 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the district, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman, day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. We saw Teresa Carlson yesterday, a lot of keynotes. We saw the CIA. Todd Osborne is here, he's the vice president of alliances of New Relic, company that's been smoking hot, six billion dollar market cap, and really has taken the world by storm. He's joined by Scott Drossos, who's the president of Infinity, who's a public sector consultancy. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks, great to be here. So Todd, you heard me, I mean, really, everybody's talking about New Relic. Stock's been smoking, I read an article recently, it's got to cool off, it's too hot. So why so hot? What's going on? Why the appeal of New Relic? Well, as our CEO, Lou Cerny, has been on it a couple of times talking to you about, every business is becoming a software business in the public sector, which we're here representing at the Amazon Public Sector event. It's the same thing with agencies and all the digital experiences that are happening across all the government, and whether it's education, higher ed, healthcare, any of the DOD or other agencies, there's always some sort of digital experience that folks are having with the citizens, that all the agencies and organizations are trying to support. And New Relic's right there, right there at the forefront of every one of those digital experiences. Everyone's running software that's modern software or shifting to that with modern software, running microservices, running containers, shifting to the cloud. And anyone deploying that type of software needs to have New Relic as part of their engagement to monitor what's happening at the citizen or the customer level. What's going on in the back end on through the infrastructure. And in New Relic, whether it's a large enterprise that we're out there like Dunkin' Donuts or Domino's monitoring their applications and their e-commerce sites, or it's an agency in the public sector space, you got to have New Relic as part of those engagements. So Scott, when AWS services first came out, 2006 timeframe, we looked at it and said, okay, this is the future. But as much as it potentially simplifies lives, it brings a lot of new complexities. So Stu and I used to talk about, look, the AWS is awesome with big fans, but the ecosystem has to grow. Consultancies have to come out of the woodworks and help customers really adopt. So that's really exactly what's happened. I presume that's how Infinity got started. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company and what your value is. Sure, thanks Dave. So Infinity is a 15 year old company. We're originally founded in public sector IT consulting and we realized several years ago that the world was changing and that we needed to make the shift from IT consulting to cloud services. And so we dove in headfirst with AWS and we really tried to move to the top of the curve very quickly. And so we were a little bit ahead of our market in public sector, being a public sector focused organization, but we felt it was important to get ahead of the market because now the market really is smoking hot. But we thought it was important that if we're going to move into the cloud, we want to move to the top of the curve and deal with things like DevOps, migrations, even machine learning, predictive analytics. So we kind of pride ourselves on having some of the largest public sector contracts in the US, even though we're right now predominantly California based, California focused. And what's your head count? We're about 100 people. Yeah, I mean, is this the thing? We're seeing this trend toward a lot of smaller specialists are really doing super. Why is that? How are you able to differentiate from these big global SIs that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, vertical expertise? Why are you guys winning? Well, first of all, I think we're able to be nimble and shift our focus pretty quickly to serve our market, to serve our customers, I think more successfully. But one of the things that's changed when the cloud arrived is the cloud really let smaller organizations like us act like big organizations. So we didn't need to go deploy millions of dollars of capital to go set up a massive data center. We can build an environment on the fly, as you know, in the cloud. And we can have access to world-class platform tools like New Relic and we can help a customer, a large customer perform just as well as if we were a large, multi-billion dollar services organization. Todd, one of the interesting things to talk to customers about is their journey and where are they and the cloud migration and how do they do this? I reinvent a year or two ago, I heard there were like seven or nine hours as to get there, anything from the full refactoring and building cool new stuff with serverless and things like that to just the replatforming, lift and shift, is that a good thing? Isn't that, maybe walk us through how New Relic with Infinity, how are you involved in some of those migrations? There's no typical customer, but it gives us some examples. Yeah, absolutely. So Infinity, just like many of the integrators that we work with are all delivering services generally in a couple different areas. One is typically a cloud adoption or cloud migration practice. So working with Amazon, how do we get more and more of customer's workload shifted to the cloud? Usually those projects are also going on with something in the refactoring world or application space. Usually they're also developing or shifting to some sort of DevOps practice. And that's also part of our sweet spot, what's happening in the application there. Whether it's on the cloud yet or not, we're going to provide that visibility to that. And then the third piece is there's usually something else happening with that, as I was mentioning before, the customer experience or the citizen experience. So what's the browser impact? What's the user experience on that? What's the, if it's on a mobile app, what's the user experience on there? So while Infinity's delivering all those services for the clients, New Relic's part of all those services. So our whole model that we're trying to do with all of our partners is embed ourselves into all of those services, such that we can help Infinity be more successful, deliver those projects on time, and really resolve any issues that may come up during those migration issues. Yeah, Scott, I'd love to hear especially, I know I hear DevOps talk about a lot in New Relic's customers. Is it pervasive around the agencies and that you work with, and please do add some color there too. So in the public sector, it's a range of readiness, but we're seeing a real wave building, we believe. We worked with New Relic on a very large DevOps, SysOps, very complex cloud services engagement, largest higher education cloud services engagement in the U.S. And in that case, just like Todd was referencing, when we implemented the