November 26, 2022 • 52 mins
TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests. In this episode, we check in with Sid Rao, the GM of Amazon Chime SDK.
I fondly remember Biba, a WebRTC video/messaging startup . There was a lot of excitement over WebRTC about ten years ago. Biba was acquired by Amazon and relaunched as the Amazon Chime app in 2017.
Chime was a lot like Webex and Zoom, but worked entirely in a browser. Both Vonage and CenturyLink (now Lumen) were early resellers of the meeting application. The app worked well, but wasn't a bit hit. Vonage moved to its own video solution, and CenturyLink turned to apps such as Zoom and Teams.
AWS discovered that its customers were more interested in Chime's underlying WebRTC than the meeting app. Amazon created WebRTC APIs, effectively making WebRTC a service rather than a tech stack. This model was a better fit for AWS, so at its reInvent conference in 2018, AWS launched the Chime SDK.
Then came the pandemic and a boom in most things video. AWS customers and partners used Chime to create all kinds of solutions. K-12 education, for example, needed video for remote education. Chime obliged, and did so with simple hardware requirements for end users. Blackboard presented its success story at reInvent 2021.
As for the original Chime app, it's been getting better thanks to new capabilities of the Chime SDK. The Chime app isn't particular popular,, nor marketed. It does well within Amazon, both as an internal meeting and chat app and with many of AWS's large customers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
god (00:00):
We can go ahead and go
Dave Michels (00:12):
look at the talking heads today we'll be
talking with Cinderella Amazonchime but before that, Evan, how
did you do a Thanksgiving turkeydinner?
Evan Kirstel (00:19):
You know, I had his gigantic Thanksgiving turkey
dinner. I fell into a food comaand woke up in a another
dimension of time and space.
Dave Michels (00:29):
Oh, it sounds like Irma won the wishbone
competition.
Evan Kirstel (00:34):
I don't know what what time it is what day it is,
but apparently we're recording.
Now what is your favorite? What
Dave Michels (00:39):
is your favorite dish on Thanksgiving? Not
counting the turkey. What isyour favorite side dish?
Evan Kirstel (00:44):
You know, the side dish would be pumpkin pie. I
enjoy that as a side dish to theactual dessert. It's just a side
dish. It's not desert,
Dave Michels (00:56):
it's constable's mom's festival.
Evan Kirstel (00:59):
Pumpkins are good for you. Good for it. Speaking
of things that are good for you,we have a guest with a lot of
knowledge that is going to begood for you. So let's listen.
Talking.
god (01:08):
It's a semi monthly podcast with interviews of the top
movers and shakers andenterprise communications and
collaboration. Your host areDave Michaels and Evan
Kirkstall, both of which offerextraordinary services including
research, analysis and socialmedia marketing. You can find
them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or attalking points.com. That's
(01:29):
points with the Z and Devonkirsten.com. That's ke r s t e
l.
Dave Michels (01:36):
Today we have with us Sid Rao, the general manager
of Amazon chime SDK. Welcome,sir.
Sid Rao (01:44):
Thank you, Dave. And thank you, Ivan for having me. I
appreciate it. Thank you foryour time today. I look forward
to our chat. Yeah, this
Dave Michels (01:50):
is gonna be interesting. The chime SDK is
the seapass that lurks inside ofAmazon. But before we get into
chime, let's get to know Sid alittle better. I noticed your
background includes some stintsat Nortel and Microsoft, among
others. But you had a 12 yearrun at something called CTI what
does that?
Sid Rao (02:11):
Yeah, so CTI group was a software company that focused
on serving telecommunicationcarriers. So we had customers
like sprint or Cox businessservices or Vodafone was another
customer of ours as well. Ifocused on providing hosted Call
Recording analytics,transcription speech analytics
(02:32):
services, primarily for hostedUCaaS service providers, as well
as contact center as a serviceproviders. And I worked with
partners such as like a broad,soft or meta switch on some of
the very early stints inproviding business telephony and
business context and ourservices in the cloud. And
(02:52):
that's kind of the backgroundthat I that I kind of cultivated
there. And that's after that Icame to Amazon after the company
was assaulted and trials group.
Evan Kirstel (03:00):
I moved to Amazon.
Well, you have been around theblock a few times. So when you
arrived at Amazon, was the chimeSPK already there or?
Sid Rao (03:10):
Oh no, absolutely not.
Amazon, nine years ago hadactually some pretty rudimentary
communication services aide hadit, it was his typical startup,
everything had been kind of puttogether in a little bit of a
rush to try to get some sort ofa communication platform up for
the business to operate. Andthat's actually where I first
focused was on helping Amazon asa business manage their real
(03:35):
time communication needs, suchas sending out a text message
when an order is being processedon the retail website, or
ensuring that a public telephonenetwork call can be delivered to
a you know, to our context orservices. So I was responsible
for a number of real timecommunication workloads for
(03:56):
Amazon as a business. And youknow, when I joined there, it
was probably about 40,000information workers and very
rapidly it had grown many timesthat in terms of size, and the
company's real timecommunication needs expanded
with that accordingly.
Dave Michels (04:14):
So so just curious, what was your original
title at Amazon?
Sid Rao (04:18):
Oh, my original title on Amazon was I was the software
development manager in charge ofunified communications at
Amazon. That was the officialtitle I was given. So you
completely
Dave Michels (04:29):
failed at that image of GM of the time SDK. Is
that fair?
Sid Rao (04:34):
That's absolutely fair.
I'll take failure as a as areality point. We actually
learned a lot as a business interms of how to manage these
real time communication servicesat scale. And eventually we got
to a point where we felt like wecould use those learnings to
help our customers and that'sactually how we really got into
(04:54):
the real time communicationservice, you know, business as
as a as an organization, andwe've done that in multiple
different ways, the Amazon chimeSDK which we're going to talk
about today, but also AmazonConnect is run by a peer of mine
called Pascal IO. And where weused our learnings, the context
in our business to provide afull, feature rich context
(05:15):
Center as a service applicationfor enterprise customers like
cap one are into it.
Dave Michels (05:23):
Well, before we get too much into the chime SDK,
I want to ask you about Max andHawk, you know, they were our
first choice for this podcast,but they referred us to you as
their spokesperson. They have apretty nice Twitter feed.
Sid Rao (05:35):
Oh, yeah. So Max and Hawk are by my pretty much the
apart from my wife, my dearwife, who are kind of the center
of my little universe, andthey've been with me on this
real time communications journeyat Amazon. So to two shits is
that occupies a large amount ofmy mental capacity every day
other than worrying about howto, you know, make sure that
(05:58):
audio and video, you know,streams for millions and
millions of daily active usersevery day. Yeah, Max and Hawk
take a large amount of mentalcapacity for me.
Evan Kirstel (06:07):
And I saw Max and Hawk last time on as we were
doing a video not not a podcast.
So I'd like to collaboration,you know, hashtag golf to
Twitter is kind of the bigthing. We can even get the blue
checkmark for only $8 Thesedays, apparently, yeah,
evidently. So what say you aboutTwitter and Alon these days? Or
would you rather no comment,
Sid Rao (06:27):
I tend to focus on kind of customer needs. I've I've
given up on trying to speculateon these whole social media
acquisitions and neworganizations. But what
Evan Kirstel (06:39):
I will not answer here.
Sid Rao (06:43):
What I will say, though, is I do I do really
empathize with the 1000s of techworkers are now finding
themselves completely shaken upfrom a career and life
perspective, because of all thechurn going on in our industry.
So that is very unfortunate. Andthis is why it's important as
leaders to be careful about howwe hire and how we, you know,
(07:06):
not to get too caught up in thisin the storm of kind of the tech
enthusiasm and frothiness thatwe see in our industry.
Dave Michels (07:13):
It's not so much how we hire it's who acquires us
in that case, but maybe youcan't comment on it. But have
you ever talked to Twitter aboutdoing a click the call option?
Sid Rao (07:22):
So I cannot talk about a real time communications
workload at Twitter, but wedefinitely do help. You know,
social media companies like and,of course, collaboration
companies with exactly thatworkload. So one of the public
use cases I can talk about isslack huddles. So slack did
(07:42):
exactly that, in terms of, youknow, creating a virtual audio
space, it started out as justthe audio space, it's now a
video space in a content sharingspace within a Slack channel.
And it's quite an innovative usecase. You know, they themselves
say it's their fastest growingfeature ever in the history of
slack, which I was, I was superstunned to see that. What we're
(08:04):
really excited about there is wewere able to take away that
undifferentiated heavy liftingof figuring out how to make
audio and video streams in realtime, you know, with around the
world and 18 global regions, andautomatically scale so that
slack didn't have to worry aboutall those infrastructure
challenges and could insteadfocus on the user experience and
(08:26):
their customer experience. Andit's because they're able to
focus on their customerexperience and not worrying
about putting a bid on the wire.
They're able to differentiateand innovate at a speed that
really keeps their customershappy. And that's why I think
we're seeing services likeSlack. huddles be so successful.
Evan Kirstel (08:43):
Yeah, I actually like cuddles. I like Twitter
spaces, which is their drop inaudio service. I like clubhouse.
I mean, I can imagine we'regonna see a lot more video and
communications coming to allapps. But I guess you agreed on
that.
Sid Rao (09:00):
I'm a little biased on that one, of course. Yeah. But
yes, I I do think that becauseof services like the Amazon
chime SDK, we're making it easyfor developers to manipulate
real time audio and video, andespecially to real time
collaboration. It's no longerleft to the elite few who could
operate big development teamslike Cisco WebEx or zoom or the
(09:24):
Amazon chime application forthat matter. We're democratizing
the ability to add collaborationas a capability, or browser and
mobile app communications as acapability into the hands of any
web or mobile developer outthere.
Evan Kirstel (09:39):
I'd love to see a service where you know, website
publisher, let's take aWashington Post and you know,
could have a real time chatattached to a leading story. So
people could jump on read thearticle and then chat with other
readers or message in real timeabout about what they read
Dave Michels (09:58):
and you're gonna have to read the art trickle you
just just read it, you know,he's always looking for a way
out. So I want to get back tothe little bit of the historical
archives here. Because whenchime was originally launched at
Amazon, it was a zoom like, youknow, meeting and chat
application. And it was based onAmazon's 2016 acquisition of
(10:21):
Beaba. How in wind chime becomean SDK?
Sid Rao (10:26):
And that's a great question. So you're correct.
Amazon chime initially startedas an application and focused on
enterprise collaboration needs.
And it was about two to threeyears ago, we really started to
get a number of inquiries fromcustomers like a slack at the
time eventually becameSalesforce, Cerner on their
(10:48):
telemedicine front in a numberof different organizations.
Mitel, looking for ways to addreal time audio and video
capabilities to their apps. Andyou know, for the longest time,
we really were focused on Amazonchime as an application. But we
started to see in around thattime was also in the COVID shift
was had not occurred yet. But wewere starting to get a hint that
(11:12):
look WebRTC audio video basedservices are going to be
something that is going to be apart of any application, it's
not going to just be somethingthat is isolated to just the
specific large monolithicapplications like a Cisco WebEx
or, you know, or even a zoom.
