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>> Good afternoon and welcome back
to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada,
where we're here live from the show floor,
all four days of AWS re:Invent.
I'm Savannah Peterson, joined with my co-host Dave Vellante.
Dave, how you doing?
>> Good.
Beautiful and chilly Las Vegas.
Can't wait to get back to New England where it's warm.
>> Balmy, New England this time of year in December.
Wow, Dave, that's a bold statement.
I am super excited about the conversation
that we're going to be having next.
And, you know, I'm not even going to tee it up.
I just want to bring Dilip on.
Dilip, thank you so much for being here.
How you doing?
>> Savannah, Dave, thank you so much.
>> Hey, Dilip.
>> Excited to be here. >> It's joy to have you.
So, you have been working at Amazon for about 20 years.
>> Almost. Almost. >> Yes.
>> Feels like 20, 19 1/2. >> Which is very exciting.
You've had a lot of roles.
I'm going to touch on some of them,
but you just came over to AWS from the physical retail side.
Talk to me about that.
>> Yup, so I've been to Amazon for 19 1/2 years.
Done pricing, supply chain.
I was Jeff Bezos technical advisor for a couple years.
>> Casual name drop. >> Casual name drop.
>> Savannah: But a couple people here for that name before.
>> Humble brag, hashtag.
And then I, for the last several years,
I was leading our physical retail initiatives.
We just walk out Amazon One,
bringing convenience to physical spaces.
And then in August, with like as those things
were getting a lot of traction
and we were selling to third parties,
we felt that it would be better suited in AWS.
And, but along with that, there was also another trend
that's been brewing, which is, you know,
companies have loved building on AWS.
They love the infrastructure services,
but increasingly, they're also asking us
to build applications that are higher up in the stack.
Solving key, turnkey business problems.
Just walk out Amazon One or examples of that,
Amazon Connect.
We just recently announced supply chain,
so now there's a bevy interesting services
all coming together, higher up in the stack for customers.
So it's an exciting time.
>> It was interesting that you're able to, you know, transfer
from that retail.
I mean, normally, in historically,
if you're within an industry, retail, manufacturing,
automotive whatever.
You were kind as locked in a little bit.
>> Dilip: Siloed a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Because they had their own, your own value chain.
And I guess, data has changed that maybe,
that you can traverse now.
>> Yeah, if you think about the things that we did,
even when we were in retail,
the tenants was less about the industries and more about
how can we bring convenience to physical spaces?
The fact that you don't like to wait in line
is no more like likely, you know,
five years from now than it is today.
So, it's a very durable tenant, but it's equally applicable
whether you're in a grocery store, a convenience store,
a stadium, an airport.
So it actually transcends any, and like supply chain,
think of supply chain.
Supply chain isn't, you know, targeted
to any one particular industry.
It has broad applicability.
So these things are very, you know, horizontally applicable.
>> Anything that makes my life easier, I'm down.
>> Savannah: We're all here for the easy button.
We've been talking about it a bit this week.
I'm in.
And the retail store, I mean, I'm in San Francisco.
I've had the experience of going through.
Very interesting and seamless journey, honestly.
It's very exciting.
So tell us a little bit more about the applications group
at AWS.
>> Yup. So as I said, you know, we are,
the applications group is a combination of several services.
You know, we have communication developer services,
which is the ability to add simple email service
or video and embed video, voice chat using a chime SDK.
In a higher up in the stack,
we are taking care of things that IT administrators
have to deal with where you can provision an entire desktop
with the workspaces or provide a femoral access to it.
And then as you go up even higher up in the stack,
you have productivity applications like AWS Wicker,
which we just did GA, you know, last week in AWS Clean Rooms
which we announced as a service in preview.
And then you have, you know, Connect,
which is our cloud contact center, AWS supply chain.
Just walk out Amazon One,
it just feels like we're getting started.
>> Just a couple things going on.
>> So, clean rooms.
Part of the governance play, part of data sharing.
Can you explain, you know, we were talking offline,
but I remember back in the disk drive days.
We were in a clean room, they'd show you the clean room,
you couldn't go near it unless you had a hazmat suit on.
So now you're applying that to data.
Explain that concept.
>> Yeah, so the companies across, you know,
financial services or healthcare, advertising,
they all want to be able to combine
and pull together data`sets with their partners
in order to get these collaborative insights.
