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>> Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to New York City.
Lisa Martin and John Furrier
with theCUBE here live covering the AWS Summit NYC 2022.
There's about 15 different summits going on
this year, John, globally.
We're here with about 10,000 attendees.
Just finished the keynote and two guests from SoftwareONE.
Please welcome David Torres, the director of cloud services
and Asim Khan,
a North American AWS services delivery lead at SoftwareONE.
Welcome, guys.
>> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us.
>> Talk to us, David, kick us off.
Give the audience an overview of SoftwareONE.
What do you guys do?
And then tell us a little bit about the AWS partnership.
>> Sure, so SoftwareONE,
we are one of Microsoft and VMware's largest resellers.
We help customers with our IT asset management services,
managing their on-premises license real estate,
but we're definitely a company
that's undergoing a transformation.
And when I say that,
essentially we're focused on three key pillars
with our go to market, supporting the hyperscalers.
So we do support AWS, Azure, GCP at modernization
because we do see this with a lot of our customers,
you know, they're moving from on premises to AWS.
They have a lot of technical debt
and they're looking at options to modernize that,
and mission critical workloads like SAP, Windows, Oracle,
and we offer, you know, a suite of professional services,
managed services, migrations,
quite quite a bit of services. (chuckles)
>> Asim, can you kind of double click on the services
that SoftwareONE delivers to customers?
Maybe some key use cases?
>> Yeah, sure.
I think in the Amazon space,
I would say we're currently focusing in the area
of funding programs that Amazon currently has, for example,
the Migration Acceleration Program, which is a map
with supporting customers basically
with the entire cloud journey that they might have,
or helping them define that cloud journey.
And then we can help the customer
in any phase of that journey as well
to basically take them a step step above.
So that's what our area of focus is right now
to basically help enable customers.
>> So on the Microsoft, AWS, you mentioned Microsoft,
I mean, they've had the enterprise business for years
and, you know, developers was their, you know, ecosystem.
Back in the day, "Developers, developers, developers"
as Steve Ballmer once said, and that was their crown jewel.
But then, you know, .NET now has Linux.
They got a lot more open source.
So those enterprises, their customers are changing.
A lot of them are on AWS.
So talk about that dynamic of the shift to AWS.
And now that Azure's out there,
what's the relationship of those hyperscale?
How do you guys navigate those waters?
>> Sure, I mean, it's always the concept of work backwards
from the customer, right?
What are the business outcomes they're trying to drive
and, you know, define a strategy from that.
And it's still a function of change management
for a lot of customers, people, process and tools.
So, you know, in a lot of cases, our customers are evaluating
what's a skillset of our people, do we need to upskill them,
the tools that we're using,
how do we use those on the multiple clouds, right?
And then the processes.
So for us, you know, we have some customers
that prefer one cloud over another.
We have customers that run cross multiple clouds.
They deploy different workloads.
And then we have some customers that transformation
and modernization are really big top of stack for them.
So in some cases, those customers are going to AWS
and, you know, we're helping them kind of
with that journey.
It's interesting, Amazon literally won
the developer cloud market early on, going back 15 years.
>> Absolutely.
>> But not all developers, enterprise developers
who, you know, in the enterprises,
they're stuck in their ways, but are changing.
This is a digital transformation moment
'cause cloud native applications,
the modernization piece, is developer centric.
>> Absolutely.
>> That's key, the developers.
So I'm interested in your perspective and reaction
to what's going on in that developer market right now
with DevOps exploding in a great way,
the goodness of the cloud coming more and more to the table.
>> Sure, no, absolutely, great question.
So I think with enterprise developers, you know,
we see just the businesses driving
a lot of the outcomes, right?
So the modernization aspect
of needing to get to market faster,
needing to deploy applications faster,
having a more efficient operating model, more automation.
And for your point on the .NET modernization, you know,
we work with customers too as well.
We made an acquisition
a couple years ago, a company, InterGrupo.