(11:34):
When we had that insight, andour customers were telling us
that we started to really divein and pay attention to their
needs. And this is prettytypical AWS, we we start to ask
what are the unmet needs in thatspace. And some of the unmet
needs we had were aroundsecurity, being able to provide
that video collaborationexperience in a FedRAMP,
(11:54):
moderate environment, within thegovernment application that say
a large hospital who servesgovernment employees needs to be
able to provide, you know, inthe case of slack as well, they
have their government version ofslack, and it needed to be
FedRAMP compliant as well. So wehad some security things that
started to creep out. Anotherthing that started to come out
(12:15):
was, hey, said, We need to beable to do this in a very global
way, support 18 regions acrossthe globe. And we don't want
people to be using a separateapplication, like chime to join
a classroom or join atelemedicine session. Now, we
really want the customers to befocused on our application, we
want them to be in ourapplication. So there was this
(12:38):
need to make sure that the videocollaboration capability was
actually in the app, it couldnot be a separate application.
So that started to take us by alittle bit by surprise. And then
we started to see unmet needsaround machine learning
integrations with transcriptionservices, so that in one case, a
company who focuses on peoplewho are hard of hearing, we're
(12:59):
we're looking for veryaccessibility focused version of
collaboration for theirparticular customers. So we
really started to get a numberof use cases and workloads where
customers were looking to addcommunication capabilities to
their apps versus using ourapplication. And this also
really focused well on AWS ascore competency and serving
(13:21):
builders, we, you know, if youthink about AWS, as a company,
we work with builders every dayand application developers and
application builders. So westarted to see a correlation
between the common customer baseof AWS and the need to have
these communication buildingblocks to add to their
applications. And that's howbasically, the Amazon chime SDK
(13:43):
was formed, was we said, how canwe take the capabilities of the
great application we had builthere and give them to the
builders so that they can addthose capabilities into their
own applications, whether it's avideo based browser chat
service, or in the case of Evanwas just describing like a real
(14:03):
time chat, at the end of anewspaper article? Well, I'll
give you a great example thatSamsung has a watch party app,
for example, where they'reyou're allowed to chat with
people in real time based on atelevision program in Korea. And
they're using the Amazon chimeSDK for that chat use case. But
we also handle kind of thosepublic telephone network
(14:24):
problems that are out therestill, because the PSTN is still
the most interoperable audiocapability on in the world
today. So we still also have toprovide some of that
programmatic capability for thePSTN. So our customers, you
know, for that those securityreasons, those global reach
reasons as machine learningreasons, pretty much drug us
(14:46):
from being focused on anapplication to being focused on
these building blocks. Andbecause we had the experience of
building the app, we knew whatwere the building blocks that
would be most helpful tocustomers to build The rich
applications that they're tryingto build, said helpful, Dave, in
terms of the backrub.
Dave Michels (15:05):
Absolutely. Thank you.
Evan Kirstel (15:07):
Yeah, helpful to me as well. So I understand the
relationship between the chimeapp and the chime SDK. But are
the teens different withinAmazon or the tech stacks
different?
Sid Rao (15:17):
So initially, I owned both the application and the
SDK. But over time, we didseparate the teams because we
have a very different focus interms of go to market motion,
the types of customers that wework with. So if you think about
the app, it's focused on yourtraditional enterprise, it are a
line of business buyer who'strying to add a video
(15:39):
collaboration, you know,service, video collaboration use
case within their their workenvironment. Whereas I tend to
focus around independentsoftware vendors that are
building apps, I focus oncontact center customers who are
trying to enrich or expand orenhance their contact center. So
I have a very different customerin terms of who I have to serve.
(16:03):
And we like to align ourbusiness units and organizations
around the customers that we'retrying to serve. And kind of in
our working backwards mentality,we really like to map services
to these customers. That beingsaid, the app still continues to
use the building blocks weproduce, they don't use all of
them, we'd like them to use moreof them. But they do use all of
(16:25):
the building blocks that I mean,they use many of the building
blocks that we have within theSDK today. So they are a
customer of ours, just like weserve slack huddles or Visa we
serve a salesforce.com. They'rejust very typical at AWS, where
you have internal and externalcustomers, and the app is an
internal customer, a team ofours, and yes, they are a
(16:46):
completely separate team at thispoint.
Dave Michels (16:48):
Is there any significance to calling chime in
SDK? Because normally, you know,in the circles that Evan and I
travel in, we normally hear theterm C pass?
Sid Rao (16:59):
That's a great question. Yes, there actually is
a significance to the term SDK,it was not an accident that it
was called an SDK. So one of thethings that this kind of
actually bothers me a little bitabout our industry is that we
like to say the word C pass allthe time. And C pass means to
many different, many differentthings, to many different things
(17:23):
to many different people as
Evan Kirstel (17:25):
clear as the analyst these big weeks like
they Michaels they love it, theylove. Yes, probably
Sid Rao (17:31):
they I don't know, maybe the term see past. So I
have to be careful what I sayabout about that favorite term.
But now the challenge with usinga term like seapass, is it
really doesn't focus around theactual customer workload date,
and the customer workload. Andwhen you look at real time,
communications involves multipledifferent things. Yes, there is
(17:53):
a cloud service that is makingsure audio and video can reach
other devices and traverse thePSTN. But there's also a client
component to usually theseapplications, and these client
components, render the videoprovide the echo cancellation do
the noise suppression, they haveto work across a myriad of
(18:14):
mobile devices, you know, inroom conference equipment, sip
devices. So there's definitely aclient component to this story
as well. And, you know, ifyou're looking at a
communication service, andyou're just saying, See pass,
inevitably, what that means to alot of people is bulk sending
and receiving of phone calls ortext messages or, you know, kind
(18:37):
of at transport level problem,Dave. And really, it's a higher
level construct of you workingon devices, working on cloud
services, and putting it alltogether so that customers can
have a meaningful solution foryou know, what they're trying to
build, whether it's a huddlesapplication, or it's enabling
(18:57):
agent assistance in the contactcenter. So we that's why we take
the approach of saying it's anSDK, there's, there's a cloud
service component, there's alsoa client component. And by
putting it together, that's howyou get the real meaningful
value out of our service. Sothat's kind of the backstory on
the name. Is that
Evan Kirstel (19:15):
helpful? It is.
And so what AWS services arecommonly used with the Jime SDK?
Oh, that's a
Sid Rao (19:22):
great question. So our customers will use a number of
different services inconstructing their application,
whether it's amplified to createmobile and web apps, or you
know, it's lambda to you know,orchestrate who they want to
meet and when they want to meetor where they want to steer a
phone call or route a phonecall. So yes, we use a number of
(19:44):
different AWS services with theSDK. But a crucial service that
customers commonly use with theAmazon chime SDK is transcribed.
So with a single line of code, abuilder can basically add
captions or transcriptsbasically to real type of audio
and video sessions, which usedto be actually a pretty tricky
thing for a lot of companies toachieve. Now we've made it
(20:07):
really easy. So transcribe is avery common partner service that
our customers use. It's usedalso with with huddles from an
accessibility perspective,that's where you may have seen
it there. But it's also used forthings you would never expect to
have. And like, we havecustomers, for example, like T
Mobile, with their 60,000 agentswho use our you know, they're
(20:27):
able to capture the audio viasip, and they also use
transcribe, to transcribe thataudio comprehend to detect the
topics coming out of that audio,and then basically, Drive Agent
assistant style applicationsthat are common for their
particular contact center. So wesee machine learning workloads,
whether that's transcribe or inthe case of T Mobile, they're
(20:51):
using, you know, a transcriptionengine powered by Nvidia, but it
runs out UC two and it stillruns on our, you know, on on
AWS. And that type oftranscription and machine
learning workload is verycommonly applied with the Amazon
chime SDK. You
Dave Michels (21:07):
know, the more I think about it, and listen to
you, all of AWS is really anSDK. What determines if an API
is part of chime or connect orLex or whatever?
Sid Rao (21:19):
That's a great question in terms of how we categorize
our API. So the way we look atthat problem is, who is the
customer? And what is theworkload. So if you think about
Amazon, connect the workload,there is end to end contact
center, you need a cloud basedcontact center, go to Amazon
connect, if you're addingcommunication capabilities, to
(21:44):
your contact center, or to yourexisting application, come talk
to the Amazon chime SDK. And sowe may, in fact, sometimes have
API's that are do the same thingand two services, that's
actually not not an unusualwithin AWS. It's all about the
customers workload that decideswhether that API exists within
(22:07):
one service or the other. So agreat example of that today is
if I'm hosting a database, I canuse obviously, rds MySQL, I can
use Aurora for doing a fullymanaged version of that
database. But I also might beusing redshift, because it's
actually a data warehouse, andI'm doing large analytic style
(22:28):
workloads. And so the workloadis what decides where that where
that API method exists withinthat particular service. So you
know, in the case of all threeof those workloads, the need to
run a database query isuniversal. But you may see
redshift only offer the abilityto do queries across billions of
(22:50):
rows versus that may not beappropriate for RDS MySQL,
right? So it really depends onthe customer workload or the
customer application. And so,for example, and in the chime
SDK, you'll see the ability tohave two people have a phone
call together, right? And you'relike, Well, look, Kinect also
offers that too. Why do you havetwo services that allow you to
(23:13):
make phone calls? Well, ourphone calls are focused around
people who want to add PSTNcapabilities to their
applications. Whereas connectsupports the PSTN as a channel
to a contact center. So yes,similar workloads, but not
exactly the same. And so thecustomer solution is driving
Dave Michels (23:34):
they really do kind of blur and overlap. I
mean, you went to the databaseis when all my databases, but
connect chime and Lex kind ofworking together. Now, you just
made some big announcements withLex and Alexa at the at the
recent reinvent conference. Canyou tell us about that?
Sid Rao (23:49):
Oh, sure. Absolutely.
So kind of going back to thatthat concept I described about
SDKs and supporting devices, weactually enabled Alexa to
initiate calls within skills. Soif I'm an Alexa skill developer,
such as an insurance company, Ican basically create skill
actions now that go like thisAlexa ask insurance company to
(24:13):
call my agent. And what it doesis it basically initiates a call
immediately from your Alexapowered device to the insurance
company's local office orcontact center via the PSTN or
BSF, or even WebRTC. Sobasically, this enables skilled
developers to add human beingsinto their workflows. It's
(24:37):
actually a really it makes thePerl personal assistant market
actually super useful above andbeyond where it was today, the
utility of a skill went upbecause now when you need help,
or when you're trying to dosomething that requires a human
being, you can bring a humanbeing into that skill via
traditional traditionaltelephone call. So yes, we're
(25:00):
super excited about that workwe're doing with the Alexa team.
