>> Narrator: Live from London, England.
It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Welcome back to Excel London everybody.
My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE,
the leader in live tech coverage,
we go out to the events, we extract the signal
from the noise, this is our day long coverage
of the AWS Summit in London, 12,000 people here.
It's a Summit, it's like a mini reinvent.
Dominic Deacon is here, he's the sales director
for cloud and alliances at CenturyLink,
Dominic, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks very much for having me.
>> So, what's going on here at the show,
what's CenturyLink showing?
What are the conversations like,
and what are you guys up to?
>> Well, it's been a fantastic day
for us here at CenturyLink,
we've got a big stand presence out
on our floor here, it's been fantastic
to see the vast number of people here today,
and fascinating from all different types
of industries, different types
of technology companies, manufacturing companies,
it's just a vast, different array of people.
And some fantastic conversations on the stand today.
>> So cloud computing when it came in, a lot
of people sort of didn't understand it.
A lot of people ignored it.
A lot of people thought they could replicate it.
But now, it's starting to come into focus,
now that we're in, you know, whatever it is,
15 years in.
>> Dominic: Yeah.
>> 12, 13 years in.
It's been a real tailwind for your business.
Describe why that is, where you fit
in the value chain of the ecosystem.
>> Sure, so you know, CenturyLink
is a global IT network technology organization.
So we operate in many many different countries,
60 off countries globally.
And for us the value proposition with CenturyLink
is around connecting customers to AWS cloud.
It's around then helping do the migration
and transition of workloads to AWS and the cloud.
And then for us, a key part of our heritage
is the managed services, so then we are able,
once applications have been, and workloads,
have been transitioned to AWS,
we're able to managed those as a managed service provider
for the organizations, and a lot of enterprises now
are on this digital transformation journey,
you know, a lot of industries today are being disrupted
by new entrants, and we've seen a lot
of those over the past, kind of five to ten years.
Probably name a, you know, 25 of them
off the top of my head if we wanted to right now.
So industries are being disrupted,
and we're there to really help organizations
in that digital transformation journey
through connecting, through migration,
and then through the management aspect.
>> So the early days of cloud, of course
you saw a lot of startups, and a lot of innovators
moving to the cloud.
You saw large corporations maybe doing
a little shadow IT...
>> Dominic: Yeah.
>> You saw IT maybe throwing up some crapplications,
you know, we used to jokingly call them in the cloud.
Now the cloud is essentially running, you know,
any workload, any application, anywhere in the world.
What are you seeing in terms of some of the trends,
in terms of what people are doing with the cloud,
what they're putting in the cloud,
who are they, what's your customer based look on it?
>> Yeah, I mean it's, you know, it's been
a fascinating journey over the last kind
of ten years really.
You know, I remember going back ten years ago
and, you know, enterprise organizations were,
yeah this cloud thing, not sure, they'd give you
a million reasons why they wouldn't do it,
and then you'd have some parts of the organization
generally you know, lines of businesses
that were, that were a bit
stuck with their own IT departments
around speed and agility, hey we need this now,
but you guys are telling me it's gonna
take four months just to deliver some service
and then another month to build it out,
I can't wait six months to be able
to, you know, accelerate our business,
so we needed different ways, so that's when we
starting seeing the shadow IT aspects,
and especially with AWS, right?
Well I've got a credit card, I can get the resources
that I need within 30 seconds, I've just logged in, right?
I've got all the resources there right now,
we can accelerate, and now we can go,
and that really started the revolution,
but also, became a bit of a challenge to enterprises
because now they've got unregulated IT spends,
we've got lots of different silos of applications,
that starts to become a challenge to manage that
at scale, which really started to turn enterprises
into understanding, well actually, digital transformation
for us, cloud fixes at the core part of those strategies,
okay, so now let's start bringing that in,
how do we start utilizing that to the best
of our ability, and we've seen that shift
over the last ten years to really get to a point
where we are today with some really cool things
happening with, you know, large scale enterprise
mission critical applications now being deployed in AWS.