The problem is either the data's fragmented,
it's siloed or you have, you know, data governance issues
that's preventing them from sharing.
And the key requirement is that they want to be able
to share this data
without exposing any of the underlying data.
Clean rooms are always emerged as a solution to that,
but the problem with that is that they're hard
to maintain.
They're expensive.
You have to write complex privacy queries.
And if you make a mistake, you risk exposing the same data
that you've been, you know,
studiously trying to protect. >> Trying to protect.
>> You know, take advertising as an industry, as an example.
You know, advertisers care about, is my ad effective?
But it turns out that if you're an advertiser
and let's say you're a Nike or some other advertiser
and your pop, you know, you place an ad on the website.
Well, you want to stop showing the ad to people
who have already purchased the product.
However, people who purchased the product,-
>> Savannah: It happens all the time.
>> that purchasing data is not accessible to them easily.
But if you could combine those insights,
you know, the publishers benefit, advertisers benefits.
So AWS Clean Rooms is that service
that allows you very easily to be able to collaborate
with a group of folks
and then be able to gain these collaborative insights.
>> And the consumers benefit.
I mean, how many times you bought, you search it.
>> It happens all the time. >> They know.
And like, I just bought that guys, you know?
>> Yeah, no, exactly. >> Four weeks.
>> And I'm like, you don't need to serve me that, you know?
And we understand the marketing backend.
And it's just a waste of money and energy and resources.
I mean, we're talking about sustainability as well.
I don't think supply chain has ever had a hotter moment
than it's had the last two and a half years.
Tell me more about the announcement.
>> Yup, so super excited about this.
As you know, as you said, supply chains
have always been very critical and very core for companies.
The pandemic exacerbated it.
So, ours way of sort of thinking about supply chains
is to say that, you know, companies have taken,
over the years many, like dozens,
like millions and millions of dollars of investment
in building their own supply chains.
But the problem with supply chains is that
the reason that they're not as functional as they could be
is because of the lack of visibility.
Because they're strung together very many disparate systems,
that lack of visibility affects agility.
And so, our approach in it was to say that,
well, if we could have folks use their existing supply chain
what can we do to improve the investment on the ROI
of what they're getting?
By creating a layer on top of it,
that provides them that insights,
connects all of these disparate data
and then provides them insights to say,
well, you know, here's where you overstock,
here's where you under stock.
You know, this is the, you know, the carbon emission impact
of being able to transfer something.
So like rather without requiring people to re-platform,
what's the way that we can add value in it?
And then also build upon Amazon's, you know,
years of supply chain experience,
to be able to build these predictive analytics
for customers.
>> So, that's a good, I like that you started
with the why. >> Yes.
>> Right now, what is it?
It's an abstraction layer and then you're connecting
into different data points. >> Yes, that's correct.
>> Injecting ML. >> Feel like you can pick in,
like if you think about supply chain,
you can have warehouse management systems,
order management systems.
It could be in disparate things.
We use ML to be able to bring all of this disparate data in
and create our unified data lake.
Once you have that unified data lake,
you can then run an insights layer on top of it
to be able to say, so that as the data changes,
supply chain is not a static thing.
Data's constantly changing.
As the data's changing, the data lake now reflects
the most up-to-date information.
You can have alerts and insights set up on it
to say that, what are the kinds of things
that you're interested in?
And then more importantly, supply chain and agility
is about communication.
In order to be able to make certain things happen,
you need to be able to communicate,
you need to make sure that everyone's on the same page.
And we allow for a lot of the communication
and collaboration tools to be built within this platform
so that you're not necessarily leaving to go and toggle
from one place to the other to solve your problems.
>> And in the pie chart of how people spend their time,
they're spending a lot less time communicating
and being proactive. >> That's correct.
>> And getting ahead of the curve.
They're spending more time trying to figure out actually
what's going on. >> Yes.
>> And that's the problem that you're going to solve.
>> Well, and it ensures that the customer at the other end
of that supply chain experience
is going to have their expectations managed
in terms of when their good might get there
or whatever's going to happen. >> Exactly.
>> I feel like that expectation management
has been such a big part of it.
Okay, I just have to ask because I'm very curious.
What was it like advising Jeff?
>> Quite possibly the best job that I've ever had.
You know, he's a fascinating individual.
>> Did he pay you to say that? >> Nope.
But I would've, like, I would've done it for like,
it's remarkable seeing how he thinks
and his approach to problem solving.