And it enables a conveniencefactor that we were a little bit
surprised about, actually, interms of how well it's received
by our developers, by skilleddevelopers. For example, we have
a we have a large hotel chainwho has economic sitting in all
of their rooms. And they'reusing this capability basically
(25:20):
to automate calls to their frontdesk or calls to their in room
dining. And we have a largerestaurant chain, for example,
who's no longer has to programtheir entire menu, within a
whole conversational AI skills.
Evan Kirstel (25:37):
Come on, Dave Michaels really enjoys these
1984 era phones. Well, I
Sid Rao (25:47):
actually, that's a good point, I haven't really seen too
many 1980s phones in hotel roomin a while now, I have seen
echoes starting to show up forin room control and things of
that nature. But there you go,that's like a pretty typical use
case of they want to get beyondjust simply providing in room
control, they want to be able toreach other parts the hotel,
(26:07):
enrich the hotel visitors stay.
And this allows them to bringvarious different human hotel
resources into thatconversational AI experience
they're having with thesedevices. So being able to target
a number of different use caseslike that to the convenience use
case of luck, I got anotification that my car
insurance is due on my echo andwith a single tap of my echo
(26:29):
show can call the agent to renewmy car insurance, or I can call
my doctor's care team to join atelemedicine session. For
example, these are the types ofuse cases that we're now able to
power on Alexa powered devices.
So that's kind of the backstoryand backdrop around what we
announced the reinvent,
Evan Kirstel (26:49):
we have really exciting. Now, contact centers
traditionally have plugins forwebsites, you know, click the
chat, and now you're enablingAlexa to connect, when it comes
to chime, and customerengagement, will chime also work
for third party secretsproviders or legacy TDM contact
centers on the premises.
Sid Rao (27:10):
Oh, absolutely. In fact, that's a pretty common use
case, Evan, for why customerscome to talk to us about the
SDK. So we typically run intoorganizations, especially
through acquisition, like in thecase of we were talking about T
Mobile just a few minutes ago,with a large acquisition of
sprint, you know, they havepretty varied and diverse
(27:31):
contexts in our platform. Andwhen you're operating in that
kind of an environment, it's noteasy to just say, snap your
fingers and switch everythingover to the cloud overnight. And
that lifecycle of communicationplatforms of, you know, five 710
years is still the lifecycle weobserved today. And a lot of
that also has to do with thekind of risk aversion you might
(27:53):
have some of the best cloudcontext servers center services
out there today. But customersare little, sometimes a little
bit risk averse, worried aboutdisrupting their business. After
all, the contact center is likethe old primary way they get
reached, it's the kind of abarrier of last resort. So of
course, with Amazon connect, wehave a fantastic highly
(28:13):
resilient, highly availablecontact center, Cloud Contact
Center platform. But it's not,you know, sometimes customers
take their time to migrate. Butat the same time, they want to
add provide advanced callingcapabilities off of their
website, they want to add video,they want to add new
capabilities to their existingcontact center. And that's where
(28:34):
the SDK does come into play. Wehave customers who are basically
migrating from traditional dialin pick up the phone and call
the contact center style usecases to browser and mobile app
calling. If I can quickly gointo a great example of that. It
just happened to me thismorning, I was looking at my my
hospital chart, and I saw that Ihad an appointment with my
(28:55):
cardiologist setup. And while Iwas looking at that hospital
chart, there was a I had toreschedule the appointment.
Well, there's a little phoneicon and I so I'm like, okay,
cool, I can call my my care teamand reschedule that appointment
and reach the hospital contactcenter. So I clicked the button,
and initiates a completely newcall now to the hospital. And
(29:18):
all of that context of what wasgoing on in the chart, my
authentication details, all ofthat's lost. So I now start over
in the contact center having tore authenticate myself. Tell
them my reason why I'm comingin, tell them about my care
team. And that really frustratesand adds friction to the
customer's experience. And itadds time to the agent handling
(29:40):
time as well, which is which isa cost of course to these
organizations like my localhospital. And so with WebRTC and
the Amazon chime SDK, I can takethat entire experience and make
your really efficient when youclick that call button initiates
an audio session via WebRTC andthe SDK to the customer's
(30:02):
existing contact center via Sep,or TDM. If they are really kind
of antiquated, and the contextof that entire, you know,
customer, their authenticationdetails, their, where were they
in the chart, what appointmentwhere they looking at all of
that detail can be captured andsent along to the contact
(30:23):
center. So now when the agentgets the call on their legacy
contact center, their screenpops says it said, he was
looking at this appointment, hehas an appointment with the
cardiology care team. And Idon't know, I might do an extra
check just to be absolutely safefrom a security perspective
before talking about medicalrecords. And then while I can go
(30:45):
right in to help him as acustomer, reducing handle time,
making the IVR andconversationally I experience
more efficient. And, of course,removing friction from the end
customers experience, which iswhat they're looking to do. So
those types of use cases havebeen our absolutely common use
cases for the enterprisecustomer of the Amazon chime
(31:07):
SDK. And obviously, on the Alexaside, we do something similar,
where if you're signed into theAlexa skill, all the detail
about where they were in theskill and what they were trying
to ask about. All that detailcan be passed along to the to
the context that are in thatcontext is super valuable, also
from an analytics perspective aswell, because now I can go into
(31:29):
my reporting infrastructure,especially with my contact
center and say, where on thewebsite, our customers getting
stuck, when they call and ask mefor help, which is actually
something that it's pretty hardfor contact centers to do today
with traditional one 800 Callthe contact center. So that type
of services,
Evan Kirstel (31:47):
well, we've just said Alexa about 12 times, so I
apologize to the listeners 1313times, we may need to say the a
word in future. But yeah, it'samazing how, you know,
technology has evolved. I mean,you can offer so many advanced
communication services withoutcapex from the cloud. I mean,
things like recording andtranscription and translation,
(32:10):
even, you know, used to be veryexpensive. So do all these new
economics really surprise you?
Looking from the inside, I guessout. And you know,
Sid Rao (32:21):
I don't think I'm surprised even as much as I'm
actually super happy about it,because so it's actually
interesting, he asked me aboutmy prior job, which was as a CTI
group and I worked on callrecording and cloud based call
recording. And there's actuallyan interview of me by somebody
in the analyst space, who wasasking me about cloud based call
(32:43):
recording in the past, and Iwent on this diatribe about how
I was annoyed about the state ofthe industry, and how these old
guard providers are chargingthese super expensive capital
license fees and highmaintenance fees to basically
record a call. And that's like,all they were doing, they
weren't even transcribing thecall, there was no machine
(33:06):
learning nothing, just takingaudio on the wire, and putting
it on a hard drive. So nowlooking back on that time period
of my life, where I was saying,Look, that can be a cloud based
service in elastically scale, itcan be efficient for customers
to provide this commonregulatory fat function. Now I'm
able to literally provide likealmost like a Google search
(33:29):
interface to those calls,unlocking all the intelligence
and conversational intelligenceand sentiment data and topical
data, from our most importantthing, how we talk to customers
and those customerconversations, I'm able to do
all of that in an elasticfashion, on a pay as you go
basis without these cap, youknow, really expensive capex
(33:52):
licenses and traditionaltechniques offered by old guard
providers. And I wouldn't say itsurprises me as much as it
delights me to watch customersbe able to do the right thing
for their customers now, withoutworrying about, oh, I have to
write a large check to somesoftware company for a gajillion
dollars because of themaintenance contract I've signed
(34:14):
for the last 10 years. So I'msuper, it's super exciting to
see the whole customerexperience customer service
industry, be able to get veryintelligent, very efficient, and
help people like me who justneed to get their cardiology
appointment rescheduled gothrough their life better. So I
always get happy when I seesoftware actually improve lives.
(34:36):
And that's something I'm seeinghappen with that change to the
cloud versus what was in thepast. It felt like almost like a
hostage situation where somebodyhad to write the check to a
provider that year for theability to take audio and put it
on a hard drive. Maybeoccasionally transcribe it
because transcribing it cost toomuch, you know, occasionally
(34:58):
being able to provide insightsto a Customer on how they can
improve the customer experience.
So anyway, I hope that answeredyour question.
Dave Michels (35:06):
You started that with always being annoyed. And
that's, that's my stick but butyou ended up with always being
happy. And so it's okay, you'reall right, you're safe to about
the customer journey through thechime SDK, what gets your
customers? Or what gets youleads? What kind of events do
they have that caused them toinquire about chime SDK?
Sid Rao (35:30):
Sure, that's actually pretty straightforward. So let's
talk about interactive voiceresponse. IVR. So a lot of
companies now, especially in theCOVID timeframe, decided, look,
we need to upgrade the IVR, wecan no longer do this DTMF
touchdown thing needs to beconversational. We need to
improve our you know, ourcontainment scores, and how can
(35:52):
we do it. And what they firstsometimes do is a first start
down the road of, oh, maybe Ineed to go replace my contact
center. But then they realized,look, we don't have the budget,
maybe we don't have theretraining cost for agents.
Maybe there's some, you know,maybe there's a long term
telecom contract, there's, ormaybe there's a platform
(36:13):
contract. Like in one case, wehad a company who had signed a
five year deal with Cisco, andthey could not get out of their
software contract and move to acloud based service. And when
they're so when they reached oneof these constraint points,
which actually happens even morethan I thought it would happen,
I'm actually pleasantlysurprised by that. What happens
(36:34):
is they reach out to a servicelike the SDK, and they reach out
to us saying, hey, we want toadd IVR capabilities to our
context and a conversational AI.
We want to add Amazon Lex to atelephone platform, can you help
us out. And so it's those kindsof compelling events, like, I
need to add agent assistance, Ineed to add video to my contact
center, I'm adding acollaboration capability to my
(36:55):
existing software application.
And that is, these are the kindof events where it's usually
additive versus like, I'm gonnago replace something. Now, we do
have some companies andorganizations who, for example,
Harvard health and Beth IsraelHospital out of Boston, where
(37:16):
they had a hard dependency on athird party for telemedicine,
and they wanted to bring thattelemedicine service in house.
So there are some scenarioswhere we are doing solution
style replacement. But there's alot of feature style scenarios
as well, where they're adding afeature to an application. Both
of those use cases are whatdrives kind of new business or
(37:37):
new opportunities to ourservice. And the reason why AWS
has chosen versus otherproviders has a lot to do with
that security challenge oftrying to keep data customer
data within a single vendorboundary or a cloud boundary.
And AWS is obviously a verycommon boundary for our
(38:00):
customers in terms of they knowhow to secure resources at AWS,
they understand that model. Andwhen you build with the Amazon
chime SDK, you have pretty muchaccess to anything within your
AWS account. So if you if that'stranscription or databases, all
of that is available to you fromthat same footprint, which it
makes it easy for customers tomanage. It's interesting
Dave Michels (38:22):
because, you know, in the CPAP space, people
normally start with SMS and theyexpand into, you know, into
video and other services. But itsounds like in your SDK case
that they kind of start all overthe place. Is it easier to say
where they start? Or is iteasier to see where they end
Sid Rao (38:36):
up, it's actually easier to say where they end up
when they're done using the SDK.
