 Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous live coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 live from Las Vegas. It's I'm Lisa Martin and it's so great to say that we are doing with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. One of the most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've two sets, over a hundred guests, two remote studios, lots going on. I've got an alumni back with me and a new guest. Please welcome back Sabina Joseph of the GM of technology partners at AWS and Neil Fowler joins her. He's the GM of Micro Focus AMC and you're going to tell me what AMC stands for. Application modernization and connectivity. I love it, awesome. Guys, it's great to see you again in person. Thank you for having us here. It's great to have the buzz. I know it's going to be a little bit hard to hear, but great to have AWS has done a phenomenal job of getting everyone in here safely. I want to give them kudos to that. Sabina, talk to me. It's been a while since I've seen you in person, but talk to me about your current role at AWS. What's going on? Yeah, so I'm the general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas. We also help partners out of ME and APAC grow in the Americas. And one of the great examples of a successful partnership is Micro Focus with their solutions across application modernization, security, database services, mainframes. And so from your perspective, through your lens, how do you think they're performing as a partner? Yeah, so first of all kudos to Neil and the entire Micro Focus team. They've done a great job leaning in with a cloud-first strategy with SaaS Solutions on AWS. And these solutions help customers across application modernization, application delivery, security, cyber resiliency, database services, and also IT performance management. And we've been working with them now for a few years. And in fact, today we have actually 400 customer wins together. Congratulations. Yeah, and then also eight-digit annual recurring revenue. And they have six active listings in Marketplace and all of this is really helping customers move their workloads and modernize their workloads into AWS. We've seen that as such an acceleration nail in the digital transformation, cloud adoption, the pandemic has really been a forcing function for that. There's some silver linings, but talk to me about some of the things that you've seen at Micro Focus the last 20 months or so and how have you helped those 400 customers getting to that big ARR? How are you helping them with that acceleration? Well, as you're saying, I mean there's lots of changes in the last 12 to 18 months. Some of it brought on by the pandemic and the change in business, the having to respond, deliver solutions more quickly to the market, as well as remote working. So optimizing in the economic environment of costs, but they're doing more dynamic. It really has caused businesses to have to do something different now just to be able to survive. And serve their customers better. That was a big thing that we saw in the very beginning was that survival mode. And then of course it wasn't too long when we started seeing those survivors really start to thrive and you started seeing who we're going to be the winners of tomorrow. Because the thing is, every company these days is a data company. If it's not, it's going to be passed up by competitor that's right there in the rearview mirror for sure. And so we've got organizations though running mainframes, older applications, legacy applications, modernization. Where are most industries in terms of adopting that the mindset first of all that they need to change? Well, I think across the whole industry, I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's retail. I mean, if you think about airlines with when the pandemic hit, business went down to unless they've got that elastic nature of actually being able to respond to it. But everyone had to bring in new services, new offerings very quickly. So the ability to be able to innovate in their environments and bring more solutions to their customers in a really fast way. They couldn't just sit there and work with what they had. They had to move forward just to be able to stay in the business but also be able to reduce the cost out of what they're trying to do. So running and transforming at the same time. Absolutely. And so how can organizations integrate existing core applications with new technologies to really be able to thrive in today's dynamic market? Well, when we look at modernization overall we think of it in sort of three different ways with application, process and infrastructure. So with a move to cloud, that's the infrastructure modernization. They've immediately got far more access to more scalable dynamic elastic compute resources as well as all the technology platforms they have around. And then if you look at the application side and that's where the micro focus platform comes in we can help customers actually move those applications forward in terms of making them available through APIs maybe as a journey to microservices and cloud native. But once that core business logic and that data is available it can be integrated into artificial intelligence machine learning and actually round out the whole solution. So the final part of that from the process modernization if you as they develop in these applications with new tools, new ranges in terms of where they can deploy on the AWS platform they can automate the build deployment and operations. So all those existing applications and they're running on the contemporary platform with full access to the technologies that are available. That's fantastic and so necessary for businesses in any industry. So Ben you talked about some of the different business units of micro focus. Are there any ones in particular that you want to call out? Yeah, so we work with them across all of their business units but some of them that come to my mind is of course Neil and team are doing a great job with application modernization and connectivity really helping customers modernize the applications. And as customers are modernizing the applications they're cyber resiliency business units helping customers secure those applications. And then they also have their IT operations management bridge product listed in marketplace. And then just in September their Vertica business unit launched Vertica accelerator on AWS. So I think they have a very holistic story to help customers on AWS. Talk to me a little bit Neil about cyber resiliency. We have seen such a dramatic change in cybersecurity in the threat landscape the last 20 months. I think I saw a stat recently that ransomware was up almost 11X in the first half of 2021. Every company's a data company. That data has got to be secure. It's no longer a nice to have. That is a core requirement. How are you helping customers achieve that cyber resilience? I think as you say across the whole spectrum from cyber from identity access management through data encryption, through data protection it's not a nice, as you say it's not a nice to have capability. You really have to have an integrated solution to be able to manage access, control it and also generating the events in terms of being able to, if anyone tries to get into the systems and log it because before by the time you've discovered something it's too late. So you really need a combined solution from multi-fat to authentication