They actually specialize in this in .NET modernization.
So we know we're seeing some customers
that are moving to Linux, right?
And they want to go .NET Core
and, you know, they're kind of standardizing on Linux.
So we kind of see a, you know, wide spectrum,
but yeah, maybe.
>> Where are your customer conversations
as things have changed so much
in accelerated dramatically in the last couple of years?
>> Sure.
>> Obviously we've talked about the developers,
but talk to me about, you know, business imperatives
for businesses in every industry to digitally transform,
number one, to survive the last couple of years,
but, two, to be at a competitive advantage.
>> Sure, no, so I think with businesses, you know,
obviously, 2017, innovation, 2022,
it's a little bit different, right?
There's obviously macro conditions, you have COVID.
So, you know, we're seeing
where customers are essentially really doing
their due diligence, right, when they make their choices
more than ever before.
And they're trying to maximize, right,
their spend and their ROI when they move to cloud
and that involves, you know, the licensing advisory,
what they can move, what they can modernize, migrations,
and just the roadmap and what strategy.
But what I see is, it's the business outcomes,
what they're trying to drive,
and, you know, we're seeing some trends too
with maybe a more conservative segments
like healthcare, public sector, right,
utilities that they are really investing
and moving towards the cloud.
>> Asim, I got a question from Twitter, a DM, I want to ask.
You guys are on the front line.
So you see the customers, which is really great
'cause it's primary data.
You guys are right there.
And you're not biased.
You work with whatever hyperscaler.
So it's really good.
So the question that came up was, "Can you ask them
the following, 'What's going on in the data warehouse front,
cloud warehouse front, you got Redshift competing
with Synapse, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery,
and then you got Snowflake and Databricks out there?'"
So you got this new data provider,
but it's not a data warehouse.
And you got data refactoring on AWS, for instance as well.
So, you know, this whole new level of data analytics
with how you're doing cloud data.
And you call it a data warehouse, I guess
for categorically, but it's really not a warehouse.
It's a data lake and you got lake front foundation.
What are you guys seeing on the front lines with customers
as they try to squint through how to deal
with the data and which cloud to work with?
>> That is a good question.
I mean, I've been in the industry a long time.
I've worked for some major financial institutions as well
and data or big data was big for that industry.
(John chuckles)
So I've seen how the trends have changed,
but from our perspective,
because we are an agnostic services company,
as you mentioned, we basically can work
with any hyperscaler, we initially see
what the business needs are for the customer.
If the customer is already, for example, using Amazon,
we initially want to have
the customer use native tooling available
within that hyperscaler space.
If the customer is open for us
to give them any recommendations, of course,
we look at the business needs.
We look at what type of data is going to be stored.
What the industry is.
Based on all of those inputs is when we basically give
the right recommendation,
it could be a third party data warehousing solution.
It could be an area one.
It all depends on what the business needs
of the customer are.
>> So for example, and most companies do this
they build on say AWS, who is one of the first big clouds.
And then they go, "Hey,
we got customers over there at Azure, that's Microsoft
they got thousands and thousands of customers.
Snowflake's done, and they have marketplaces as well."
So you guys are kind of agnostic it sounds like.
Whatever the architecture is on the stack
that they choose.
>> Correct, so that's what makes us special.
I think we are one of those services companies
which is quite unique in the industry.
And I don't say that just because I work for SoftwareONE,
(John chuckle)
that is a fact that gives us a very unique perspective
of giving the customer the right piece of advice
because we've seen it all and we've done it all.
So that's, I think what puts us unique
and regarding technology, all the different hyperscalers,
they might have a very similar backend technology stack,
but what the front end services each hyperscaler is building
are very unique.
Amazon being the leader in this space,
they've been ahead of the curb by a few years,
they will always have certain solutions
which are above the rest.
So I mean, I've always been an Amazon person,
so I'm slightly biased, but, hey, I mean,
I'm not complaining about that.
