>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering AWS re:Invent 2017.
Presented by AWS,
Intel,
and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Welcome back and we're live here in Las Vegas.
This is 45,000 people here
for Amazon Web Services re:Invent.
This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage.
I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman.
And our next guests are Barry Russell,
general manager and business development of AWS Marketplace,
and John Rooney, Vice President of product management
for Splunk, partner of AWS.
Also we cover Cube.com, Cube alumnis.
Welcome back, good to see you.
>> Thank you, it's wonderful to be back.
>> So what's it like partnering with AWS?
Because you guys got a big mention from Andy Jassy
on my interview with him last week,
really highlighting Splunk as a partner
that's done so well on the platform, in the ecosystem.
You guys were called out as just a real success story.
Congratulations, what's the secret magic formula?
Just can't be making great products?
>> No, really, I think the secret formula
is really about helping customers,
and sort of what do customers need, and getting it to them.
And there is this sort of virtuous cycle of
the more AWS continues to innovate
in how customers can build, deploy, manage
services and applications,
really build a whole business in the cloud,
the more varied visibility needs there are.
And that's what we provide.
So it's a really good symbiotic relationship.
It's a partnership that goes back years and years.
I think I was here in 2012
on theCUBE re:Invent that year.
And every year, it seems like
there is no shortage of services.
>> You and Jerry Chen have been on every year of AWS.
>> I'm trying to dress better.
That first year I wore a black Splunk t-shirt.
And my Aunt Merry Jo was really upset.
Like, "Can you please dress up?"
So I'm wearing a sport jacket and shirt.
So doing my best.
>> Whatever you do, don't wear a tie.
I'm boycotting the tie.
>> I'll try not to. Yeah.
>> Barry, we've been talking about the
engagement and integrations that you've been doing.
Talk about Splunk, the category that they're in,
and why that's important in the marketplace.
>> Yeah, well they've been great at innovating with us.
In particular, they offer customers the ability
to really deeply analyze what's happening
in their environment.
And as customers are migrating over,
that's been super important for us.
As a customer makes a decision to
shut down data centers
and migrate those application workloads over,
they want to understand what's happening
in their environment.
They want security within that environment.
And Splunk has been innovating around that.
And for us, they've been a great partner
because not only have they offered
a traditional machine image-based software.
But now they offer Splunk Cloud,
which is a SAS based offering.
Which we know many enterprise customers
are moving to that model.
>> What's the Splunk formula for the product?
Because I hear there's a lot.
And it's been debunked, but I'll bring it up
because it's out there in people's minds.
Whoa if we partner with Amazon I don't know
they might take over our company.
So I won't say there's a general fear,
but I've heard that before.
>> No, no, I think our relationship, again, with Amazon,
it is around delivering the best possible service.
the best possible products to our customers
and we feel like the Amazon platform is,
it's obviously best in industry, and best in class.
Look around at the people that are here.
And our customers are going there in droves.
And they're looking at moving workloads.
They're looking at starting.
I mean, that's the other thing that's great.
And the interesting thing,
That we heard so much about serverless
in the last couple of days and so much about
sort of the next paradigm in building applications.
That's all because the groundwork's been set
in the cloud by Amazon for when the cloud in
2008, 2009, 2010 was all forklift a VM
into the cloud and that sort of cloud.
Well now we're completely re-architecting.
We're really thinking about re-thinking the way
applications and services are built.
And again, that brings in new changes
and challenges in visibility.
I think the early, the sort of last decade or so
at the early stage of,
what were the concerns around the cloud?
It's like, well, what about security
and what about visibility?
Obviously Verner talked today in the keynote about
security is job one. Every developer needs
to think about security.
That's no longer a concern.
That's not a blocker for cloud migration.
Then obviously you have things like the Kinesis Firehose.
All these other sources of information
and sources of data so that customers who are
moving their workloads to the cloud still
have the same and probably better
and more manageable visibility then they would have
if they were pulling log files off disks
in their data center.