SAP, ERP applications for example,
ten years ago, I didn't think anyone would've
realized that you could've run that in AWS,
and here we are today where you can.
>> I don't know if you saw the keynote this morning,
but the guy from Saintsbury said that they moved
an Oracle rack instance into AWS,
and I got a lot of questions for him...
(laughs)
but he ran off, and there were a number
of examples of Oracles, not trivial to move Oracle in,
but SAP of course is not as antagonistic
with regards to AWS as Oracle are,
but so there's a better partnership there.
So you're seeing those types of applications
now moved to the cloud.
What's the motivation for people doing that?
Are they able to change the operating model,
how are they able to affect their business by doing that?
>> Well I think the fundamental change
in the last, maybe five years is that
their, is that the board of their enterprise organizations
have actually woken up to the fact that
we can start delivering transformation
at speed and at scale, utilizing services like AWS.
And the broad ecosystem of specialist partners
that sit in and around AWS to be able
to deliver that value, and the board
and steering committees, of, you know,
the large enterprise customers have kind of sat there
going, right, the time is now, disruption is,
you know, quite prevalent in our marketplace now,
so we need to change, we need to become more agile,
we need to change our cost base, we need
to change our operations model,
we need to be thinking more about
the customer experience and how do we deliver
new services quickly to remain relevant,
and you kind of have this tidal wave
of everything aligning, and the realization
that there is a way to be able to do this,
and realize the benefits of that.
And I think that's really what we've seen
in the last few years or so.
>> Now, you guys obviously, first talk about
your AWS partnership, how did it start,
how's it going, what's the relationship like,
what's that journey been like?
>> Sure, so, yeah, CenturyLink, as I said before,
provides global network services,
and also provides, you know hosting, cloud,
and managed services that combine with that
with a security wrap and a managed security service
that goes across, you know, network, infrastructure,
and applications.
That's the core of our business globally.
I'd say for us, you know, essentially,
we made a pivot around three or four years ago,
which was to say, do we really need
to own our data centers anymore,
or do we just want to be able to provide
the expertise and services that come from a data center?
So rather than building all of our own,
you know, cloud infrastructure and trying
to take that to market, actually what we are
experts in is being able to deliver value
with that infrastructure from an application standpoint,
and being able to manage that and optimize it
in the most economical model to be a service provider
for those customers, and so, you know,
we've been on that journey ourselves
for probably the last three or four years,
and that led us up to the point where,
you know, a lot of our customers were asking us,
hey, I've got some applications and some
kind of traditional hosting with CenturyLink,
but we're also looking at AWS for some
of our newer workloads, hey CenturyLink,
are you able to help us across both of these,
and then we kind of saw the magnification
of, you know, the hybrid IT kind of platform come in,
I've got applications that I need to set
in a private cloud, or some legacy infrastructure,
I'm also looking at my AWS public cloud,
and actually what I need is a service provider
to be a consistent provider across all
of these different infrastructure types now
as we transition.
So CenturyLink made that pivot,
we joined forces with AWS about three years ago now.
It's a fantastic partnership for us,
and we deliver all of those cool capabilities
that we have for years with the AWS platform
as part of their partner ecosystem,
delivering that value for our mutual customers.
>> So Matt Garmin said this morning
in the keynote that, you know, he firmly believes
they do this, he believes that over time,
the vast majority of workloads are gonna live
in the public cloud.
Having said that, he said something you didn't hear AWS
recognize several years ago, which was hybrid.
You just mentioned hybrid.
>> Dominic: Yup.
>> And then he laid out a number of things
that they're doing for folks on prem,
I think you mentioned Snowball,
which I think was one of the first ones.
>> Dominic: Yeah.
>> You know, and then a number of other ones,
of course Outpost.
>> Dominic: That's the big one.
>> Grab a lot of attention, so my point
of this question is that, and a sort of observation
and then question, is AWS, never say never,
when it comes to AWS.
>> Dominic: Absolutely.
>> You know, years ago, people said no,
they'll never do on prem, never do hybrid,
of course now, they're gonna become a leader
in hybrid, predicted that on theCUBE for a while.