And never really done using theSDK because we're always adding
new features and capabilities.
But when you look at kind oflike the ultimate story of some
of these customers, theybasically completely taken over
(38:56):
the customer engagementexperience and have complete
ownership of it end to end allthe way from chat to voice to
video to unit mentioned SMS,they sent send and receive SMS
notifications using pinpointwhich is sister service of ours
as well. So we many times day,we will start in many different
(39:17):
parts of the organization. Andbefore you know it, we were
doing everything from making aphone call work at that company
to driving their entire videomortgage application process if
it's a bank, or all the way tosending out SMS text messages
for them for one time. passcode.
So, usually, and this is kind oftrue of the industry as a whole,
(39:38):
this whole seapass industry isthat, you know, customers will
usually start with some pointneed that they have. And then
they once they get comfortablewith the API's. They just start
layering many many, many, manydifferent types of applications
on top of it, ultimately leadingto finally you know context
interest service being deployed.
(40:02):
In our case, that'd be AmazonConnect. That's just the way
that our customers tend to thinkabout the problem and how
they've been approaching theproblem. And we of course,
follow their lead in terms ofhow they want to go through
their journey with our with awith AWS communication services.
Evan Kirstel (40:17):
So the API economy has been talked about for years,
but really seems to be coming tothe fore. So does everyone want
to become an SDK and seapassprovider these days?
Sid Rao (40:28):
I will tell you that based on various events and
trade shows, I've been watchingover the last couple of months
into it sure as heck seems likeeverybody likes this whole. I'm
an SDK. And then they use termslike platform and SDK and
ecosystem. And I hate thoseterms, because that's not really
(40:50):
the right way to think about it,Evan, if I had to go back again,
and look at the entire originstory of the Amazon chime SDK,
the main thing I would change isto actually forget about, really
the the term SDK or seapass, orany of those things, and really
focus on that workload, theworkload is really the important
(41:10):
thing, which is, how do I getvideo into my contact center,
that's the workload if I'm init, because I have a need for
video. And maybe I'm a bankthat's doing mortgage banking,
and videos important forcontent, show reasons. And also
personal reasons, I need tobring video into my contact
center. Well, that's theworkload. And that's the thing
(41:31):
to focus on versus the term SDK,or platform or whatever the case
might be. Those are just toolsthat allow you to build the
workload. So I will tell youthat everybody kind of is really
looking at that SDK platformstory, because they realize that
the word customer workload iswhat's driving them towards
(41:52):
doing that. Now, if you reallylook one closely at that
problem, the root of all of thatis COVID, changed our entire
worldview. Basically,communications became just table
stakes, there was no way to livewithout some sort of a video
communications capability oraudio communications capability,
or conference chair. And oncethat that kind of notion had
(42:16):
been built in once everybody wascomfortable jumping on video
meetings and audio meetings allday long for everything they do,
whether it's ordering a burgeror talking to their buddy at
work, then the problem becameabout where are the eyeballs
going to be located? You and I,Evan and Dave, we grew up in the
times of Cisco, WebEx wherethere was this application, and
(42:38):
everybody lived in thisapplication. But that doesn't
work for a lot of applicationdevelopers, they want those
eyeballs to be focused on theirapp. If I'm an E commerce
company, and I'm adding a helpbutton to my website, I don't
want another application to getlaunched to serve that need, I
want that person to continue tobe in my website, because that's
(43:01):
where they're going to be buyingsomething from me, I don't want
them to get distracted. And sokeeping the eyeballs which is
typically what a lot of websitedevelopers and app developers
focus on, is still critical. Andcommunications became critical.
And I think that's why you'reseeing so many people pivot or
talk about an SDK is because theonly way you really can provide
(43:24):
communications now and besuccessful and meet both of
those requirements is byproviding a component that can
be built into a website or amobile app to facilitate
communication. So I think that'swhy you see everybody, a lot of
the cool kids in town startingto use the term SDK a lot. And
we just happen to be doing itfor the last couple of years
(43:46):
already. So we've become prettyproficient in handling that
builder or developer customerwho needs to Website Builder or
developer type of customer. Doesthat answer your question? It
does.
Evan Kirstel (43:58):
I guess my additional question would be so
many, you're one of the coolkids clearly, but you have so
many alternatives. How does onedistinguish themselves from the
competition in this space? Givenall the options? How do you
differentiate yourself? Fromyour competitors?
Sid Rao (44:15):
Yeah, there's two ways that the SDK does differentiate
itself from substitutes. Sousually, when you're making a
decision about look at thissession, right, me, you and Dave
are on a call. Getting thesethree people together requires
some sort of a data service or adatabase and in security
(44:36):
conscious organizations, theydon't want that data of Dave
evidence ID to leave their cloudboundary. And that is a unique
advantage that AWS is able toprovide to its customer is that
the database of deciding thatDave said and Evan should mean
is stored in AWS and thereforethe instruction to the
(44:58):
communication service to putThree of them together can be
retained within AWS. So there'sthat security advantage. That's
kind of important. The nextimportant thing that our
customers are looking for ismachine learning. It's no longer
good enough for customers tojust simply send audio packets
across the wire or video packetsacross the wire, and hope that
(45:21):
it's all good. from a qualityperspective, no machine learning
is now required for all kinds ofuse cases in the communication
space. There's the wholeeverything from simple things
like background replacement tonoise suppression to echo
cancellation, which is driven bymachine learning workloads these
days to packet loss concealmentthat is also ml driven. So
(45:43):
there's a tremendous amount ofmachine learning required now to
make a communication session goon the fraud and detection for
space there used the whole byvoice identification and voice
printing kind of mechanism. Andso the SDK, first of all,
provides machine learningconstruct constructs on its own.
It integrates with complimentaryAWS machine learning services,
(46:06):
and it also gives you access tothe data do your own machine
learning. And AWS is a greatplace to do and now so it these
are the kind of the commonreasons why customers tend to
use our communication serviceand are successful with our
communication service versus themany different substitutes and
alternatives that are out there.
And this is actually why, youknow, we think AWS is really
(46:29):
serving an unmet need in thecommunications business is
because we're able to providethese types of capabilities.
Dave Michels (46:37):
interesting ways.
He's gonna go, I gotta thank youfor taking so much time with us.
But I want to wrap up on oneother topic, a term you use
earlier, I haven't heard for awhile you use the term WebRTC.
That was like the term I don'tknow, five, six years ago,
everyone was talking aboutWebRTC was going to change the
world
Evan Kirstel (46:56):
koleksi pas now.
But I guess,
Dave Michels (47:00):
zoom, never embraced it. And Zune certainly
hasn't been hurt by that andseems you know, it's it's done
really well. WebRTC just doesn'tcome up as much anymore in
conversation. So I believeyou're using WebRTC. And let me
ask you, is that important? Andhow do you feel about that? Oh,
yeah.
Sid Rao (47:16):
So remember what I said a few minutes ago about how app
developers don't want theeyeballs to leave their app.
WebRTC is nothing more than anacronym to basically describe
browser calling, like, you caninitiate audio and video, real
time audio video sessions withina browser. And even within the
(47:37):
mobile app community, a lot ofapps are now pretty much browser
based as well. So it's all aboutmaking sure that real time audio
and video works within abrowser, that's basically and So
WebRTC is still alive. And well.
It's the foundation behindGoogle Hangouts and meat. It's
the foundation behind a numberof these services. Facebook, of
course, uses it for its ownservice. Apple does and some of
the FaceTime interactions arenow support. So vertices as
(48:00):
well, is still a wellestablished standard out there.
Yes, we do have some marketparticipants who have not
embraced WebRTC, and who arevery dependent upon their native
application and nativecapabilities to make their
service work. And my comment onthat is very simple, which is
that works when you're in thecollaboration business, when,
(48:23):
when you're in the business ofbeing that collaboration
application like a Cisco WebExor a zoom or trying the
application as well, that makessense for that workload. It
doesn't make sense for theseworkloads, like in the contact
center space, where you reallywant people to stay within your
app, you don't want them movingoff of your app, all that
(48:45):
context, we described about,like, what's in their shopping
cart, how are theyauthenticated, all of that
detail gets lost as soon as youswitch application. So just like
you don't want them pickinghaving to pick up the phone and
start a phone call. Because allthat context is lost, you don't
want them to click on thatbutton and launch a completely
different application toinitiate that call either
(49:07):
because, again, the context islost. So you know, when it comes
back to context analytics, andproviding that rich experience
at a website or mobile app, andpeople the standard out there is
still WebRTC. It's maybe not ashot or trendy, but to achieve
the customer's businessobjectives. That is still a very
important and critical part ofthe chain that the tool chain
(49:29):
that still needs to be outthere.
Evan Kirstel (49:32):
This has been a fantastic deep dive into the
world of deep as SDK andapplication development and for
real time communication. Sothanks so much for spending so
much quality time with us. Andwe look forward to seeing more
from Amazon SDK.
Sid Rao (49:50):
Thank you, Dave and Evan, for having me. And by the
way, you can follow me onLinkedIn to see how the team's
progressing and what we wereannounced and of course, we have
a pretty active blog channelswell aws.amazon.com
Evan Kirstel (50:02):
Don't forget Max and Hawk they deserve some
attention as well on Twitter.
Sid Rao (50:06):
Oh, yes, Max and Hawk, they believe they deserve
attention all the time, not juston Twitter or the internet. They
think they deserve intentionjust for waking up in the
morning. They haven't. So. Allright, well, thank you for your
time. I do appreciate it, folks.
Dave Michels (50:21):
It's really exciting to watch what you're
doing over there. And, you know,time SDK, it kind of came out of
nowhere, all of a sudden, thatwas just there. And now it's
really making some bigdifferences for a lot of
customers. So it's just beengreat to watch this.
Sid Rao (50:32):
Thank you. Appreciate it. Dave. And thank you again,
Evan, for your kind words andlook forward to keep continue to
collaborate. Thank you. Takecare, take care, have a good
one.
Evan Kirstel (50:43):
Well, Syd rose is a fascinating guy. He's one of
the most visible businessleaders in Amazon. Most of the
folks seem to be unwilling to dopodcasts and live streams and
talk to external analysts likeyou Dave, what do you think
Dave Michels (50:58):
it's almost like a strategy or something? There's
like always different islands inAmazon, like the contact center
and, and what we just caughtthis in, in China SDK. There's
legs and there's alwaysdifferent islands. But I think
that they're kind of comingtogether. I'm not I might just
be my imagination. But I kind ofthink there's almost like a
(51:18):
master strategy here or
Evan Kirstel (51:20):
something like that. I don't know about that.
But But Sid, is definitely thefantasy island of Amazon. You
know, he's like the planeWelcome. Welcome. We're gonna
talk to you a conversation.