>> John you mentioned customers
going through that transformation.
I remember when we first started covering
the Splunk conference with theCUBE.
It was heavily virtualization environment.
I mean, I first came across Splunk from
the VMware community and the like.
Customers are being pulled and going
through those transformations.
You mentioned Kinesis, you talk about,
I think you've got an announcement for the
Alexa for business also.
You have a pretty broad spectrum.
I mean, Splunk, how do you manage
that portfolio internally and with customers?
How do you manage the, I wouldn't say
old guard for Splunk but you know manage
the modernization and all these changes that are happening?
>> Well, sort of the mental model for Splunk
has always been, we'll go and get your data
wherever it is and we'll pull it into Splunk
so then you can correlate, visualize, search,
and get value out of that data.
And in some cases, that data is going to live, again,
in the traditional distributed data center environment.
Is going to be a log written to disk.
There are still some industries
where there are still mainframes.
I know it seems crazy, but that is still a big piece
and that's not necessarily going to go away
tomorrow or the next day.
But more importantly, I think increasingly,
you're going to see,
not just a,
again, take an existing VM and forklift
that into an IS environment.
Lets re-architect an entire service.
Lets rethink the way that we're
delivering value to our customers.
Those are the interesting opportunities for us
It's a very close partnership with AWS.
We're very closely aligned with the teams.
So as they think about services,
Cloud Trails, and the Kinesis Firehose, and Guard Duty.
These things that they realize are valuable
to their customers because they are here
and their customers ask for it.
We have just a good partnership
that says, how can we plug in?
How can we contribute to that initiative?
>> Hey Barry, there's a word that John used
that I want to ask you about.
It's data.
So you know when we interviewed Andy last year
I put forth the premise, I think
data is going to be the next flywheel for AWS.
How does the marketplace look at that?
You work with your partners,
obviously integrations, the APIs
but data is at the center of it.
And how do you make sure that you are securing the data?
Make sure that only the people have it
but that partners can also help
customers get more value out of it?
>> Well you know all the applications we list
in the catalog are put through security tests
and we scan the applications themselves, the code,
24 hours a day seven days a week.
It's part of the value we add.
But working with ISVs like Splunk
we also build API integration to
services like Kinesis Firehose, like S3, like Aurora,
so that customers have the opportunity
to move their data over into AWS,
which is where it's secure,
and then leverage secure software
to access and analyze that data.
So I think he's exactly right
in working in partnership with AWS.
There's that connective tissue between
a third party software and the native AWS service.
>> Where's it go next for you guys?
I mean, obviously, I think you're right about
this whole partnership thing.
Even though I brought that other question up.
The growth is so massive.
You can innovate with AWS.
It's not like you're just partnering with them
and putting it in a marketplace and hope someone buys it.
There's growth.
I think that's the nuance that people don't understand,
is that you can do more with AWS.
>> Well yeah I mean absolutely.
I think the ability to be part of,
the same way, again, in the keynote today,
we talked about building in security from the get go.
You start with security and with functionality.
I think the notion of visibility and
observability from a data standpoint.
If you are building something, how do you know it's working?
How can you provide the folks
in operational roles and business roles
the data and information that they need?
So if you bake that in from the beginning,
we now have an opportunity for Splunk
to rethink our integration points.
To rethink how we deliver value to customers.
Again if you think about the Splunk origin story,
we started with monitoring and troubleshooting
in production environments. Right?
Obviously, we built the company on that.
We drink a lot of free soda in San Francisco
based on those use cases.
But if you think about now with DevOps
and sort of the shift left movement that
>> Your chair has grown significantly,
big time because more services are available.
>> More services are available but also
people are rethinking the whole
notion of product development and life cycle.
And again I think DevOps,
in many cases, the accelerant for DevOps
has been cloud and obviously the
accelerant for cloud has been AWS.
