>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering AWS re:Invent 2019.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel,
along with its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome to theCUBE.
Lisa Martin with Dave Valente.
This is our first day of covering AWS re:Invent 2019.
Dave, we have a jam packed three days here.
The seventh time theCUBE has been at re:Invent.
>> It's like the Super Bowl here.
>> It is, I stole that from you,
but you just said it back to me.
It is like the Super Bowl here.
We're very pleased to welcome
a couple of guests from Refinitiv.
Refinitiv's first time on theCUBE, as well our guests.
Please welcome Hanna, Hanna Helen, Helin, sorry.
VP of Cloud Propositions.
And James Turck,
the Head of Architecture and Cloud from Refinitiv.
Guys, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Guests: Thank you.
>> Thank you for having us, great to be here.
>> So here we are in the expo hall
with thousands and thousands of folks.
But I'd love for you guys to start,
Hanna we'll start with you.
Tell our audience about Refinitiv.
You're a data company,
but really what is it that you guys do?
What do you deliver to the community?
>> Absolutely, absolutely.
So simply put, we are, as you said, we're a data company.
So we serve the global financial community,
so looking at banks, asset managers,
hedge funds, corporations with financial and risk data.
So very powerful combination in this cloud environment.
So obviously without data cloud is empty.
So that's where we come in (laughs).
>> And look, what type of data are we talking about,
data from a thematic perspective, it is,
we know, and every company knows, on some level,
there's tremendous value in the data.
The challenge is being able to access it,
and unlock the value.
Give us a slice of, in capital markets for example,
what are some of the types of data services
that you provide to your customers?
>> So we have all sorts of data.
So we obviously source the data
from lots of different sources,
whether they're coming from exchanges
or from the market data sources,
and then our customers use that to analyze the data
and re-running the back testing for those data sets.
They also co-mingle our data
with alternative data sets, as well,
as well as their own internal data.
So it's all about that analytical layer
that they can add on top of our data.
>> Okay, and it's data as a service,
essentially is that right?
>> We do have some data as a service.
We also deliver the data to the client.
People are interested in accessing data
in all sorts of different ways,
including increasingly on the cloud.
>> So talk more about your cloud offer.
You got "cloud" in your title, "cloud architecture."
>> So one of the things that we're doing
is we have a combination.
We're an interesting company in that
we both have our own piece of cloud infrastructure
for our own purposes, but also increasingly,
we need to build and deliver solutions for our customers
to be able to consume data in the cloud.
So that means being able to work with them
to put it into the cloud that they want it to be going into,
and to be able to work out how
we can keep that data up to date,
and to do it in a cost-effective manner
for our clients to be able to get the most out of it.
>> How do you deal with the inherent problems of data quality
you're getting data from different sources.
How do you take care of that?
>> Absolutely,
so that's really our core strength and expertise.
And we have been doing that for years and years.
So again, coming form different sources,
we normalize the data on our side, we clean it up,
and then serve for our customers
in our own information world.
And we have created this permanent
and unique identifier, called PermID.
So we map all the data sets,
so it's very easy for our customers of consume that
and then also map it back to their own data
and third party data sets.
>> Where does the global security come into play?
Because that's a topic
and thing that we talk about at every event.
When you're talking about
all these different external data sources, quality,
but security is, I imagine, fundamental.
How do you help deliver that?
>> Absolutely, so obviously from the cloud perspective
that has been a big theme in the public cloud environment.
And I think we are seeing, more and more
feedback from our customers that
as it comes down to public cloud,
I think they are very comfortable actually now,
with the privacy and security of public cloud.
So that has been, I think big change past couple of years.
I haven't personally seen those concerns anymore
coming from customers, the way that we saw
a couple of years ago, so.
>> One of the interesting things that we're seeing
as an increasing move, is that our clients
want to be able to mix their data with our data.
And so increasingly
you're seeing interesting solutions coming to market,
which allow them to keep their data
where their data is held,
on their cloud, or even on their own premises
and mix that with our data.
And so we're trying to bring together those solutions
where a customer doesn't have to
put all of our data with theirs,
put all of their data with ours,
but keep that segregation as you say,
because that PII data and all of those sorts of things,
much more important these days, for us to be able to show
that is how the data is being segregated
and that things are being kept apart in an appropriate way.
>> And who's responsible for that?
Is that you guys?
Is that the cloud provider?
Is it the customer?
>> It's a joint responsibility.
>> So it's a shared responsibility model?
>> Yeah.
>> Where do you leave off
and where does the customer pick up?
What do you advise customers, in terms of,
"Hey, here's what we're going to do for you.
"And now you have to be responsible for X?"
What does that line look like?
>> Well, quite often defining that service boundary
is something that we continue to work on.
So historically we've delivered data to clients.
And so we've had lines going into our clients premises.
And then there's an obvious point at the end of that
where, "This was us and that's you."
