. That's very convenient. You also mentioned the ability to interconnect between customers. So your customers can actually connect to each other and conduct transactions or integrate their applications. Talk about how that works. Yeah, so for instance, let's say you're a customer that's taking advantage of our platform and you find your network is under a DDoS attack. You can go into our meeting place, connect to one of our cloud service providers who specializes in DDoS mitigation, spend up a connection to them within a few minutes and immediately you can start taking care of your DDoS problem. And once it's taken care of, you turn it down. Now those types of services that are subscription based are via API into our platform. So we can settle the bill for our customer on behalf of that service provider or the service provider themselves can build that customer depending on how they want to set it up. So it's very flexible. It's really clever too. I mean, especially in an instance, like you just mentioned in that example, that's a moment of panic and high stress and high tension. The last thing you want to be thinking about is what's the right service provider? How quickly can I get this up and running? If I can just couple clicks, couple lines of code perhaps or even just through the portal be able to do it. It's pretty, pretty powerful. You mentioned that console connect and I want to talk about this because it's clear you care about the user experience, the community. And console connect came out of LinkedIn DNA and you mentioned there's a social component to this, to the platform as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yes, thank you for that. Yeah, so you can, as a customer or a partner, you can market directly to others on the platform using our meeting place. And you have the ability to reach out directly to people across the platform, send them a message. You have the ability to post articles, blog in one of our sections. And then the other one, you can actually go in and see all the latest activity in the platform. You can see who's the newest companies to join console connect. Oh, wow, cool. How do I reach out to them? And then that gives you the ability to begin either marketing across the platform or direct marketing to someone or directly just reach out and connect with them and say, hey, we want to set a bilateral partnership with you, you know, how do we do that? So it's very flexible. Can I connect my systems to others? So if I want to plug into their e-commerce system to, so I can fulfill orders, take them through their e-commerce system, can I enable that kind of connection? Well, we're not there yet. It is coming, but we're just not there yet. A lot of that is a trust issue. You know, when you're dealing with across the globe, there are regulations in every location that must be adhered to. A lot of that is security and privacy related. And we must make sure that we are adhering to all of the local regulations wherever we are. So it's not the technology that's a problem really, it's the- It's a regulatory issue, yeah. So the technology is there. And I would say that the rest is following. It's just, it's slow when you're dealing with permits and with compliance. I also want to ask you, our notes here mention egress charges, which are a niggling pain point for a lot of customers. They have to pay to get their data out of the cloud. How do you help with that problem? So how we help with this is, first we get a discount from our partners, our cloud partner, including AWS. And we pass that on to the customers. The other way is you have a full visibility of which connections you have live into those partners. And you can manage that much easier through the single, I would say, view of all of your connections. You can see all of your cloud connections right in the one view. And then you can do a little more digging and say, are we using these, you know? Because a lot of times you have projects that spin up and then someone forgets to spin them back down. So this helps give you that single view. But again, we get the discount that we are happy to pass on as well. Which is a win-win for everyone. And I've been using a tab analogy all show. We all, we want it in one place, one tab, not all the tabs. Yes, I think network management and service management in any enterprise or partnership company is a real drain on resources. Oh yeah, and it's a waste of money. Yeah, and if you're not managing correctly, yeah, you get the thing on the money. Are you an alternative to the direct connect services from the major cloud providers or are you a compliment to them? We're not competing with them, we're partnered. And so we don't see ourselves as an alternative. A lot of times our customers come to us and they want to direct connect in a location where perhaps AWS isn't. Doesn't have a point of presence. Exactly, and so we give them that flexibility of, you think, yes, you can directly connect to here. And then the other approach that we like to take is we like to give our customers the choice of not only data center, but also region. So a lot of times egress charges can be calculated across regions as well. And that can really add up for our customer. Whereas if you have multiple egress locations, you're not transferring data across a region on the AWS platform or another cloud service platform, you can egress at that location and then take it across your own network or take it across our network. And then your egress charges will be more reasonable. That's, it's kind of smart. You're making people's jobs optimized and easier as well as their stack and all the tools that they're using. It's fantastic. All right, Garrett, we've got a new challenge here on theCUBE at Reinvent. It's probably different from the last time you were on theCUBE. We're looking for your 30 second hot take, your thought leadership moment. What's the biggest theme coming out of the show or for you as we look into 2023? Well, for in 30 seconds. Yeah, casual, right? No pressure. No big deal. No, so with Console Connect, we are around the globe. I know that a lot of companies at AWS are some are regional, some are global. And we have the ability to cover both. We can do either regional or global or a hybrid of those. We also have a hybrid approach on different types of services. And so the flexibility, scalability, reliability and the lowered cost of egress with Console Connect is a win all around. You can't lose with it. I love it. You're meeting customers where they are. Garrett, it was fantastic to have you back on theCUBE. We look forward to your third cameo. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having Console Connect on. Hey, absolutely. We look forward to continuing to watch and hopefully tell that story as well. And thank all of you for tuning in to day four of AWS's re-invent coverage in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm starting to forget my own name. I am with Paul Gillan. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE. We are the leading source for high tech coverage.