We're gonna build Come Come andjoin our island. So very, very
fun
Dave Michels (51:35):
stuff. Well, it was great talking to him. And
this will be one of our lastpodcast of the year.
Evan Kirstel (51:40):
I guess we have one more coming up with Jeff
Haas and the Tullio you saidlast podcast and I was getting a
bit worried like you somethingyou need to tell me
Dave Michels (51:48):
last point what we have like one more podcast for
the year I think it's
Evan Kirstel (51:53):
okay, just I just wanted to make that clear for
the year so thanks, everyone.
You made sure man I gotta getout of the phone. Don't wait.
Don't read your phone. No, man.
(52:23):
No, it's me.
We can go ahead and go
Dave Michels (00:12):
look at the talking heads today we'll be
talking with Cinderella Amazonchime but before that, Evan, how
did you do a Thanksgiving turkeydinner?
Evan Kirstel (00:19):
You know, I had his gigantic Thanksgiving turkey
dinner. I fell into a food comaand woke up in a another
dimension of time and space.
Dave Michels (00:29):
Oh, it sounds like Irma won the wishbone
competition.
Evan Kirstel (00:34):
I don't know what what time it is what day it is,
but apparently we're recording.
Now what is your favorite? What
Dave Michels (00:39):
is your favorite dish on Thanksgiving? Not
counting the turkey. What isyour favorite side dish?
Evan Kirstel (00:44):
You know, the side dish would be pumpkin pie. I
enjoy that as a side dish to theactual dessert. It's just a side
dish. It's not desert,
Dave Michels (00:56):
it's constable's mom's festival.
Evan Kirstel (00:59):
Pumpkins are good for you. Good for it. Speaking
of things that are good for you,we have a guest with a lot of
knowledge that is going to begood for you. So let's listen.
Talking.
god (01:08):
It's a semi monthly podcast with interviews of the top
movers and shakers andenterprise communications and
collaboration. Your host areDave Michaels and Evan
Kirkstall, both of which offerextraordinary services including
research, analysis and socialmedia marketing. You can find
them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or attalking points.com. That's
(01:29):
points with the Z and Devonkirsten.com. That's ke r s t e
l.
Dave Michels (01:36):
Today we have with us Sid Rao, the general manager
of Amazon chime SDK. Welcome,sir.
Sid Rao (01:44):
Thank you, Dave. And thank you, Ivan for having me. I
appreciate it. Thank you foryour time today. I look forward
to our chat. Yeah, this
Dave Michels (01:50):
is gonna be interesting. The chime SDK is
the seapass that lurks inside ofAmazon. But before we get into
chime, let's get to know Sid alittle better. I noticed your
background includes some stintsat Nortel and Microsoft, among
others. But you had a 12 yearrun at something called CTI what
does that?
Sid Rao (02:11):
Yeah, so CTI group was a software company that focused
on serving telecommunicationcarriers. So we had customers
like sprint or Cox businessservices or Vodafone was another
customer of ours as well. Ifocused on providing hosted Call
Recording analytics,transcription speech analytics
(02:32):
services, primarily for hostedUCaaS service providers, as well
as contact center as a serviceproviders. And I worked with
partners such as like a broad,soft or meta switch on some of
the very early stints inproviding business telephony and
business context and ourservices in the cloud. And
(02:52):
that's kind of the backgroundthat I that I kind of cultivated
there. And that's after that Icame to Amazon after the company
was assaulted and trials group.
Evan Kirstel (03:00):
I moved to Amazon.
Well, you have been around theblock a few times. So when you
arrived at Amazon, was the chimeSPK already there or?
Sid Rao (03:10):
Oh no, absolutely not.
Amazon, nine years ago hadactually some pretty rudimentary
communication services aide hadit, it was his typical startup,
everything had been kind of puttogether in a little bit of a
rush to try to get some sort ofa communication platform up for
the business to operate. Andthat's actually where I first
focused was on helping Amazon asa business manage their real
(03:35):
time communication needs, suchas sending out a text message
when an order is being processedon the retail website, or
ensuring that a public telephonenetwork call can be delivered to
a you know, to our context orservices. So I was responsible
for a number of real timecommunication workloads for
(03:56):
Amazon as a business. And youknow, when I joined there, it
was probably about 40,000information workers and very
rapidly it had grown many timesthat in terms of size, and the
company's real timecommunication needs expanded
with that accordingly.
Dave Michels (04:14):
So so just curious, what was your original
title at Amazon?
Sid Rao (04:18):
Oh, my original title on Amazon was I was the software
development manager in charge ofunified communications at
Amazon. That was the officialtitle I was given. So you
completely
Dave Michels (04:29):
failed at that image of GM of the time SDK. Is
that fair?
Sid Rao (04:34):
That's absolutely fair.
I'll take failure as a as areality point. We actually
learned a lot as a business interms of how to manage these
real time communication servicesat scale. And eventually we got
to a point where we felt like wecould use those learnings to
help our customers and that'sactually how we really got into
(04:54):
the real time communicationservice, you know, business as
as a as an organization, andwe've done that in multiple
different ways, the Amazon chimeSDK which we're going to talk
about today, but also AmazonConnect is run by a peer of mine
called Pascal IO. And where weused our learnings, the context
in our business to provide afull, feature rich context
(05:15):
Center as a service applicationfor enterprise customers like
cap one are into it.
Dave Michels (05:23):
Well, before we get too much into the chime SDK,
I want to ask you about Max andHawk, you know, they were our
first choice for this podcast,but they referred us to you as
their spokesperson. They have apretty nice Twitter feed.
Sid Rao (05:35):
Oh, yeah. So Max and Hawk are by my pretty much the
apart from my wife, my dearwife, who are kind of the center
of my little universe, andthey've been with me on this
real time communications journeyat Amazon. So to two shits is
that occupies a large amount ofmy mental capacity every day
other than worrying about howto, you know, make sure that
(05:58):
audio and video, you know,streams for millions and
millions of daily active usersevery day. Yeah, Max and Hawk
take a large amount of mentalcapacity for me.
Evan Kirstel (06:07):
And I saw Max and Hawk last time on as we were
doing a video not not a podcast.
So I'd like to collaboration,you know, hashtag golf to
Twitter is kind of the bigthing. We can even get the blue
checkmark for only $8 Thesedays, apparently, yeah,
evidently. So what say you aboutTwitter and Alon these days? Or
would you rather no comment,
Sid Rao (06:27):
I tend to focus on kind of customer needs. I've I've
given up on trying to speculateon these whole social media
acquisitions and neworganizations. But what
Evan Kirstel (06:39):
I will not answer here.
Sid Rao (06:43):
What I will say, though, is I do I do really
empathize with the 1000s of techworkers are now finding
themselves completely shaken upfrom a career and life
perspective, because of all thechurn going on in our industry.
So that is very unfortunate. Andthis is why it's important as
leaders to be careful about howwe hire and how we, you know,
(07:06):
not to get too caught up in thisin the storm of kind of the tech
enthusiasm and frothiness thatwe see in our industry.
Dave Michels (07:13):
It's not so much how we hire it's who acquires us
in that case, but maybe youcan't comment on it. But have
you ever talked to Twitter aboutdoing a click the call option?
Sid Rao (07:22):
So I cannot talk about a real time communications
workload at Twitter, but wedefinitely do help. You know,
social media companies like and,of course, collaboration
companies with exactly thatworkload. So one of the public
use cases I can talk about isslack huddles. So slack did
(07:42):
exactly that, in terms of, youknow, creating a virtual audio
space, it started out as justthe audio space, it's now a
video space in a content sharingspace within a Slack channel.
And it's quite an innovative usecase. You know, they themselves
say it's their fastest growingfeature ever in the history of
slack, which I was, I was superstunned to see that. What we're
(08:04):
really excited about there is wewere able to take away that
undifferentiated heavy liftingof figuring out how to make
audio and video streams in realtime, you know, with around the
world and 18 global regions, andautomatically scale so that
slack didn't have to worry aboutall those infrastructure
challenges and could insteadfocus on the user experience and
(08:26):
their customer experience. Andit's because they're able to
focus on their customerexperience and not worrying
about putting a bid on the wire.
They're able to differentiateand innovate at a speed that
really keeps their customershappy. And that's why I think
we're seeing services likeSlack. huddles be so successful.
Evan Kirstel (08:43):
Yeah, I actually like cuddles. I like Twitter
spaces, which is their drop inaudio service. I like clubhouse.
I mean, I can imagine we'regonna see a lot more video and
communications coming to allapps. But I guess you agreed on
that.
Sid Rao (09:00):
I'm a little biased on that one, of course. Yeah. But
yes, I I do think that becauseof services like the Amazon
chime SDK, we're making it easyfor developers to manipulate
real time audio and video, andespecially to real time
collaboration. It's no longerleft to the elite few who could
operate big development teamslike Cisco WebEx or zoom or the
(09:24):
Amazon chime application forthat matter. We're democratizing
the ability to add collaborationas a capability, or browser and
mobile app communications as acapability into the hands of any
web or mobile developer outthere.
Evan Kirstel (09:39):
I'd love to see a service where you know, website
publisher, let's take aWashington Post and you know,
could have a real time chatattached to a leading story. So
people could jump on read thearticle and then chat with other
readers or message in real timeabout about what they read
Dave Michels (09:58):
and you're gonna have to read the art trickle you
just just read it, you know,he's always looking for a way
out. So I want to get back tothe little bit of the historical
archives here. Because whenchime was originally launched at
Amazon, it was a zoom like, youknow, meeting and chat
application. And it was based onAmazon's 2016 acquisition of
(10:21):
Beaba. How in wind chime becomean SDK?
Sid Rao (10:26):
And that's a great question. So you're correct.
Amazon chime initially startedas an application and focused on
enterprise collaboration needs.
And it was about two to threeyears ago, we really started to
get a number of inquiries fromcustomers like a slack at the
time eventually becameSalesforce, Cerner on their
(10:48):
telemedicine front in a numberof different organizations.
Mitel, looking for ways to addreal time audio and video
capabilities to their apps. Andyou know, for the longest time,
we really were focused on Amazonchime as an application. But we
started to see in around thattime was also in the COVID shift
was had not occurred yet. But wewere starting to get a hint that
(11:12):
look WebRTC audio video basedservices are going to be
something that is going to be apart of any application, it's
not going to just be somethingthat is isolated to just the
specific large monolithicapplications like a Cisco WebEx
or, you know, or even a zoom.