There's also this world of multi cloud,
of course AWS doesn't wanna talk about, you know,
non, other clouds, but there's a multi cloud
world, every show you go to, everybody's talking
about multi cloud, it's a huge opportunity for you.
I've contended that multi cloud is largely a symptom
of multi vendor, and line of business, and shadow IT,
and as we said now, we've got this mess out there
that IT's gotta deal with.
>> Yeah.
>> But it's an opportunity, you know, chaos is cash
for you guys, so what are your thoughts
on multi cloud, how real is it, how far are we
into the journey of multi cloud?
>> Yeah, I mean that's a, that's a really
interesting questions, and actually,
we see, we see that more and more
in the enterprise space now.
I think as that, as the thinking in enterprises
has matured, there's a realization
that, you know, it's not always
that one thing fits everything.
So it's about understanding, you know,
the workload that I've got today,
and where's the best platform for that workload
to reside on that delivers the scale,
the performance, you know, from a compliance perspective,
am I compliant with this workload,
and which platform is the most compliant around that?
So there's a number of factors that come into play,
which leads to, you know, some platforms being,
we call it the best execution venue,
becomes the best venue to deploy the application.
You know, public cloud is fantastic
and provides the agility, speed, innovation,
but sometimes isn't necessarily the right platform
for some of the legacy workloads
that actually just need to transition out
of a customer status center, because they
don't want a data center anymore.
So, there is movements today where,
you know, as that market's maturing,
the organizations are sort of saying
to themselves, well I need a, I need
a staging post to now understand what I do
with these workloads before I can then do
a level of migration and transition
and refactoring, and so that I can get
to, get to private cloud.
Generally that comes down to, you know,
sometimes it's capex avoidance,
I don't wanna refresh my whole data center,
or I actually don't wanna own bricks and mortar
anymore, for us we just wanna be able
to consume the service under an SLA
that's outcome driven.
So that's where we start seeing the,
you know, the hybrid cloud model,
and that's a mixture of private cloud,
and sometimes a mixture of public clouds as well.
Sometimes, enterprises look at it and go,
well if I put all my eggs in one basket,
does that blast my risk compliance?
Or do I split it out, and you know,
basically have two public clouds
that we mitigate the risk and can move
one workload into another?
There's a number of different factors
that are driving that, but generally
it's around risk mitigation, speed, and economics.
>> I'm glad you brought that up too, and as well
horses for courses, you know?
You were saying that sometimes,
there's, you know, a workload that fits best here.
So I, we've predicted on theCUBE
that eventually, Amazon will get into that business,
you'll see, because once it gets big enough,
and if it's real, Amazon will have a solution,
you know.
>> Dominic: Sure.
>> Because their customers will ask for it.
>> Dominic: Absolutely.
>> Amazon says they're customer driven, they actually are.
>> Dominic: Yeah.
>> Enough customers say that's how
things like Outpost...
>> Dominic: Absolutely.
>> Occur.
So take use back to sort of,
what's happening in your business today,
where you see this sort of next near term,
to mid term, going for CenturyLink.
>> Sure so, you know, for us our focus
is on really, you know, delivering
great customer outcomes and customer experience.
And it's about delivering the value add in
partnership with AWS, so combining the strength
of CenturyLink with the strength of AWS
delivers great customer experience,
also delivers great customer business outcomes,
which keeps, you know, our mutual customers
together with us for many many years, hopefully.
And that's really for us focusing on delivering,
you know, our core innovation with,
on top of AWS around how we deliver our automated
managed services, we're looking at simplification,
automation of operational functions for our customers,
because if we can streamline that,
the economics become better, SLAs increase,
their business productivity and performance
increases along with that,
and it's a mutual win win win
for all three partners involved,
which is what we're all striving for.
>> Well, as somebody once said, the network is the computer,
you guys are the network, so, thanks very much
for coming on theCUBE Dominic.
>> Dominic: Thank you for having me.
>> You're very welcome.
All right, keep it right there everybody,
we'll be back with our next guest,
you're watching the cube, this is Dave Vellante,
live from London AWS Summit, we'll be right back.