As we get more into the cloud space,
we have to define much more clearly
what that service boundary is.
So again,
as we're developing out some of our cloud propositions,
that's a key thing that we're working through,
as to what is it that the client wants to control,
and what is it that we need to control?
>> That's very true Hanna.
I mean, 10 years ago
you would talk to financial services companies say,
they'd say, "We will never be in the cloud."
And now--
>> Hanna: Right, exactly.
>> They're much more comfortable.
Now, you guys do this cloud survey each year.
>> Hanna: Yes.
>> What are you seeing, I'll share some of our data,
I wonder if it matches.
What are the big trends?
>> Sure, sure, yeah, so we are doing this.
It's almost becoming a tradition for us
to do this cloud survey on a yearly basis.
So it's quite interesting
to kind of compare the previous surveys
and where we are today.
So what we have found out on the survey this year
is that the IT investment
is very much going to public cloud.
So I think
when we started the cloud survey a couple of years ago,
we saw that about 32%
of the IT investment went to public cloud.
But then for next year, that is increasing almost to 50%.
So obviously, public cloud is definitely here to stay.
I think another key trend that we saw from the survey
is that,
I think the testing that the companies have been doing,
like, they are learning more and more,
and they are really seeing the benefit
from public cloud now.
And I would highlight that,
especially our hedge fund customers,
they were highlighting that they saw, also,
cost benefits with the cloud.
So about 92% saw that actually, when they moved the cloud
and do the projects in the cloud environment
it really saves money for them,
which is quite interesting, because also then,
at the same time,
throughout many of the customer discussions,
that it can be also a challenge for,
especially for larger organizations,
as they move to the cloud environment,
how do you kind of manage that traditional technology stack
and when you move the public cloud.
So it's kind of two-sided way there.
But I think the general consensus,
as it comes down to cloud survey,
was that many of the organizations,
they really saw that big transition
that organizations are going through
and that it can be really, really big impact
for their own business.
So very, very positive message on that part.
>> Let's dig into that a little bit more from a transition,
or we'll use Andy Jassy's word, "transformation."
James, I'd love to get your perspective on
what has changed in the last few years.
To see the numbers that Helen talked about, really,
Hanna, excuse me, going up so significantly,
is we know that cloud 1.0's
compute and storage and networking
and maybe some data services,
but what do you think has fundamentally changed
across industries, such that public cloud now,
is much more strategic? >> I think for a lot of firms,
particularly in financial services,
we spend a lot to time looking at analytics
and being out around those large analytical jobs
and be able to scale them.
I think that as people have become more comfortable
about the data that they can put into the cloud
and being able to get access to more data
through companies like Refinitiv,
being able to run those machine learning jobs,
and it was really interesting
to see the keynote this morning,
to see Amazon really putting a lot of effort
into democratizing the use of machine learning
through SageMaker, thought it was very exciting.
We think that that is going to be an increasing thing.
So as you see in financial services,
people are looking for those large workloads,
they have really large data sets.
And so the only way that they can do that,
in a kind of realistic manner,
is being able to use public cloud.
And then you see them taking
a lot of the old, traditional systems,
and as we're seeing the risk appetite
to be able to get onto cloud becoming more,
they're going through the same sort of transformation,
which we see many firms having gone through.
The developers are insisting
that they're getting the best tools so that it can be,
have the agility to deliver what their clients want.
And again, one of the best ways of doing that
is moving onto a public cloud infrastructure
that really delivers those tools to you.
>> I wonder if you could talk about what you're seeing
in terms of adoption of new tech?
So I said we'd share some of our data,
at the macro, spending's slowing down.
It's reverting to pre-2018 levels.
It's not falling off a cliff,
but when you look at the spending data from ETR and others,
it's slowing down.
Financial services is a bellwether,
you're seeing less experimentation
and sort of more narrowing of their bets.
They're placing bets
on things that they know are going to work.
They've been experimenting with digital transformation
for the last couple of years, and now they're saying,
"Hey, we're now going to double down on the things that work,
"we're going to unplug the things, the legacy stuff,
"so we can get rid of some of our technical debt."
What are you seeing in terms of the trends
of technology adoption,
particularly for emerging tech within FS?
>> Yeah, and I think you touched on this briefly.
But I think what we are seeing is that,
when we started cloud discussions with our customers,
they all started with kind of
the backend technology/IT conversation at that time.
But in that trend, as you say it was,
it's moving very much to the end users,
and end users, for example, data scientists,
picking the analytical tool that they want to consume.
And that's a very big trend that we are seeing.
So again, AI, AML, analytics in general,
that you can add on top of the cloud environment
and on top of the data,
that will be the big thing happening.
>> One of the things that Andy Jassy said this morning,
James, is in sort of these four, kind of essentials,
for transformation to happen, he said the first one is,
you've got to get senior executive alignment,
and the second thing he said is, it has to be this,
and he used the word "aggressive,"
aggressive, top down approach.
