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>> Welcome back to theCUBE's
continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021.
Live from Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin
and it's so great to say that we are doing with AWS
and its massive ecosystem of partners
one of the most important hyper tech events of the year.
We've two sets, over a hundred guests,
two remote studios, lots going on.
I've got an alumni back with me and a new guest.
Please welcome back Sabina Joseph,
the GM of Technology Partners at AWS
and Neil Fowler joins her.
He is the GM of Micro-Focus, AMC
and you're going to tell me what AMC stands for.
>> Application Modernization and Connectivity.
>> I love it, awesome.
Guys, it's great to see you again in person.
>> Thank you for having us here.
>> It's great to have the buzz.
I know it's going to be a little bit hard to hear,
but great to have.
AWS has done a phenomenal job
of getting everyone in here safely.
I want to give them kudos to that.
Sabina talk to me.
It's been a while since I've seen you in person,
but talk to me about your current role at AWS.
What's going on?
>> Yes, so I'm the General Manager
for Technology Partnerships globally
out of the Americas.
We also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow
in the Americas.
And one of the great examples
of a successful partnership is Micro Focus
with their solutions across application modernization,
security, database services, mainframes.
>> And so from your perspective, through your lens,
how do you think they're performing as a partner?
>> Yeah, so first of all,
kudos to Neil and the entire Micro Focus team.
They have done a great job leaning in
with a cloud-first strategy with SaaS solutions on AWS
and these solutions help customers
across application modernization,
application delivery,
security, cyber resiliency, database services
and also IT performance management.
And we've been working with them now for a few years.
And in fact today
we have actually 400 customer wins together.
>> Congratulations.
>> Yeah and then also
eight digit annual recurring revenue.
They have six active listings in marketplace
and all of this is really helping customers
move their workloads and modernize their workloads into AWS.
>> We've seen that such an acceleration Neil,
in the digital transformation cloud adoption.
Pandemic has really been a forcing function for that.
There's some silver linings.
Talk to me about some of the things
that you've seen at Micro Focus the last 20 months or so
and how have you helped those 400 customers,
you know, getting to that big ARR.
How are you helping them with that acceleration?
>> Well, as you're saying, there's lots of changes
in the last 12 to 18 months,
some of it brought on by the pandemic
and the change in business
to having to respond,
deliver solutions more quickly to the market,
as well as remote working.
So it's optimizing in the economic environment of course,
but then be more dynamic.
It really has caused businesses
to have to do something different now,
just to be able to survive
and serve their customers better.
>> That was a big thing that we saw
in the very beginning, was that survival mode.
And then of course it wasn't too long
when we started seeing those survivors
really start to thrive.
And you started seeing who were going to be
the winners of tomorrow.
'Cause the thing is every company
these days is a data company.
If it's not, it's going to be passed up
by a competitor that's right there
in their rear view mirror. >> Absolutely.
>> For sure.
And so we've got, you know, organizations,
though running mainframes,
you know, older applications, legacy applications.
Modernization, where are most industries in terms
of adopting that, the mindset, first of all,
that they need to change?
>> Well, I think across the whole industry,
I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's retail.
I mean, if you think about airlines,
when the pandemic hit, business went down.
So unless they've got that elastic nature
of actually how to respond to it,
but everyone had to bring in new services,
new offerings very quickly.
So the ability to be able to innovate in their environments
and bring more solutions to their customers
in a really fast way,
you know, they couldn't just sit there
and work with what they had.
They had to move forward just to be able to stay
in the business,
but also be able to reduce the cost
out of what they're trying to do.
So running and transforming at the same time.
>> Absolutely, and so how can organizations integrate
existing core applications with new technologies
to really be able to thrive in today's dynamic market?
>> Well, when we look at modernization overall.
We think of it in sort of three different ways,
with application, process and infrastructure.
So with the multicloud,
that's the infrastructure modernization,
they've immediately got far more access
to more scalable dynamic elastic compute resources,
as well as all the technology platforms they have around.