>> The good news is the customer has choices.
>> Right, absolutely.
And we do see customers that want to be agnostic, right,
>> Yeah.
>> With their technology choices.
Actually, that's a good segue
about our partnership with AWS.
We recently signed
a strategic collaboration agreement between both parties.
So there's going to continue to be big investment
from us, scaling out our professional services,
our practice areas, and then also key focus area
for a fin ops.
>> Is that your number one area?
>> It's one of the areas, yeah.
>> Okay, what your top three practice areas?
>> Top three, mission critical workloads.
So enterprise workloads like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle,
two, app modernization, and, three, definitely fin ops
and the hyperscalers, right?
Because we see a lot of customers
that have already heavily adopted cloud, they're struggling
with that cloud financial management aspect.
>> So if they're struggling,
what are some of the key business outcomes
that they come to you, to SoftwareONE, and say,
"Help us figure this out.
We have to achieve A, B, C."
>> Sure, so depending on the maturity of the customer
and where they are in the journey,
if they're already very heavily adopting cloud, you know,
AWS or Azure, we see in a lot of cases
that the customers are unsure
if they're getting the most out of their cloud spend,
and they're looking at their operations,
and their governance, and, you know, they're coming to us
and basically asking us, "Hey,
we feel like our cloud spend is a little bit out of control.
Can you help us?"
And that's where we can come in, you know,
provide the advice, the guidance, the advisory
but also give them the tooling, right,
to have visibility into their cloud spend
and make those conditions.
And we also offer a managed fin op service
that will end to end do this for the customers
to help to manage their resale, their invoicing,
their marketplace buy, as well as their cloud spend.
>> So obviously the engagement varies customer to customer.
What's a typical timeframe?
Like how long does it take you to really get in there
with a customer, understand the direction they need to go,
and create the right plan?
>> Sure, again, comes back to the cloud journey.
You know, if the customer is still, you know,
very much on prem and maybe more, you know, conservative,
it may start with licensing assessments just to give them
an idea of what it would cost
to move those workloads, right?
Then it turns into migration modernization,
you know, it can be an anywhere from one to six months,
you know, of just consulting, right,
to get the customer ready.
And then we help 'em, you know,
obviously with their migration plan.
But if they're already heavily adopting cloud,
you know, we do remediation work, we do optimization.
Obviously, SAP, that's a longer cycle, so. (chuckles)
>> So I got to ask you guys, what is the PyraCloud?
SoftwareONE as a platform PyraCloud.
What is that?
>> I might want to answer that.
>> Sure. (chuckles)
>> It's pronounced PyraCloud.
>> How do you pronounce it?
>> PyraCloud.
>> PyraCloud, okay.
I like PyraCloud better. (chuckles)
>> With the Y in there.
It's basically our spend insight platform.
It gives customers an a truly agnostic single pane
of glass view into their entire cloud enterprise spend.
What I mean by that is with a single login,
the customer has access
to looking at their enterprise spend on AWS, on Azure,
as well as GCP.
And in the future, of course,
we're going to add other hyperscalers in there as well.
Because of the single pin of glass view,
the customer has a true or the customer leadership,
or, for example, the CTO has
a single pane of glass view into the entire spend.
We allow the customer to basically have
an enterprise level tagging strategy,
which is across all the hyperscalers
as well as then allowing a certain amount
of automated cost management as well,
which is again agnostic and enterprisewide.
>> Can you share an example of a customer
for whom you've given them this single pane
of glass through PyraCloud,
and by how much they've been able to reduce costs
or optimize costs?
>> Yes, mostly the customers who would be a very good fit
for PyraCloud would be a slightly more mature customer
who already has a large amount of spend,
or who is already very mature
in their different hyperscalers.
And usually what we've seen once a customer is mature
in the cloud over a certain period of time,
controlling costs does become difficult,
even though you might have automation in place,
but to get to that automation,
you have to go through a certain amount of time
of basically things breaking and you fixing them.