What are some of the changes that you're seeing
with respect to,
where it comes to maybe what you said Hanna,
about the emerging technologies, and the end users really,
and the data scientists
needing to be able to get their hands wet with all of this.
But what are you seeing in terms of
organizations that you work with where,
is that senior leadership really getting on board
where public cloud is a strategy that is driven top down?
>> Absolutely, increasingly you're seeing that happen,
is that it really is going to be the top down strategy.
There are a number of very large capital market firms
who have come out
and said that they're going to adopt varying cloud providers.
And increasingly, that's because
the level of trust has gone up,
and the level of maturity of the cloud providers
has also increased.
So a few years ago, you would speak to the cloud providers
and they really wouldn't understand the need
to engage with the regulators.
Now companies have large teams of people
who go out and engage with the regulators.
And they will partner with the financial institutions
to make sure that we're getting the right,
sort of, level of engagement,
and the right level of permission to do these things.
So that means that the senior management are there.
And I think that also, the senior management finally
are starting to see some of the benefits flow through,
in terms of a combination of the agility,
the different, sort of, cost controls and the elasticity.
And if you think about some of the nature of the workloads
that financial institutions run,
you've got a lot of this overnight processing,
which still goes on, for creating risk reports
and all those sorts of things
really well suited for elasticity.
And in the last few years,
you've seen just this massive increase
in the regulatory requirement for those things.
And certainly, institutions that I've worked with,
you end up in a situation where you're saying,
"Well, in order to be able to accommodate
"just working out what I need to do there,
"I'd need to build three different data centers."
Clearly, nobody is doing that anymore.
You're going to go out,
you're going to partner with your cloud provider,
and they're going to provide you with that capability.
That may not be something that you need in the longterm,
but it'll be something that'll help you work out
what it is that you do need,
and then you can turn that into a normal workload.
>> So AWS, obviously, is a cloud provider for you--
>> James: Yeah.
>> And maybe others, as well.
But you saw some of the announcements today,
you mentioned some of the machine learning
and AI stuff, the SageMaker.
You also saw a lot of activity around the data store.
Redshift and separating compute from storage.
Is that something that you care about?
Is that your customers have to worry about that?
Sometimes they ask you for the solution?
>> We super care about this.
In fact,
one of the big things that we're looking at at the moment,
and I was really interested in the announcements today,
but exactly that,
is how do we get our data into people's data lakes?
As I said,
how do we do that in a way where we're making sure
that the commitments that we have
on digital rights management are being honored,
and how do we work with cloud providers, like Amazon,
about how we do that.
So we have very strong relationships with Amazon.
We have very strong relationships
with other providers, as well.
And so we are trying hard
to work out what the best solution is,
because to be honest with you,
we have to deliver where our clients want the data to be.
So we're working with lots of different providers on this.
But these are all really interesting times.
And this focus on the data
and how you get the data into people's data lakes
is really interesting to us,
and something where we're pushing very hard.
>> Yeah, and then how you act on it.
It's a whole new layer of compute being driven
and new workloads that are emerging
as a result of that data.
It's not just throw it in the data lake anymore.
It's, "I have to extract insights."
>> James: Absolutely, yeah.
>> Talk to us about how, on that front, how are you helping,
Hanna, we'll start with you.
How are you helping customers,
maybe a large enterprise, legacy organization
actually start to use data for competitive advantage
in business differentiation,
especially where the enterprise is concerned,
where they most likely have competitors
that are born in the cloud, that have the agility,
and the speed, and the appetite to take risks.
So how are you helping customers unlock this data
and go, "Wow, this is a huge advantage for our business."
>> Absolutely, so obviously, as I said earlier,
so because we are a data company,
so our customers know us from that perspective,
so they come to us for both financial and risk data,
so that's kind of one, go-to place to get everything.
And then, we're obviously working
very close with our customers to also offer them
new, additional data sets.
So things like,
alternative data obviously being one that you, again,
want to co-mingle your own data with the third party data,
with alternative data sets, as well.
So we, for example, formed a partnership
with a company called BattleFin earlier this year,
which has this very nice technology
to onboard different alternative data sets,
and then we are onboarding those data sets
for our customers
again, combining that with our overall information model.
But it's really again
coming back to that flexible question
that we want to make sure that our data
can be served in the environment where our customers are.
So whether they're in public cloud, private cloud,
whether they have their on-prem solution still,
obviously, especially with the large institutions,
they still have those,
as well as we hosting the offering for them, as well.
So it's all about that flexibility that we would be offering.
>> Excellent, well, Hanna, James,
thank you for joining Dave and me,
sharing with our audience who Refinitv is, what you do,
and really kind of this importance of data,
as we're in this new next-gen of cloud.
We appreciate your time.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Dave: Thank you.
>> For Dave Valente, I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE,
from day one of our coverage at AWS re:Invent 19.
Thanks for watching.
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