to really take it to that next level. Absolutely right. If once you've detected it it's too late and with ransomware as a service cyber criminals are getting so much more sophisticated and also more brazen. There's so much money in it that the security front is I think even more interesting now than it's ever been. Talk to me about some joint customers and how you've helped them together with AWS with micro focus achieve some of those key outcomes that you were talking about earlier. Well I think obviously with AWS as a platform has quite a lot of technology solutions going in. What we often find with our customers is a lot of they're coming from an existing on-prem solution so they need that hybrid model. So as part of taking that forward been able to have that integrated solution that allows them to work both on-prem and as part of the cloud. Most of it all being hooked up. Now even that from down to the as a developer in the applications been able to do static coded analysis to help those applications be more secure with things like fortified demand as well as integrating into that security platform for multi-factor. So I think as you know it's a combination of being able to bridge between all the different technologies but have one single view of being able to protect that whole real estate. Multiple layers from both external and internal threat. So that's the other thing you also need to take into account. Be able to protect all layers. Multi-layered approach. Absolutely, but you're right. The internal threats is something that we don't talk about as much but that is obviously a substantial problem for organizations in most, if not any, industries. So to be able to talk to me a little bit about let's kind of get into the responsibilities that you have a little bit more in there. You've got responsibility for multiple solutions like once at AWS. You told me before we went live you have 50 meetings this week. My goodness this is day one. It's all good. It's fun. Isn't it fun? It is. Talk to me about AWS's approach to partnering. What does it look like? What are some of the things that you think are really critical components? Yeah, so as you may have heard we always start with the customer at Amazon and AWS. We start with the customer. We work backwards. When we are relaunching our products, our programs, our services we really go and ask the customers what do you want us to develop? Where do you want us to focus the resources? It takes a lot of discipline to do that but it's something that where we really want to walk the talk. And we use the same approach with our partners. When we started to work with Micro Focus we really kind of want to make sure that what we are working on together is what customers want. Because we firmly believe that once you lay that foundation of that solution you can scale your business a lot more quicker. Your story is a lot more simple. And the customers are going to find a lot of value in what you are doing together. So it's really all about the customer for us. It is. It's absolutely critical. That's the whole reason that we are here. Neil, talk to me a little bit about maybe some cultural alignment with AWS. That customer first, customer obsession that sounds like at Micro Focus, very similar? Absolutely. I mean, the way that we all think about how we are building our products is all around customer centric innovation. So that aspect of trying to make sure that we can solve what the business, understanding what the customers are trying to do to then help to be able to deliver solutions that meet that. And that combination of, as I say, the way that we look at it from that infrastructure modernization and the range of technologies that are available, and that relentless focus on making customers successful. It is so key, but we have to make sure that that collaboration works together to make sure that the solutions align and we're helping customers get there together. How important of that? In your customer conversations, I imagine they've changed quite a bit during the pandemic, with so many things being escalated to the C-suite, to the board. How important is that cultural alignment between AWS and Micro Focus? From your customer's perspective, is it something that comes up fairly often? Well, I think when you actually get a mismatching culture, it's more obvious. So I don't think that necessarily people are looking for it to say, I need organizations, but if you're not thinking the same way, you're not behaving the same way and actually partnering. I think that partnering part of it is really important because you're both working together to come with that desired outcome. So I think it's more obvious when it isn't a good match, as opposed to looking for that particular side. But I think that's a really key aspect in the sense of working together to help that customer be successful. Right, that's a great point that you bring up, but it's probably more obvious when it isn't working than when it's beautifully aligned, falling into place and really focused on that customer. So what are some of the things that attendees can feel and see and learn at the Micro Focus booth at this year's re-invent, Neil? Well, as well as obviously the key round up, application modernization, where we're looking at the main frame modernization we've got the full range of the Microsoft booth in terms of cyber resilience, as well as our ITOM, IT operations management, our ADM portfolios. So we've got a lot of technologies which we can learn about in the booth, interactive as well as all of our experts to understand how we can do all these things and work together as part of the AWS platform to be able to deliver those solutions. Excellent, I'm sure there will be plethora of knowledge shared at the booth there. Last question, Neil, for you, talk to me about the vision going forward with the partnership. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we end 2021 and go into hopefully what is a better year 2022? Well, I think one of the key things, especially around one of my passionate areas is helping our customers really look in terms of building the platform of the future. We can help solve the problems today, but we're really trying to create that innovation platform to go through. So again, that combination of the technologies that we can bring to help our customers and the breadth and the investment that AWS continue making in the platform. Those two combinations really helps us help our customers not just solve today's problems, but really move into the forward and be the platform for innovation for the next decade. And that's really critical, that future ready state that is so undefined most of the time. I mean, none of us saw the pandemic coming. All right, that was a complete shock. But to be able to partner together to help your customers really set up the foundation to be innovative as things happen that we can't even predict is really critical. So congratulations on your 400 customer wins, your eight digit ARR, that's fantastic. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, talking about the Micro Focus AWS partnership and all of the successes that you guys have had. Great job. And I hope that you have cough drops and a lot of water this week, Sabina. I hope you do too. I need it. Guys, thanks for joining me. Okay, thank you. Pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. 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