It is, you know, you could be really tactical
and go very deep.
You could be extremely strategic.
And to be able to sort of move effortlessly
between those two is a unique skill.
I learned a lot.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So what made you want to evolve your career
at Amazon after that?
'Cause I see on your LinkedIn, you say,
it was the best job you ever had.
With curiosity?
>> Yeah, so one of the things, so the role is designed
for you to be able to transition to something new.
>> Savannah: Oh, cool.
>> So after I finished that role,
we were just getting into our foray with physical stores.
And the idea between physical stores is that,
you and I as consumers, we all have a lot of choices
for physical stores.
You know, there's a lot of options,
there's a lot of formats.
And so the last thing we wanted to do
is come up with another me too offering.
So, our approach was that
what can we do to improve convenience in physical stores?
That's what resulted in just walk out to Amazon Go.
That's what resulted in Amazon One,
which is another in a fast, convenient, contactless
way to pay using the power of your palm.
And now, what started in Amazon retail
is now expanded to several third parties in,
you know, stadiums, convention centers, airports.
>> Airport, I just had, was in the Houston airport
and got to do a humanless checkout.
>> Dilip: Exactly.
>> And actually in Honolulu a couple weeks ago as well too.
Yeah, so we're going to see more and more of this.
>> Yes.
>> So what Amazon, I think has over a million employees.
A lot of those are warehouse employees.
But what advice would you give to somebody
who's somewhere inside of Amazon, maybe they're on AWS,
maybe they're Amazon.
What advice would you give somebody inside that's maybe,
you know, hey, I've been at this job for five, six years,
three, four years, whatever it is.
I want to do something else.
And there's so much opportunity inside Amazon, right?
What would you advise them?
>> My single advice, which is actually transferable
and I use it for myself is choose something
that makes you a little uncomfortable.
>> Dave: Get out of your comfort zone.
>> It's like, you got to do that.
It's like, it's not the easiest thing to hear,
but it's also the most satisfying.
Because almost every single time that I've done it
for myself, it's resulted in like,
you don't really know what the answer is.
You don't really know exactly where you're going to end up,
but the process and the journey through it,
if you experience a little bit of discomfort constantly,
it makes you non complacent.
It makes you sort of not take the job,
sort of in a stride.
You have to be on it to do it.
So that's the advice that I would give anyone.
>> Yeah, that's good.
So something that's maybe adjacent
and maybe not completely foreign to you,
but also something that, you know,
you got to go dig a little bit and learn.
>> You're planning a career change over here, Dave?
>> No, I know a lot of people in Amazon are like,
hey, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next.
I mean, I love it here.
I live by the LPS, you know, but,
and there's so much to choose from.
>> It is, you know, when I joined in 2003,
there were so many things that we were sort of doing today.
None of those existed.
It's a fascinating company.
And the evolution, you could be in 20 different places
and the breadth of the kinds of things that, you know,
the Amazon experience provides is timeless.
It's fascinating.
>> And, you know, you look at a company like Amazon,
and, you know, it's so amazing.
You look at this ecosystem.
I've been around- >> Even a show floor.
>> I've been around a lot of time.
And the show floor says it all.
But I've seen a lot of, you know, waves.
And each subsequent wave, you know,
we always talk about how many companies were
in the Fortune 1000 and aren't anymore.
And, but the leaders, you know, survive and they thrive.
And I think it's fascinating to try to better understand
the culture that enables that.
You know, you look at a company like Microsoft
that was irrelevant and then came back.
You know, even IBM was on death store for a while
and they come back and so they.
And so, but Amazon just feels, you know,
at the moment you feel like,
"Oh wow, nothing can stop this machine."
'Cause everybody's trying to disrupt Amazon
and then, you know, only the paranoid survive,
all that stuff.
But it's not like, past is not prologue, all right?
So that's why I asked these questions.
And you just said that a lot of the services today
that although the ideas didn't even exist,
I mean, walkout.
I mean, that's just amazing.
>> I think one of the things that Amazon
does really well culturally
is that they create the single threaded leadership.
They give people focus.
If you have to get something done,
you have to give people focus.
You can't distract them with like seven different things
and then say that, oh, by the way, your eighth job
is to innovate.
It just doesn't work that way.
It's like it's hard.
Like it can be-
>> And where were the energy come from that?
>> Exactly.
And so giving people that single threaded focus
is super important.
>> Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, has a great quote.
He wrote on his book.
He said, "If you got 14 priorities, you got none."
And he asks,- >> Well said.
>> he challenges people.
If you had to give up everything and do only one thing
for the next 365 days, what would that be?
It's a really hard question to answer.
>> I feel like as we're around New Year's resolution times.
I mean when we thinking about that,
maybe we can all share our one thing.
So, Dilip, you've been with the the applications team
for five months.
What's coming up next?
>> Well, as I said, you know, it feels like
it's still day one for applications.
If you think about the things, the news that we introduced
and the several services that we introduced,
it has applicability across a variety
of horizontal industries.
But then we're also feeling
that there's considerable vertical applications
that can be built for specific things.
Like, it could be in advertising,
it could be in financial services,
it could be in manufacturing.
The opportunities are endless.
I think the notion of people wanting applications higher up
in the stack and a little more turnkey solutions
is also, it's not new for us,
but it's also new and creative too.
You know, AWS has traditionally been doing.
>> So again, this relates to what we were sort
of talking about before.
And maybe, this came from Jazzy or maybe it came from Bezos.
But you hear a lot, it's okay to be misunderstood
or if we were misunderstood for a long time.
So when people hear up the stack, they think,
when you think about apps, you know, in the last 10 years
it was taking on-prem and bringing it into the cloud.
Okay, you saw that with CREM, email, CRM,
service management, you know, data warehouses, et cetera.
Amazon is thinking about this in a different way.
It's like you're looking at the world saying,
okay, how can we improve whatever?
Workflows, people's lives, doing something
that's not been done before?
And that seems to be the kind of applications
that you guys are thinking about building.
>> Yeah.
>> And that's unique.
It's not just, okay, we're going to take something on-prem
put it in the cloud.
Been there, done that.
That S-curve is sort of flattening now.
But there's a new S-curve which is completely new workflows
and innovations and processes
that we really haven't thought about yet.
Or you're thinking about, I presume.
>> Yeah. Having said that, I'd also like to sort
of remind folks that when you consider the,
you know, the entire spend, the portion of workloads
that are running in the cloud is a teeny tiny fraction.
It's like less than 5%, like 4% or something like that.
So it's a very, there's still plenty of things
that can sort of move to the cloud.
But you're right that there is another trend
of where in the stack and the types of applications
that you can provide as well.
>> Yeah, new innovation that haven't well thought of yet.
>> So, Dilip, we have a new tradition here
on theCUBE at re:Invent.
Where we're looking for your 30 minute Instagram reel,
your hot take, biggest key theme, either for you, your team,
or just general vibe from the show.
>> General vibe from the show.
Well, 19 1/2 years at Amazon,
this is actually my first re:Invent, believe it or not.
This is my, as a AWS employee now,
as re:Invent with like launching services.
So that's the first.
I've been to re:Invent before,
but as an attendee rather than as a person who's,
you know, a contributing number of the workforce.
>> Working actually?
>> If you will.
>> Actually doing your job.
>> And so I'm just amazed at the energy and the breadth.
And the, you know, from the partners to the customers
to the diversity of people who are coming here
from everywhere.
I had meetings from people in New Zealand.
Like, you know, the UK, like customers are coming at us
from like very many different places.
And it's fascinating for me to see.
It's new for me as well given, you know,
some of my past experience.
But this is a, it's been a blast.
>> People are pumped. >> People are pumped.
>> They can't believe the booth traffic.
Not only that quality.
>> Right. All of our guests have talked about that.
>> Like, yeah, you know, we're going to throw half
of these leads away, but they're saying no,
I'm having like really substantive conversations
with business people.
This is, I think, my 10th re:Invent.
And the first one was mostly developers.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And, you know, so.
Now it's a lot more business people,
a lot of developers too. >> Yeah.
>> It's just.
>> The community really makes it.
Dilip, thank you so much for joining us today on theCube.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> You're fantastic.
I could ask you a million questions.
Be sure and tell Jeff that we said hi.
>> Will do.
>> Savannah: Next time you guys are hanging out.
And thank all of you. >> You want to go into space?
>> Yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely.
I'm perhaps the most space obsessed on the show.
And with that, we will continue our out
of this world coverage shortly from fabulous Las Vegas
where we are at AWS re:Invent.
It is day four with Dave Vellante.
I'm Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE,
the leader in high tech coverage.
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