>> Alright question for both of you guys
because we've been talking about this on theCUBE
and I've got Andy coming on in a few hours.
We believe there is going to be a
renaissance in software development.
You mentioned software lifecycle.
You can see it here.
Verner's keynote about re-imagining architecture.
He put the basic architecture slide up
from a video streaming company,
boxes and lines, normal architecture.
Then S3 buckets, it looked completely different.
So the question is with all the simplicity now,
all this simplification in APIs.
This is going to be a real boom for developers.
We believe this is going to be a
renaissance in software development,
because it's not going to be you grandfather's
software development lifecycle.
Do you believe that, and how do you see
software developers evolving?
More craft?
More artisanship?
What do you see?
>> I think that the
confines of the scope of
what a developer did five, ten, fifteen years ago
is different.
Developers didn't think about security.
They didn't care about security.
They didn't think about scalability.
They didn't think about.
What does elasticity of scale look like in my application?
I don't know it worked in my dev environment.
That now feels archaic.
That's like leeches.
Nobody does business like that anymore, right?
And I think that's where the notion of
>> Cloud9 was an impressive demo too.
>> Absolutely.
>> Things like that are coming down
>> Yeah the idea that you have a fully powered IDE
that includes interactivity in the cloud.
Folks have sort of dreamt of that.
If you think about how heavyweight the
client based IDE has got to a certain point
kind of in the late odds.
Everyone went away from that and said nope
we're just going to VI everything.
I don't want to see, I don't want to plug in.
I don't want to download anything.
I just want to VI anything.
Now it's sort of, we're back to.
I have this full set of functionality.
I have code completion, and I have all the things
I need as a developer to help me.
But its completely light weight.
It's a service. It's a utility.
It's like the faucet. So--
>> Here's what I would say.
I would say that for the first time
developers are going to have
a rich set of options where they can
choose how the customer deploys the software.
Containers or serverless.
API based or SAS.
With the consumption model that matches that use case.
Hourly, and metered, annual, or multi-year or
consumed via an API service.
>> It's going top be awesome and creative too.
A lot of creativity.
Final question because I know
both of your companies very well.
Both have really strong communities.
The role of communities,
certainly open source is growing exponentially.
We're seeing that with the Linux Foundation
and a variety of other places.
With the cloud flywheel, with the open source flywheel,
we believe communities are going to be very important.
You guys both have strong communities, Splunk and AWS.
What would you say to folks that aren't thinking about
nurturing and building community into their products?
>> I would say that our company
was built by our early advocates.
I mean again, our mission at the end of the day
and from the very beginning
was our core practitioners, our users.
It's a little slightly different now
AWS is sort of the classic developer
but for us it was the sysadmin,
the tier one and tier two SOC analysts and security.
How do we help their lives?
How do we make their job better?
So we have to have an intimate understanding
of what problems are they trying to solve?
How do we solve that?
How do we abstract away, essentially,
the high-effort low-value parts of their job?
Have the software do that, so they get to the point
where their focus is on the.
Essentially they get to apply their intellect,
their expertise.
Then they evangelize for us.
So community is one hundred percent essential.
It doesn't matter how great the mouse trap is
if you are not connecting with people, if you are not
making people part of that
and allowing people to share ideas.
>> So you had a strategy for community out of the gate.
>> Yeah I think it's community first.
>> Without community you don't get the feedback
on how to improve your product.
It's that simple.
>> That simple, all right.
Man, a great conversation.
Marketplace is booming.
General Manager of the Marketplace, Barry Russell.
We got also John Rooney vice president of
product marketing at Splunk.
Very successful company.
Gone from very small niche product, great community,
to public company and now taking over the data world.
Great to see you, John.
Thanks for coming on.
Barry, thanks for the commentary.
>> Thank you.
>> It' theCUBE 45,000 people here
live in Vegas for re:Invent.
I'm John Furrier and Stu.
We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.
(upbeat music)