2nd Watch CTO - Kris Blisner

Editor's Notes

• #4: Our founders, Kris Bliesner and Jeff Aden started working with AWS in 2007. Kris was running the technology group and Jeff was running the P&L for a publically traded marketing company. When the economy crashed, Jeff was asked to “do more with less” and save $1MM on his $30MM OPEX budget. So, Kris and Jeff started shifting marketing campaigns and projects to AWS. They were taking marketing projects that cost $500K, down to $60K. From there, they started moving business applications and other workloads to AWS. They raised $37MM to date to build an AWS only practice! AWS is all we do! We have no other revenue from datacenters or competing products. I don’t believe there is another Premier Partner who can say that today. It is in our DNA, all employees including back office staff must be trained and certified on AWS for their appreciate level. We bill over $1.4MM per month directly with AWS. We have been audited and approved Premier Partner and Managed Service provider. We carry AWS Enterprise support. We sub AWS PS on projects where it makes sense for the client. We meet with Todd monthly to collaborate on best practices and projects. Seattle is small town, we have relationships at every level and every business unit. And, they raised these funds to bring in an All STAR team! One of those teammates is Doug Schneider. Doug has a vast experience running MSP and hosting business for the last 20 years. Most recently he was running Verio which was acquired by NTT.
• #5: Our services, software and solutions have been Tested, Trusted and Proven to be successful for our clients. 2nd Watch has worked with hundreds of clients and we have 5 individuals who have been promoted to the CIO level from their work on the cloud. Michelle Routh who spoke last year at re:Invent, told the audience about her charge that she led to transform they way Coca-Cola managed technology. She leveraged our entire offering and was promoted 4 months after she modernized her platforms and migrated to AWS. Many others who we have worked with have moved from Director to VP, etc. We have been tested with the most gnarly of projects….we don’t simply get all new application builds where you can destroy and deploy if something does not work. Look at what we did for Conde’ Nast, 12 week, 300 massive Factory Migration or what we are doing at Radian with the Platform Modernization and IT Transformation. All of these clients are still clients today and look for us to support their efforts. We have our Life Sciences Competency and do a ton with BAA for clients. We have also earned our Big Data projects for what we are doing with Redshift and Data Lakes. We have done over 12 Redshift projects at BCG alone. We were among the first to have earned the audited Managed Service provider status that was audited by AWS….and we got a perfect score for our Managed Cloud. The point is, no other partner has been Tested, Trusted and Proven the way 2nd Watch has.
• #12: So, how this plays out in practical terms is this…. You will notice Coca-Cola on every slide. They are extremely aggressive about moving to the cloud. We have helped them from the beginning in 2011. They focused on how they would manage their cloud upfront, while setting up foundational services and migrating and developing workloads. In this case, a lot of companies start with digital marketing efforts. So far today, 80% of The Coca-Cola consumer facing websites globally are managed and hosted by 2nd Watch on AWS. DVF and Crate & Barrel not only run their ecom workloads with us, but they also run their ERP systems that power them.
• #13: Business applications that are SOC compliant like what SCOR is doing are all part of our Managed Cloud.
• #14: We have proof points and referrals of companies that have gone from paying Oracle Exadata license fees of $1.4MM down to $300K on Redshift…with improved performance (Query times have gone down from 20 sec to 5 to 10 sec on Redshift, note this takes tweaking of the ETLs). Coca-Cola runs their FreeStyle big data worldwide….allowing them to get machine data from every machine and serve up experiences for customer via mobile application.
• #15: And we are starting to see some really cool projects on cloud native workloads. Take Lenovo as an example, we have created a SaaS version for their Stoneware Software and created the backend of the ReachHit application. ReachHit is really cool because it allows Lenovo to extend their customer experience beyond hardware It is an application that allows consumers to pull all of their storage off of a single application (Icloud, Amazon, Dropbox, etc.).