(11:34):
When we had that insight, andour customers were telling us
that we started to really divein and pay attention to their
needs. And this is prettytypical AWS, we we start to ask
what are the unmet needs in thatspace. And some of the unmet
needs we had were aroundsecurity, being able to provide
that video collaborationexperience in a FedRAMP,
(11:54):
moderate environment, within thegovernment application that say
a large hospital who servesgovernment employees needs to be
able to provide, you know, inthe case of slack as well, they
have their government version ofslack, and it needed to be
FedRAMP compliant as well. So wehad some security things that
started to creep out. Anotherthing that started to come out
(12:15):
was, hey, said, We need to beable to do this in a very global
way, support 18 regions acrossthe globe. And we don't want
people to be using a separateapplication, like chime to join
a classroom or join atelemedicine session. Now, we
really want the customers to befocused on our application, we
want them to be in ourapplication. So there was this
(12:38):
need to make sure that the videocollaboration capability was
actually in the app, it couldnot be a separate application.
So that started to take us by alittle bit by surprise. And then
we started to see unmet needsaround machine learning
integrations with transcriptionservices, so that in one case, a
company who focuses on peoplewho are hard of hearing, we're
(12:59):
we're looking for veryaccessibility focused version of
collaboration for theirparticular customers. So we
really started to get a numberof use cases and workloads where
customers were looking to addcommunication capabilities to
their apps versus using ourapplication. And this also
really focused well on AWS ascore competency and serving
(13:21):
builders, we, you know, if youthink about AWS, as a company,
we work with builders every dayand application developers and
application builders. So westarted to see a correlation
between the common customer baseof AWS and the need to have
these communication buildingblocks to add to their
applications. And that's howbasically, the Amazon chime SDK
(13:43):
was formed, was we said, how canwe take the capabilities of the
great application we had builthere and give them to the
builders so that they can addthose capabilities into their
own applications, whether it's avideo based browser chat
service, or in the case of Evanwas just describing like a real
(14:03):
time chat, at the end of anewspaper article? Well, I'll
give you a great example thatSamsung has a watch party app,
for example, where they'reyou're allowed to chat with
people in real time based on atelevision program in Korea. And
they're using the Amazon chimeSDK for that chat use case. But
we also handle kind of thosepublic telephone network
(14:24):
problems that are out therestill, because the PSTN is still
the most interoperable audiocapability on in the world
today. So we still also have toprovide some of that
programmatic capability for thePSTN. So our customers, you
know, for that those securityreasons, those global reach
reasons as machine learningreasons, pretty much drug us
(14:46):
from being focused on anapplication to being focused on
these building blocks. Andbecause we had the experience of
building the app, we knew whatwere the building blocks that
would be most helpful tocustomers to build The rich
applications that they're tryingto build, said helpful, Dave, in
terms of the backrub.
Dave Michels (15:05):
Absolutely. Thank you.
Evan Kirstel (15:07):
Yeah, helpful to me as well. So I understand the
relationship between the chimeapp and the chime SDK. But are
the teens different withinAmazon or the tech stacks
different?
Sid Rao (15:17):
So initially, I owned both the application and the
SDK. But over time, we didseparate the teams because we
have a very different focus interms of go to market motion,
the types of customers that wework with. So if you think about
the app, it's focused on yourtraditional enterprise, it are a
line of business buyer who'strying to add a video
(15:39):
collaboration, you know,service, video collaboration use
case within their their workenvironment. Whereas I tend to
focus around independentsoftware vendors that are
building apps, I focus oncontact center customers who are
trying to enrich or expand orenhance their contact center. So
I have a very different customerin terms of who I have to serve.
(16:03):
And we like to align ourbusiness units and organizations
around the customers that we'retrying to serve. And kind of in
our working backwards mentality,we really like to map services
to these customers. That beingsaid, the app still continues to
use the building blocks weproduce, they don't use all of
them, we'd like them to use moreof them. But they do use all of
(16:25):
the building blocks that I mean,they use many of the building
blocks that we have within theSDK today. So they are a
customer of ours, just like weserve slack huddles or Visa we
serve a salesforce.com. They'rejust very typical at AWS, where
you have internal and externalcustomers, and the app is an
internal customer, a team ofours, and yes, they are a
(16:46):
completely separate team at thispoint.
Dave Michels (16:48):
Is there any significance to calling chime in
SDK? Because normally, you know,in the circles that Evan and I
travel in, we normally hear theterm C pass?
Sid Rao (16:59):
That's a great question. Yes, there actually is
a significance to the term SDK,it was not an accident that it
was called an SDK. So one of thethings that this kind of
actually bothers me a little bitabout our industry is that we
like to say the word C pass allthe time. And C pass means to
many different, many differentthings, to many different things
(17:23):
to many different people as
Evan Kirstel (17:25):
clear as the analyst these big weeks like
they Michaels they love it, theylove. Yes, probably
Sid Rao (17:31):
they I don't know, maybe the term see past. So I
have to be careful what I sayabout about that favorite term.
But now the challenge with usinga term like seapass, is it
really doesn't focus around theactual customer workload date,
and the customer workload. Andwhen you look at real time,
communications involves multipledifferent things. Yes, there is
(17:53):
a cloud service that is makingsure audio and video can reach
other devices and traverse thePSTN. But there's also a client
component to usually theseapplications, and these client
components, render the videoprovide the echo cancellation do
the noise suppression, they haveto work across a myriad of
(18:14):
mobile devices, you know, inroom conference equipment, sip
devices. So there's definitely aclient component to this story
as well. And, you know, ifyou're looking at a
communication service, andyou're just saying, See pass,
inevitably, what that means to alot of people is bulk sending
and receiving of phone calls ortext messages or, you know, kind
(18:37):
of at transport level problem,Dave. And really, it's a higher
level construct of you workingon devices, working on cloud
services, and putting it alltogether so that customers can
have a meaningful solution foryou know, what they're trying to
build, whether it's a huddlesapplication, or it's enabling
(18:57):
agent assistance in the contactcenter. So we that's why we take
the approach of saying it's anSDK, there's, there's a cloud
service component, there's alsoa client component. And by
putting it together, that's howyou get the real meaningful
value out of our service. Sothat's kind of the backstory on
the name. Is that
Evan Kirstel (19:15):
helpful? It is.
And so what AWS services arecommonly used with the Jime SDK?
Oh, that's a
Sid Rao (19:22):
great question. So our customers will use a number of
different services inconstructing their application,
whether it's amplified to createmobile and web apps, or you
know, it's lambda to you know,orchestrate who they want to
meet and when they want to meetor where they want to steer a
phone call or route a phonecall. So yes, we use a number of
(19:44):
different AWS services with theSDK. But a crucial service that
customers commonly use with theAmazon chime SDK is transcribed.
So with a single line of code, abuilder can basically add
captions or transcriptsbasically to real type of audio
and video sessions, which usedto be actually a pretty tricky
thing for a lot of companies toachieve. Now we've made it
(20:07):
really easy. So transcribe is avery common partner service that
our customers use. It's usedalso with with huddles from an
accessibility perspective,that's where you may have seen
it there. But it's also used forthings you would never expect to
have. And like, we havecustomers, for example, like T
Mobile, with their 60,000 agentswho use our you know, they're
(20:27):
able to capture the audio viasip, and they also use
transcribe, to transcribe thataudio comprehend to detect the
topics coming out of that audio,and then basically, Drive Agent
assistant style applicationsthat are common for their
particular contact center. So wesee machine learning workloads,
whether that's transcribe or inthe case of T Mobile, they're
(20:51):
using, you know, a transcriptionengine powered by Nvidia, but it
runs out UC two and it stillruns on our, you know, on on
AWS. And that type oftranscription and machine
learning workload is verycommonly applied with the Amazon
chime SDK. You
Dave Michels (21:07):
know, the more I think about it, and listen to
you, all of AWS is really anSDK. What determines if an API
is part of chime or connect orLex or whatever?
Sid Rao (21:19):
That's a great question in terms of how we categorize
our API. So the way we look atthat problem is, who is the
customer? And what is theworkload. So if you think about
Amazon, connect the workload,there is end to end contact
center, you need a cloud basedcontact center, go to Amazon
connect, if you're addingcommunication capabilities, to
(21:44):
your contact center, or to yourexisting application, come talk
to the Amazon chime SDK. And sowe may, in fact, sometimes have
API's that are do the same thingand two services, that's
actually not not an unusualwithin AWS. It's all about the
customers workload that decideswhether that API exists within
(22:07):
one service or the other. So agreat example of that today is
if I'm hosting a database, I canuse obviously, rds MySQL, I can
use Aurora for doing a fullymanaged version of that
database. But I also might beusing redshift, because it's
actually a data warehouse, andI'm doing large analytic style
(22:28):
workloads. And so the workloadis what decides where that where
that API method exists withinthat particular service. So you
know, in the case of all threeof those workloads, the need to
run a database query isuniversal. But you may see
redshift only offer the abilityto do queries across billions of
(22:50):
rows versus that may not beappropriate for RDS MySQL,
right? So it really depends onthe customer workload or the
customer application. And so,for example, and in the chime
SDK, you'll see the ability tohave two people have a phone
call together, right? And you'relike, Well, look, Kinect also
offers that too. Why do you havetwo services that allow you to
(23:13):
make phone calls? Well, ourphone calls are focused around
people who want to add PSTNcapabilities to their
applications. Whereas connectsupports the PSTN as a channel
to a contact center. So yes,similar workloads, but not
exactly the same. And so thecustomer solution is driving
Dave Michels (23:34):
they really do kind of blur and overlap. I
mean, you went to the databaseis when all my databases, but
connect chime and Lex kind ofworking together. Now, you just
made some big announcements withLex and Alexa at the at the
recent reinvent conference. Canyou tell us about that?
Sid Rao (23:49):
Oh, sure. Absolutely.
So kind of going back to thatthat concept I described about
SDKs and supporting devices, weactually enabled Alexa to
initiate calls within skills. Soif I'm an Alexa skill developer,
such as an insurance company, Ican basically create skill
actions now that go like thisAlexa ask insurance company to
(24:13):
call my agent. And what it doesis it basically initiates a call
immediately from your Alexapowered device to the insurance
company's local office orcontact center via the PSTN or
BSF, or even WebRTC. Sobasically, this enables skilled
developers to add human beingsinto their workflows. It's
(24:37):
actually a really it makes thePerl personal assistant market
actually super useful above andbeyond where it was today, the
utility of a skill went upbecause now when you need help,
or when you're trying to dosomething that requires a human
being, you can bring a humanbeing into that skill via
traditional traditionaltelephone call. So yes, we're
(25:00):
super excited about that workwe're doing with the Alexa team.
And it enables a conveniencefactor that we were a little bit
surprised about, actually, interms of how well it's received
by our developers, by skilleddevelopers. For example, we have
a we have a large hotel chainwho has economic sitting in all
of their rooms. And they'reusing this capability basically
(25:20):
to automate calls to their frontdesk or calls to their in room
dining. And we have a largerestaurant chain, for example,
who's no longer has to programtheir entire menu, within a
whole conversational AI skills.
Evan Kirstel (25:37):
Come on, Dave Michaels really enjoys these
1984 era phones. Well, I
Sid Rao (25:47):
actually, that's a good point, I haven't really seen too
many 1980s phones in hotel roomin a while now, I have seen
echoes starting to show up forin room control and things of
that nature. But there you go,that's like a pretty typical use
case of they want to get beyondjust simply providing in room
control, they want to be able toreach other parts the hotel,
(26:07):
enrich the hotel visitors stay.
