“This conference is very good for us, it’s very exciting,” Venugopal Pai, VP Global Alliances, Riverbed, commented in his conversation with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at AWS re:Invent.

The reason for all the excitement around re:Invent, Pai explained, was the fact that a lot of their enterprise customers continued to evolve in their business, and were looking at the cloud for future development solutions. As he analyzed ways to make them more efficient in the business, Pai concluded “Amazon is the poster child for taking advantage of cloud,” that being one of the reasons the conference had double the number of attendees since last year.

Asked how he presented the hybrid cloud to enterprise customers, Pai said that “in the last 20-30 years, customers have built data centers, then there was a trend of consolidation and virtualization” in the past decade. To attend the maximum value of investments, AWS was critical, as it provides “technology that’s easy and accessible, when customers want to take advantage of it,” Pai went on. Amazon provides a lot of functionality and tools to make the transition easy for enterprises when building a hybrid cloud.

Riverbed focuses on helping customers build their public cloud and make the transition to the cloud. Pai noted that “When customers want to build their hybrid cloud, move their applications to the cloud, we make sure the applications run as they did in the data center.” Commenting on the ROI of such a transition, Pai said that, when comparing de-duplication in the cloud with saving in data centers, the cloud option is only 1/16 of the cost. That is the enabler of making hybrid cloud a reality.

Customers continue to take advantage of mission critical data in datacenters as they make their transition, and they are looking at cloud tools and applications. For example, AWS Glacier is a service that provides a cost of 1 cent/GB. “They’ve extended our market.” Glacier is more efficient than tape. “Tape is mechanical, when you go recover the data, it might be unrecoverable.” Now, saving data forever is now almost reality. That is why Glacier is currently Amazon’s fastest growing service in terms of AWS portfolio, Pai stated.

Riverbed and Amazon have been partners for three years. “Before Glacier, we had a different transition product. Customers were still  hesitant. When Glacier was announced, some of the same customer called saying they were interested. Our gateway product has made it very easy for customers to take advantage of Glacier.”

Commenting on what powers the hype around the software defined data center, Pai said “people try to make it as simple as possible.” Giving customers the tools to simplify and automate parts of the operations is the promise of the software defined data center.

Asked what the next Ferrari of the data center would be, Pai said it was the concept of DevOps. Embracing DevOps and using the right tool set to build these operations allows companies to grow from 100 to 1 million users without getting IT involved within minutes.

To embrace the hybrid cloud, enterprises “have to think of it in a different way.” Pai stated. “If you just look at management of technology, there are dozens of tools. When you start moving to a hybrid cloud architecture, there’s a new set of tools.” The challenge is to find tools that let you see what happens inside it.

Explaining which segment of customers can now fully move to a public cloud model, Pai said “certain countries don’t allow data to leave their boarders.” There is however a certain segments of the market that is very comfortable putting their data in the public cloud. “Others would like to keep it in the data center for security concerns. But there are workloads that fit the public cloud market. That’s where the hybrid cloud comes in.”

Asked to think of a bumper sticker description of re:Invent, Pai summed it up in “AWS, the poster child for public cloud computing.”