migration of the legacy platform to the cloud, first of all, we had to make choices around refactoring, host, re-architect, and so forth. But then when we're managing that environment, and there's millions of users hitting that environment, we need to be able to make sure that we can monitor the application to make sure the application's performing well. And if there's an issue, we want to see the line of code that's causing the problem as quickly as possible so that we can keep the environment up all the time. Even though public sector may not be driven by the same financials as say, commercial, they still expect to be up all the time. They still want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. And so New Relic allows us to do that. But then as we're looking at the user's interface with the application environment, New Relic's browser and mobile, they let us monitor how that experience is going, and we can proactively get at the performance issues there that the application may not tell us if there's an issue there. And then we can do things like test middleware with Synthetix and make sure that the whole environment's working. And then obviously on the infrastructure side, it lets us make sure that we're optimizing the environment for our clients. One of the cool things is, when you, in the past, you'd set up an EC2 instance, you may not see that you don't need as much, you know, CPU as you're using. And so you can size that appropriately and allow your environment to still run at a high performance, 100% uptime, but give them the cost efficiencies at the same time. So we use New Relic across the board to help support the entire environment. If we could talk about the marketplace a little bit, generally, and then specifically the public sector. So Scott, I presume you're obviously public sector focused, but are you exclusive to AWS? No, you probably do some other stuff, is that right? Is that fair? But we are both AWS and Azure Gold, which is a partner, but we do more of our work in AWS for sure. Okay, so then we'll come back to that. And New Relic, of course, you're a software company. You want everybody to love your software. So if there's a cloud that a customer wants to use, you want your software to be on that cloud. Fair enough? For sure. Okay. And also on-prem. A lot of our applications we monitor are still on-prem, and there's a tremendous amount of value there, regardless of... I would just add, Infiniti is a trusted advisor. We like to see ourselves as a trusted advisor, so we do feel like we have to be multi-cloud and have an objective perspective. And New Relic is presumably the same way. I mean, let the customers decide. So, and it's a hybrid world, folks, and despite what Amazon wants, it's a hybrid world. And they even recognize that. My question is, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about Amazon as an infrastructure service provider and their lead, or relative lead, on the competition. It's our sense that there's still a lead there. What's your sense? Well, AWS is still the leading cloud services provider in the marketplace. They're leading innovation. They lead in disruption. They lead in market share. I mean, they lead in so many metrics. And because they had that lead, and that's where we started, we've benefited from that and we've invested heavily. And in the same way we've seen New Relic, when we had made a choice around who we were going to pick as a platform to support our customers, we wanted something that was cloud-born, didn't come out of on-premise and get sort of bootstrapped into the cloud, and we wanted something that was a complete platform. So, New Relic was a really a clear choice for us. It was not a, we looked at the entire market when we made that choice. So, the narrative in the market used to be it's always security in the cloud. Now we hear the CIA say, hey, the security in the worst day in Amazon's cloud is way better than I ever saw with Client's server. That was a pretty powerful statement. So, let's assume security, people are relatively comfortable with security these days, even though I'm sure there's still some issues with regard to corporate edicts and flexibility and audits. Let's put that aside. SLAs is another big one. People often criticize the public cloud SLAs and cost, oh, it's so expensive, I can do it cheaper on-prem. Are those myths? Are those realities? Is it depends? What's your sense? I mean, they're all factors that all of our customers are looking into. I would say what we're hearing a lot about right now is how do we help provide more visibility to everything that's happening? So, if you got a developer now that has the ability to have to write code, put it on any cloud they want, spin up containers, spin down containers, go try out serverless base of architectures. They've got a lot of flexibility to do what they want. Governments, agencies, as well as customers, one of the things they're looking for is what's actually happening? Who's doing what? The governance piece is a big piece of that. I think New Relic plays right into that in terms of helping control all that. One of the things that is one of our sweet spots is as you move to DevOps and a truly microservices architecture, one of the whole values of that is speed, keeping up with how fast the whole market is moving. And customers and agencies, what they want out of that is to deploy applications where they're releasing multiple times a day. You have to have visibility into everything you're doing across the stack to be successful in that. And that's really New Relic's sweet spot in terms of doing that. So providing a visibility, instrumenting the applications and infrastructure before, and then helping provide visibility to things like governance, things that other, not necessarily our sweet spot, but other companies in the industry are doing things throughout the DevOps life cycle in the governance realm, things like that. So we're part of that ecosystem that's helping Amazon and the other cloud providers be very successful, helping customers and agencies be very successful deploying modern applications. It's all about that visibility. Yeah, Scott, one of the things when we look at any rollout of new technology or migration, once it's up and running, then what? So wondering how your firm's involved with is there retraining, is there, things go on once this is in place, now what? Well, what we've found in public sector is that everybody wants to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and the benefits. And most public sector isn't going to reduce costs, they're just going to want to reuse costs more wisely. So some of the confusion around cost savings is that they're getting way more for their dollar in the future state. And the choices you have to make around how fast you want to get to the cloud and what you want to get out of the cloud when you're there. Those all affect the equation of terms of what your actual outcomes are immediately and in the long term. So we often see that in public sector, some of the