And this allows them to bringvarious different human hotel
resources into thatconversational AI experience
they're having with thesedevices. So being able to target
a number of different use caseslike that to the convenience use
case of luck, I got anotification that my car
insurance is due on my echo andwith a single tap of my echo
(26:29):
show can call the agent to renewmy car insurance, or I can call
my doctor's care team to join atelemedicine session. For
example, these are the types ofuse cases that we're now able to
power on Alexa powered devices.
So that's kind of the backstoryand backdrop around what we
announced the reinvent,
Evan Kirstel (26:49):
we have really exciting. Now, contact centers
traditionally have plugins forwebsites, you know, click the
chat, and now you're enablingAlexa to connect, when it comes
to chime, and customerengagement, will chime also work
for third party secretsproviders or legacy TDM contact
centers on the premises.
Sid Rao (27:10):
Oh, absolutely. In fact, that's a pretty common use
case, Evan, for why customerscome to talk to us about the
SDK. So we typically run intoorganizations, especially
through acquisition, like in thecase of we were talking about T
Mobile just a few minutes ago,with a large acquisition of
sprint, you know, they havepretty varied and diverse
(27:31):
contexts in our platform. Andwhen you're operating in that
kind of an environment, it's noteasy to just say, snap your
fingers and switch everythingover to the cloud overnight. And
that lifecycle of communicationplatforms of, you know, five 710
years is still the lifecycle weobserved today. And a lot of
that also has to do with thekind of risk aversion you might
(27:53):
have some of the best cloudcontext servers center services
out there today. But customersare little, sometimes a little
bit risk averse, worried aboutdisrupting their business. After
all, the contact center is likethe old primary way they get
reached, it's the kind of abarrier of last resort. So of
course, with Amazon connect, wehave a fantastic highly
(28:13):
resilient, highly availablecontact center, Cloud Contact
Center platform. But it's not,you know, sometimes customers
take their time to migrate. Butat the same time, they want to
add provide advanced callingcapabilities off of their
website, they want to add video,they want to add new
capabilities to their existingcontact center. And that's where
(28:34):
the SDK does come into play. Wehave customers who are basically
migrating from traditional dialin pick up the phone and call
the contact center style usecases to browser and mobile app
calling. If I can quickly gointo a great example of that. It
just happened to me thismorning, I was looking at my my
hospital chart, and I saw that Ihad an appointment with my
(28:55):
cardiologist setup. And while Iwas looking at that hospital
chart, there was a I had toreschedule the appointment.
Well, there's a little phoneicon and I so I'm like, okay,
cool, I can call my my care teamand reschedule that appointment
and reach the hospital contactcenter. So I clicked the button,
and initiates a completely newcall now to the hospital. And
(29:18):
all of that context of what wasgoing on in the chart, my
authentication details, all ofthat's lost. So I now start over
in the contact center having tore authenticate myself. Tell
them my reason why I'm comingin, tell them about my care
team. And that really frustratesand adds friction to the
customer's experience. And itadds time to the agent handling
(29:40):
time as well, which is which isa cost of course to these
organizations like my localhospital. And so with WebRTC and
the Amazon chime SDK, I can takethat entire experience and make
your really efficient when youclick that call button initiates
an audio session via WebRTC andthe SDK to the customer's
(30:02):
existing contact center via Sep,or TDM. If they are really kind
of antiquated, and the contextof that entire, you know,
customer, their authenticationdetails, their, where were they
in the chart, what appointmentwhere they looking at all of
that detail can be captured andsent along to the contact
(30:23):
center. So now when the agentgets the call on their legacy
contact center, their screenpops says it said, he was
looking at this appointment, hehas an appointment with the
cardiology care team. And Idon't know, I might do an extra
check just to be absolutely safefrom a security perspective
before talking about medicalrecords. And then while I can go
(30:45):
right in to help him as acustomer, reducing handle time,
making the IVR andconversationally I experience
more efficient. And, of course,removing friction from the end
customers experience, which iswhat they're looking to do. So
those types of use cases havebeen our absolutely common use
cases for the enterprisecustomer of the Amazon chime
(31:07):
SDK. And obviously, on the Alexaside, we do something similar,
where if you're signed into theAlexa skill, all the detail
about where they were in theskill and what they were trying
to ask about. All that detailcan be passed along to the to
the context that are in thatcontext is super valuable, also
from an analytics perspective aswell, because now I can go into
(31:29):
my reporting infrastructure,especially with my contact
center and say, where on thewebsite, our customers getting
stuck, when they call and ask mefor help, which is actually
something that it's pretty hardfor contact centers to do today
with traditional one 800 Callthe contact center. So that type
of services,
Evan Kirstel (31:47):
well, we've just said Alexa about 12 times, so I
apologize to the listeners 1313times, we may need to say the a
word in future. But yeah, it'samazing how, you know,
technology has evolved. I mean,you can offer so many advanced
communication services withoutcapex from the cloud. I mean,
things like recording andtranscription and translation,
(32:10):
even, you know, used to be veryexpensive. So do all these new
economics really surprise you?
Looking from the inside, I guessout. And you know,
Sid Rao (32:21):
I don't think I'm surprised even as much as I'm
actually super happy about it,because so it's actually
interesting, he asked me aboutmy prior job, which was as a CTI
group and I worked on callrecording and cloud based call
recording. And there's actuallyan interview of me by somebody
in the analyst space, who wasasking me about cloud based call
(32:43):
recording in the past, and Iwent on this diatribe about how
I was annoyed about the state ofthe industry, and how these old
guard providers are chargingthese super expensive capital
license fees and highmaintenance fees to basically
record a call. And that's like,all they were doing, they
weren't even transcribing thecall, there was no machine
(33:06):
learning nothing, just takingaudio on the wire, and putting
it on a hard drive. So nowlooking back on that time period
of my life, where I was saying,Look, that can be a cloud based
service in elastically scale, itcan be efficient for customers
to provide this commonregulatory fat function. Now I'm
able to literally provide likealmost like a Google search
(33:29):
interface to those calls,unlocking all the intelligence
and conversational intelligenceand sentiment data and topical
data, from our most importantthing, how we talk to customers
and those customerconversations, I'm able to do
all of that in an elasticfashion, on a pay as you go
basis without these cap, youknow, really expensive capex
(33:52):
licenses and traditionaltechniques offered by old guard
providers. And I wouldn't say itsurprises me as much as it
delights me to watch customersbe able to do the right thing
for their customers now, withoutworrying about, oh, I have to
write a large check to somesoftware company for a gajillion
dollars because of themaintenance contract I've signed
(34:14):
for the last 10 years. So I'msuper, it's super exciting to
see the whole customerexperience customer service
industry, be able to get veryintelligent, very efficient, and
help people like me who justneed to get their cardiology
appointment rescheduled gothrough their life better. So I
always get happy when I seesoftware actually improve lives.
(34:36):
And that's something I'm seeinghappen with that change to the
cloud versus what was in thepast. It felt like almost like a
hostage situation where somebodyhad to write the check to a
provider that year for theability to take audio and put it
on a hard drive. Maybeoccasionally transcribe it
because transcribing it cost toomuch, you know, occasionally
(34:58):
being able to provide insightsto a Customer on how they can
improve the customer experience.
So anyway, I hope that answeredyour question.
Dave Michels (35:06):
You started that with always being annoyed. And
that's, that's my stick but butyou ended up with always being
happy. And so it's okay, you'reall right, you're safe to about
the customer journey through thechime SDK, what gets your
customers? Or what gets youleads? What kind of events do
they have that caused them toinquire about chime SDK?
Sid Rao (35:30):
Sure, that's actually pretty straightforward. So let's
talk about interactive voiceresponse. IVR. So a lot of
companies now, especially in theCOVID timeframe, decided, look,
we need to upgrade the IVR, wecan no longer do this DTMF
touchdown thing needs to beconversational. We need to
improve our you know, ourcontainment scores, and how can
(35:52):
we do it. And what they firstsometimes do is a first start
down the road of, oh, maybe Ineed to go replace my contact
center. But then they realized,look, we don't have the budget,
maybe we don't have theretraining cost for agents.
Maybe there's some, you know,maybe there's a long term
telecom contract, there's, ormaybe there's a platform
(36:13):
contract. Like in one case, wehad a company who had signed a
five year deal with Cisco, andthey could not get out of their
software contract and move to acloud based service. And when
they're so when they reached oneof these constraint points,
which actually happens even morethan I thought it would happen,
I'm actually pleasantlysurprised by that. What happens
(36:34):
is they reach out to a servicelike the SDK, and they reach out
to us saying, hey, we want toadd IVR capabilities to our
context and a conversational AI.
We want to add Amazon Lex to atelephone platform, can you help
us out. And so it's those kindsof compelling events, like, I
need to add agent assistance, Ineed to add video to my contact
center, I'm adding acollaboration capability to my
(36:55):
existing software application.
And that is, these are the kindof events where it's usually
additive versus like, I'm gonnago replace something. Now, we do
have some companies andorganizations who, for example,
Harvard health and Beth IsraelHospital out of Boston, where
(37:16):
they had a hard dependency on athird party for telemedicine,
and they wanted to bring thattelemedicine service in house.
So there are some scenarioswhere we are doing solution
style replacement. But there's alot of feature style scenarios
as well, where they're adding afeature to an application. Both
of those use cases are whatdrives kind of new business or
(37:37):
new opportunities to ourservice. And the reason why AWS
has chosen versus otherproviders has a lot to do with
that security challenge oftrying to keep data customer
data within a single vendorboundary or a cloud boundary.
And AWS is obviously a verycommon boundary for our
(38:00):
customers in terms of they knowhow to secure resources at AWS,
they understand that model. Andwhen you build with the Amazon
chime SDK, you have pretty muchaccess to anything within your
AWS account. So if you if that'stranscription or databases, all
of that is available to you fromthat same footprint, which it
makes it easy for customers tomanage. It's interesting
Dave Michels (38:22):
because, you know, in the CPAP space, people
normally start with SMS and theyexpand into, you know, into
video and other services. But itsounds like in your SDK case
that they kind of start all overthe place. Is it easier to say
where they start? Or is iteasier to see where they end
Sid Rao (38:36):
up, it's actually easier to say where they end up
when they're done using the SDK.
And never really done using theSDK because we're always adding
new features and capabilities.
But when you look at kind oflike the ultimate story of some
of these customers, theybasically completely taken over
(38:56):
the customer engagementexperience and have complete
ownership of it end to end allthe way from chat to voice to
video to unit mentioned SMS,they sent send and receive SMS
notifications using pinpointwhich is sister service of ours
as well. So we many times day,we will start in many different
(39:17):
parts of the organization. Andbefore you know it, we were
doing everything from making aphone call work at that company
to driving their entire videomortgage application process if
it's a bank, or all the way tosending out SMS text messages
for them for one time. passcode.