And then if you look at the application size
and that's where the Micro Focus platform comes in,
we can help customers actually move those applications
forward in terms of making them available through APIs,
maybe as a journey to microservices and cloud native.
But once that core business logic
and that data is available,
it can be integrated into artificial intelligence,
machine learning and actually reigned out
the whole solution.
So the final part of that from the process modernization,
as they're developing these applications with new tools,
new ranges, in terms of where they could deploy
on the AWS platform,
they can automate the build deployment and operations
so that all those existing applications
and they were willing on to contemporary platform
with full access to the technologies that are available.
>> That's fantastic and so necessary
for businesses in any industry.
Sabina, you talk about some of the different
business units of Micro Focus.
Are there any ones in particular that you want to call out?
>> Yeah, so we work with them
across all of their business units,
but some of them that come to my mind is of course,
Neil and team are doing a great job
with Application Modernization and Connectivity,
really helping customers modernize the applications.
And as customers are modernizing their applications,
their cyber resiliency business unit is helping customers
secure those applications.
And then they also have their IT operations management
bridge product listed in marketplace.
And then just in September,
their Vertica business unit
launched Vertica accelerator on AWS.
So I think they have a very holistic story
to help customers on AWS.
>> Talk to me a little bit Neil,
about cyber resiliency.
We have seen such a dramatic change in cybersecurity
in the threat landscape the last 20 months.
I think I saw a stat recently that ransomware was up
almost 11X in the first half of 2021.
Every day that companies had had a company,
that data got to be secure.
It's no longer a nice to have. >> Absolutely.
>> That is a core requirement.
How are you helping customers achieve that cyber security?
>> Well, the thing is, I mean, as you say,
across the whole spectrum from cyber,
from the identity access management through data encryption,
through data protection,
it's not a nice to actually as you say,
it's not a nice to have take capability.
You really have to have an integrated solution
to be able to manage access control it,
and also generating the events in terms of being able to,
if anyone tries to get into the systems and log in
because, you know, by the time you've discovered something
it's too late,
so you really need a combined solution for multifactor
authentication to really take it to that next level.
>> Absolutely right, once you've detected it, it's too late.
And I mean, with ransomware as a service,
cyber criminals are getting so much more sophisticated
and also more brazen.
There's so much money in it
that the security front is I think even more interesting
now than it's ever been.
Talk to me about some joint customers
and how you've helped them together with AWS,
with micro-focus achieve some of those key outcomes
that you've talked about earlier.
>> Well, I think obviously with AWS as a platform
has quite low over technology solutions going in,
what we often find with our customers is lots of,
they're coming from an existing on-prem solution.
So they need that hybrid model.
So as part of taking that forward,
being able to have that integrated solution that allows them
to work both on-prem and as part of the cloud,
most of it all being hooked up.
Now, even that from even down to the,
as developer the applications,
now to do static code analysis,
to help those applications be more secure
with things like DevOps demand,
as well as integrating internet
security platform for multifactor.
So I think as you know,
it's a combination of Brunel to bridge
between all the different technologies,
but have one single view of mail to protect
the whole real estate.
Multiple layers for both external and internal threat.
So that's the other thing you also need
to take in and can be able to protect
all layers, multilayered approach.
>> Absolutely, but you're right, the internal threats
is something that we don't talk about as much,
but that is obviously a substantial problem
for organizations and most, if not any industries.
Sabina, talk to me a little bit about,
let's kind of get into the responsibilities
that you have a little bit more in there.
You've got responsibility for multiple
solutions segments at AWS.
You told me before we went live,
you have 50 meetings this week, my goodness this is day one.
But talk to me- >> It's all good ,its fun.
>> Is it fun? >> It is.
>> Talk to me about AWS's approach to partnering.
What does it look like?
What are some of the things that you think
are really critical components?
>> Yeah, so as you may have heard,
we always start with the customer at Amazon and AWS,
we start with the customer, we work backwards.
When we are relaunching our products,
our programs, our services
we really go and ask the customers,
what do you want us to develop?
Where do you want us to focus the resources?