So this is where per cloud becomes very helpful
to help control that.
And building a strategy, which once in place
is repetitive and helps you manage costs and spend
in the cloud year after year then.
>> One of the things I want to get your guys reaction
before we wrap up is this show here has got 10,000 people
which is a big number, post COVID, events are coming back
but in the past five years, or six years,
or seven years, since like 2015, a lot's changed.
What's changed the most?
Shared to the audience
what you think is the biggest step function change
that's happening right now?
Is it that data's now prime time?
Everyone's got a lot of data,
hasn't figured out the consequences with it.
Is it scale?
Is it super cloud?
Is it the ecosystem
because this is not stopping ,the growth in the enterprise
on the digital transformation is expanding,
even though GDPs down, and gas prices are high,
and inflation, this isn't stopping.
Now, some of the unicorns might be impacted
by the headwinds, the big overfunded valuations
but not the ecosystem.
What's changed?
What's the big change?
>> Well, I think what I see is this cloud is
becoming the defacto operating model
and customers are working backwards from that
as their primary goal, right, to operate in the cloud.
And as I mentioned before,
they really are doing due diligence, right,
to really understand the best approach
for seeing kind of maybe some of the challenges
other customers have had when they first moved to AWS, so.
And I'm, you know, seeing industries
that maybe five years ago, you know,
were not about moving to cloud, like healthcare.
I can tell you a lot of our healthcare customers,
they're trying to get to cloud as fast as possible.
>> It's a wake up call.
>> Absolutely.
Absolutely.
>> Asim, what's your reaction?
>> In my point of view
with what's happened these last few years
with a lot of companies having their employees work
from home and being remotely,
I think end user compute was one of the big booms
which happened about two years ago.
We support a lot of customer in that space as well.
And then overall, I think we actually saw
that there was much more business focus
with employees working for home for some reason.
And we saw that internally in our own organization as well.
And with that focus, the whole area of being more lean
and agile in the cloud space,
I think became much more prevalent for all the enterprises.
Everybody wanted to be spend conscious,
availing the different tools available in the cloud arena,
like autoscaling like using, for example, containerization,
using such solutions to basically be more resilient
and more lean to basic control costs.
>> So necessity is the mother
of all inventions
>> It is. >> That got forced.
So you got wake up call and then a forcing function
to like, okay, but exposes the consequences
of a modern application, modern environment
because they didn't, they're out of business.
So then it's like, okay,
this is actually working, (chuckles)
why don't we like kill that project
that we've doubled down on, move it over here."
So I see that same pattern.
What do you guys see?
>> Yeah, no, I mean, we see that pattern as well.
Just modernization, efficiency.
You could just move faster, more elasticity, you know,
and, again, the wake up call, you know, for organizations
that people couldn't go to data centers, right? (chuckles)
>> Yeah. (chuckles)
>> We actually have a customer,
that was literally the reason they made the move,
right, to AWS.
>> And I would add one more thing to that particular point.
With the time available,
I think customers were able to actually now re-architect
their applications slightly better to be able to avail,
for example, no server type of solutions
or using certain design principles
which were much more cost lean in the cloud.
That's what we saw.
I think customers spent that time available
over the past couple of years to be much more cloud centric,
I would say.
>> Yeah, the forced March was really an accelerant
and a catalyst in a lot of ways for good,
and there's definitely some silver linings there.
Guys, we're out of time.
But thank you so much
for joining John >> Oh, awesome.
>> And me talking about SoftwareONE,
what you guys are doing, helping customers,
what you're doing with AWS and the hyperscalers.
We appreciate your time and your insights.
>> Thank you. >> Awesome.
Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us.
>> Really appreciate it.
>> All right, for our guests and John Furrier,
I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE live from New York City
at AWS Summit at NYC.
Stick around, John and I will be right back
with our next guest.
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