So, usually, and this is kind oftrue of the industry as a whole,
(39:38):
this whole seapass industry isthat, you know, customers will
usually start with some pointneed that they have. And then
they once they get comfortablewith the API's. They just start
layering many many, many, manydifferent types of applications
on top of it, ultimately leadingto finally you know context
interest service being deployed.
(40:02):
In our case, that'd be AmazonConnect. That's just the way
that our customers tend to thinkabout the problem and how
they've been approaching theproblem. And we of course,
follow their lead in terms ofhow they want to go through
their journey with our with awith AWS communication services.
Evan Kirstel (40:17):
So the API economy has been talked about for years,
but really seems to be coming tothe fore. So does everyone want
to become an SDK and seapassprovider these days?
Sid Rao (40:28):
I will tell you that based on various events and
trade shows, I've been watchingover the last couple of months
into it sure as heck seems likeeverybody likes this whole. I'm
an SDK. And then they use termslike platform and SDK and
ecosystem. And I hate thoseterms, because that's not really
(40:50):
the right way to think about it,Evan, if I had to go back again,
and look at the entire originstory of the Amazon chime SDK,
the main thing I would change isto actually forget about, really
the the term SDK or seapass, orany of those things, and really
focus on that workload, theworkload is really the important
(41:10):
thing, which is, how do I getvideo into my contact center,
that's the workload if I'm init, because I have a need for
video. And maybe I'm a bankthat's doing mortgage banking,
and videos important forcontent, show reasons. And also
personal reasons, I need tobring video into my contact
center. Well, that's theworkload. And that's the thing
(41:31):
to focus on versus the term SDK,or platform or whatever the case
might be. Those are just toolsthat allow you to build the
workload. So I will tell youthat everybody kind of is really
looking at that SDK platformstory, because they realize that
the word customer workload iswhat's driving them towards
(41:52):
doing that. Now, if you reallylook one closely at that
problem, the root of all of thatis COVID, changed our entire
worldview. Basically,communications became just table
stakes, there was no way to livewithout some sort of a video
communications capability oraudio communications capability,
or conference chair. And oncethat that kind of notion had
(42:16):
been built in once everybody wascomfortable jumping on video
meetings and audio meetings allday long for everything they do,
whether it's ordering a burgeror talking to their buddy at
work, then the problem becameabout where are the eyeballs
going to be located? You and I,Evan and Dave, we grew up in the
times of Cisco, WebEx wherethere was this application, and
(42:38):
everybody lived in thisapplication. But that doesn't
work for a lot of applicationdevelopers, they want those
eyeballs to be focused on theirapp. If I'm an E commerce
company, and I'm adding a helpbutton to my website, I don't
want another application to getlaunched to serve that need, I
want that person to continue tobe in my website, because that's
(43:01):
where they're going to be buyingsomething from me, I don't want
them to get distracted. And sokeeping the eyeballs which is
typically what a lot of websitedevelopers and app developers
focus on, is still critical. Andcommunications became critical.
And I think that's why you'reseeing so many people pivot or
talk about an SDK is because theonly way you really can provide
(43:24):
communications now and besuccessful and meet both of
those requirements is byproviding a component that can
be built into a website or amobile app to facilitate
communication. So I think that'swhy you see everybody, a lot of
the cool kids in town startingto use the term SDK a lot. And
we just happen to be doing itfor the last couple of years
(43:46):
already. So we've become prettyproficient in handling that
builder or developer customerwho needs to Website Builder or
developer type of customer. Doesthat answer your question? It
does.
Evan Kirstel (43:58):
I guess my additional question would be so
many, you're one of the coolkids clearly, but you have so
many alternatives. How does onedistinguish themselves from the
competition in this space? Givenall the options? How do you
differentiate yourself? Fromyour competitors?
Sid Rao (44:15):
Yeah, there's two ways that the SDK does differentiate
itself from substitutes. Sousually, when you're making a
decision about look at thissession, right, me, you and Dave
are on a call. Getting thesethree people together requires
some sort of a data service or adatabase and in security
(44:36):
conscious organizations, theydon't want that data of Dave
evidence ID to leave their cloudboundary. And that is a unique
advantage that AWS is able toprovide to its customer is that
the database of deciding thatDave said and Evan should mean
is stored in AWS and thereforethe instruction to the
(44:58):
communication service to putThree of them together can be
retained within AWS. So there'sthat security advantage. That's
kind of important. The nextimportant thing that our
customers are looking for ismachine learning. It's no longer
good enough for customers tojust simply send audio packets
across the wire or video packetsacross the wire, and hope that
(45:21):
it's all good. from a qualityperspective, no machine learning
is now required for all kinds ofuse cases in the communication
space. There's the wholeeverything from simple things
like background replacement tonoise suppression to echo
cancellation, which is driven bymachine learning workloads these
days to packet loss concealmentthat is also ml driven. So
(45:43):
there's a tremendous amount ofmachine learning required now to
make a communication session goon the fraud and detection for
space there used the whole byvoice identification and voice
printing kind of mechanism. Andso the SDK, first of all,
provides machine learningconstruct constructs on its own.
It integrates with complimentaryAWS machine learning services,
(46:06):
and it also gives you access tothe data do your own machine
learning. And AWS is a greatplace to do and now so it these
are the kind of the commonreasons why customers tend to
use our communication serviceand are successful with our
communication service versus themany different substitutes and
alternatives that are out there.
And this is actually why, youknow, we think AWS is really
(46:29):
serving an unmet need in thecommunications business is
because we're able to providethese types of capabilities.
Dave Michels (46:37):
interesting ways.
He's gonna go, I gotta thank youfor taking so much time with us.
But I want to wrap up on oneother topic, a term you use
earlier, I haven't heard for awhile you use the term WebRTC.
That was like the term I don'tknow, five, six years ago,
everyone was talking aboutWebRTC was going to change the
world
Evan Kirstel (46:56):
koleksi pas now.
But I guess,
Dave Michels (47:00):
zoom, never embraced it. And Zune certainly
hasn't been hurt by that andseems you know, it's it's done
really well. WebRTC just doesn'tcome up as much anymore in
conversation. So I believeyou're using WebRTC. And let me
ask you, is that important? Andhow do you feel about that? Oh,
yeah.
Sid Rao (47:16):
So remember what I said a few minutes ago about how app
developers don't want theeyeballs to leave their app.
WebRTC is nothing more than anacronym to basically describe
browser calling, like, you caninitiate audio and video, real
time audio video sessions withina browser. And even within the
(47:37):
mobile app community, a lot ofapps are now pretty much browser
based as well. So it's all aboutmaking sure that real time audio
and video works within abrowser, that's basically and So
WebRTC is still alive. And well.
It's the foundation behindGoogle Hangouts and meat. It's
the foundation behind a numberof these services. Facebook, of
course, uses it for its ownservice. Apple does and some of
the FaceTime interactions arenow support. So vertices as
(48:00):
well, is still a wellestablished standard out there.
Yes, we do have some marketparticipants who have not
embraced WebRTC, and who arevery dependent upon their native
application and nativecapabilities to make their
service work. And my comment onthat is very simple, which is
that works when you're in thecollaboration business, when,
(48:23):
when you're in the business ofbeing that collaboration
application like a Cisco WebExor a zoom or trying the
application as well, that makessense for that workload. It
doesn't make sense for theseworkloads, like in the contact
center space, where you reallywant people to stay within your
app, you don't want them movingoff of your app, all that
(48:45):
context, we described about,like, what's in their shopping
cart, how are theyauthenticated, all of that
detail gets lost as soon as youswitch application. So just like
you don't want them pickinghaving to pick up the phone and
start a phone call. Because allthat context is lost, you don't
want them to click on thatbutton and launch a completely
different application toinitiate that call either
(49:07):
because, again, the context islost. So you know, when it comes
back to context analytics, andproviding that rich experience
at a website or mobile app, andpeople the standard out there is
still WebRTC. It's maybe not ashot or trendy, but to achieve
the customer's businessobjectives. That is still a very
important and critical part ofthe chain that the tool chain
(49:29):
that still needs to be outthere.
Evan Kirstel (49:32):
This has been a fantastic deep dive into the
world of deep as SDK andapplication development and for
real time communication. Sothanks so much for spending so
much quality time with us. Andwe look forward to seeing more
from Amazon SDK.
Sid Rao (49:50):
Thank you, Dave and Evan, for having me. And by the
way, you can follow me onLinkedIn to see how the team's
progressing and what we wereannounced and of course, we have
a pretty active blog channelswell aws.amazon.com
Evan Kirstel (50:02):
Don't forget Max and Hawk they deserve some
attention as well on Twitter.
Sid Rao (50:06):
Oh, yes, Max and Hawk, they believe they deserve
attention all the time, not juston Twitter or the internet. They
think they deserve intentionjust for waking up in the
morning. They haven't. So. Allright, well, thank you for your
time. I do appreciate it, folks.
Dave Michels (50:21):
It's really exciting to watch what you're
doing over there. And, you know,time SDK, it kind of came out of
nowhere, all of a sudden, thatwas just there. And now it's
really making some bigdifferences for a lot of
customers. So it's just beengreat to watch this.
Sid Rao (50:32):
Thank you. Appreciate it. Dave. And thank you again,
Evan, for your kind words andlook forward to keep continue to
collaborate. Thank you. Takecare, take care, have a good
one.
Evan Kirstel (50:43):
Well, Syd rose is a fascinating guy. He's one of
the most visible businessleaders in Amazon. Most of the
folks seem to be unwilling to dopodcasts and live streams and
talk to external analysts likeyou Dave, what do you think
Dave Michels (50:58):
it's almost like a strategy or something? There's
like always different islands inAmazon, like the contact center
and, and what we just caughtthis in, in China SDK. There's
legs and there's alwaysdifferent islands. But I think
that they're kind of comingtogether. I'm not I might just
be my imagination. But I kind ofthink there's almost like a
(51:18):
master strategy here or
Evan Kirstel (51:20):
something like that. I don't know about that.
But But Sid, is definitely thefantasy island of Amazon. You
know, he's like the planeWelcome. Welcome. We're gonna
talk to you a conversation.
We're gonna build Come Come andjoin our island. So very, very
fun
Dave Michels (51:35):
stuff. Well, it was great talking to him. And
this will be one of our lastpodcast of the year.
Evan Kirstel (51:40):
I guess we have one more coming up with Jeff
Haas and the Tullio you saidlast podcast and I was getting a
bit worried like you somethingyou need to tell me
Dave Michels (51:48):
last point what we have like one more podcast for
the year I think it's
Evan Kirstel (51:53):
okay, just I just wanted to make that clear for
the year so thanks, everyone.
You made sure man I gotta getout of the phone. Don't wait.
Don't read your phone. No, man.
(52:23):
No, it's me.
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