It takes a lot of discipline to do that,
but it's something that where we really want to walk the talk
and we use the same approach with our partners,
when we started to work with micro-focus,
we really kind of want to make sure that what we are working
on together is what customers want,
because we firmly believe that once you lay that foundation
of that solution,
you can scale your business a lot more quicker.
Your story is a lot more simple
and the customers are going to find a lot of value
in what you are doing together.
So it's really all about the customer for us.
>> It is, it's absolutely critical, right?
That's the whole point, the whole reason that we're here.
Neil, talk to me a little bit about maybe
some cultural alignment with AWS,
that customer first, customer obsession.
And it sounds like at Micro Focus, very similar?
>> Absolutely, I mean,
the way that we always think about
how we're building our products,
it's all around customer centric innovation.
So that aspect of trying to make sure
that we can solve what the business,
understanding what the customers are trying to do
to then help, to build, to deliver solutions that meet that.
And that combination the way that we look at it from
that infrastructure modernization and the range
of technologies that are available
and that relentless focus
on making customer successful is so key.
But we have to make sure that that collaboration
works together to make sure that the solutions are aligned
and we're helping customers get there together.
>> More points on that,
In your customer conversations.
I imagine they've changed quite a bit
during the pandemic
with so many things being escalated
to the C-suite to the board.
How important is that cultural alignment between AWS
and Micro Focus from your customer's perspective?
Is it something that comes up fairly often?
>> Well, I think it is,
when you actually get a mismatching culture,
it's more obvious.
So don't think that necessarily people
are looking for it to say, "I need organizations."
But if you're not thinking the same way,
you're not behaving the same way and actually partnering.
I think that partnering part of it is really important
because you're both working together to come up
with that desired outcome.
So I think it's more obvious
when it isn't a good match as opposed to what
they're looking for that particular site.
But I think that's a really key aspect in the sense of
working together to help that customer be successful.
>> Right, that's a great point that you bring up,
but it's probably more obvious when it isn't working
than when it's beautifully aligned,
falling into place and really focused on that customer.
So what are some of the things that attendees
can feel and see and learn at the micro-focus booth
at this year's re:Invent, Neil.
>> As well as obviously the key roundup
application modernization,
where we're looking at the mainframe modernization
on the side,
we've got the full reign to the Microsoft booth
in terms of cyber risk resilience,
as well as our IT operations management, or ADM portfolios.
So we've got a lot of technologies
which we can learn about in the booth
interactive as well as all by experts
to understand how we can do all these things
and work together as part of the AWS platform
to be able to deliver those solutions.
>> Excellent, I'm sure there will be plethora
of knowledge shared at the booth there.
Last question, Neil, for you,
talk to me about the vision going forward
with the partnership.
What are some of the things that you're looking forward to
as we end 2021 and go into hopefully
what is a better year, 2022?
>> Well I think, you know, one of the key things
especially around one of my passionate areas
is helping our customers really look
in terms of building the platform of the future.
We can help solve the customer problems today,
but we're really trying to create that innovation platform
to go through.
So again, that combination of the technologies
that we can bring to help our customers
and the breadth and the investment that AWS
continue making in the platform,
those two combinations really helps us help our customers,
not just solve today's problems,
But really move into the forward to be the platform
for innovation for the next decade.
>> And that's really critical that future ready state
that is so undefined most of the time, I mean,
none of us saw the pandemic coming, right?
That was a complete shock,
but to be able to partner together,
to help your customers really set up the foundation
to be innovative
as things happen that we can't even predict
is really critical.
So congratulations on your 400 customer wins,
your eight digit ARR, that's fantastic.
>> Yes.
>> We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE,
talking about the Micro-Focus AWS partnership
and all of the successes that you guys have had.
Great job and I hope that you have cough drops
and a lot of water this week Sabina.
>> I hope you do too.
(laughs)
>> I need it, I need it, guys thanks for joining me.
>> Okay, thank you. >> Pleasure.
For my guests I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE,
the global leader in live tech coverage.
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