legacy applications, they may not naturally or easily move all at once. And so you have to make a choice, are you going to do some refactoring, you architecting before you get it there? Are you going to get in the cloud now and then do it afterwards? Either way, there's benefits, but you have to make choices about what you want. When you talk about like, after I've rolled this in, I've heard from some customers, after I've gotten the cloud, I love it, but I had to dedicate an engineer for financial architecting because there's all of these things we need to do. Are we still in that state? Once again, do you help with some of the training as to, okay, or is it plugging them into the Amazon ecosystem and how do they get certified and ready to use all of this? So Infinity works with clients differently. We work with some in a more episodic, lighter capacity, and we work with some in a holistic capacity where we are that engine for them, but we provide the complete cloud services team to do everything from migrations, architecture, DevOps, SysOps, DevSecOps, machine learning, and all the way through. And so when we're providing those services, we're doing those kind of things. We're making sure that the next improvement is worked into the architecture. Last year, the customer I was referencing earlier, we did just under 100 releases. So that's 100 releases that we're using with the New Relic platform and our solution architects, rather, to make sure that it's faultless, that the process is efficient, it's effective, it's secure, and that we're driving efficiencies wherever possible. So it really depends on what the customer wants. If the customer wants to own the environment, they may have to go a little slower to account for their learning curve and we'll help them if that's what they want. But if they want to go faster and they want to take advantage of our expertise, we make that available and we're happy to do that. We had the former CTO of the NSA on yesterday who now works for Accenture. And we were asking about federal versus commercial. Are we still taking learning lessons from commercial and bringing it to federal? Or is it because federal has so much interesting technology around analytics, does it go the other way? And he said, it's funny. When you're on the inside, you think all the innovation is going on outside. Now that I'm on the outside, I say, wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in federal. We heard Theresa yesterday talk about Aurora, she talked about the VMware partnership. So things that were announced a while ago and actually being adopted in commercial coming in to federal. So how does it work? Is it more of a two-way than it used to be 20 years ago? And I wonder if you could comment. Yeah, well, from Infinity's perspective, absolutely. We work with clients to understand the problems and where they want to get to. And then we innovate with them. You're pretty dependent on the subject matter expertise of the organization. And I think our customers like that. They like that they're part of the solution, but then they need the expertise that we bring to create the next generation solution. We just created something in the high red space called the college cloud architecture builder. And it was after teaming with a specific college and working in that space for a long time. But we wanted to create a way for colleges to rapidly implement a complete architecture integrated with all the different things, including New Relic, quickly and successfully. And that was done in partnership with them. So we did the work, but we couldn't have done it without them. Todd, New Relic, obviously you're a believer. You drink the Kool-Aid every day. Why New Relic relative to the competition? How do you guys differentiate? Pitch me. So it's really all about being successful in that modern software space again, as I've mentioned. And so New Relic is the only SaaS-only platform, so we're not going to put anything on prem. We've got ourselves, one of the biggest and best DevOps team that develops our software. We roll code every day, and our customers get the benefit of us being a pure SaaS platform. Part of that is scalability. What we can do at scale is unbelievable. There was a customer that was just talked about on the news today that I can't mention, but they just went from basically $0 to $100 million on an application just in the past 90 days. It's one of our customers, and we've scaled, but we have no problem scaling with customers that are doing things like that. And again, the full platform value that we have now, looking at everything from the front end, on the browser and mobile applications, through the application, which is core to us, which is where we provide that code level visibility, the ability to trace across all the different micro-services that are happening, connected back to that infrastructure. That full platform now provides such tremendous value up and down the stack, but not only to the technology leaders, but also to those folks that are business leaders, chief marketing officers, heads of practices that are at the consultants we work with. All these folks are all getting value out of New Relic. What would that customer who should not be named say about the value contribution of New Relic to that scale? The value is unbelievable. That's a commercial customer, but their business is taking off like so many of our customers' businesses are at an unbelievable scale. They can't be hamstrung by having to do a server upgrade or having to go back, working with a release of code from a couple of weeks ago. They have to be as fast as possible because their business is moving so fast, their agencies are moving so fast that they need a provider that's going to provide that visibility to that at the speed with which they're moving. Awesome, so you got one more? No, wait. Yeah, we got to go. So this last question, impressions of AWS Public Sector Summit. I presume you guys, like we did, had a registry yesterday. It was some logistic issues, but other than that, maybe you could give us your last word on the summit. Well, Affinity is very committed to public sectors, so we really enjoy coming to the Public Sector Summit. It's great to connect with our partners, like Neuralic and others, and it's great to see the latest innovations coming out from AWS. Yeah, and I've been to, I don't know, 10 or so summits around the world so far this year. It is unbelievable the excitement and the amount of people that are now excited about what's happening in the cloud adoption world and Amazon's piece in that and what's happening here in DC this week is no exception. Yeah, I would second that. I mean, it's been a while since I've been at summits. Stu, you go all the time, and they are just exploding and growing, and this is one of the best that's out there. So thanks guys for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest after this short break, John Furrier is here. You're watching theCUBE live from AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back.