Tom Soderstrom, Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), shares insights at the AWS Summit NYC 2025 about the transformative potential of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the public and commercial sectors. Host Dave Vellante of SiliconANGLE Media engages with Soderstrom as they explore the nuances of digital transformation and innovation within large organizations.
In this discussion, Soderstrom elaborates on their role at AWS, utilizing experience from their tenure at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They highlight similar challenges faced by public sector entities and large enterprises in embracing innovation. Soderstrom emphasizes the importance of cultural change as a crucial aspect of digital transformation processes, which includes adopting technologies such as cloud computing and generative AI. The conversation with Dave Vellante and John Furrier of theCUBE Research illuminates the evolution of technological transformations across diverse sectors.
Key takeaways include strategic approaches organizations need to succeed in the AI-driven landscape. Soderstrom discusses the significance of starting small with AI projects, iterating quickly, and focusing on presenting tangible business value to stakeholders. They also highlight that while AI rapidly transforms industries, it is essential to align AI initiatives with business goals and adapt organizational structures to incorporate AI effectively. According to Soderstrom and theCUBE analysts, organizations should foster a culture of experimentation, where AI and humans collaborate to enhance productivity and innovation.
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Chris Sullivan & Tarkan Maner | AI + Cloud Leaders
In this AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit interview, Rajiv Chopra, VP of Amazon Just Walk Out, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack the evolution and impact of computer vision in retail. Chopra shares how AWS has transformed the breakthrough technology behind Amazon Go into a scalable, edge-powered solution for partners across stadiums, hospitals, universities and airports. With over 250 deployments outside of Amazon properties, Just Walk Out is redefining how consumers shop by enabling fast, frictionless experiences without checkout lines.
Chopra details key benefits for retailers, from revenue growth to shrink reduction, and illustrates use cases across venues like Lumen Field, UC San Diego and Hudson News. He breaks down the technological architecture behind the scenes, including deep learning models, custom edge compute devices and cloud integration, and explains how Just Walk Out balances accuracy, performance and customer experience. The conversation also highlights the broader trend of digital-physical convergence and visual reasoning as a frontier for applied AI.
Watch to learn how AWS is turning real-world environments into intelligent, automated spaces – and how Just Walk Out is leading the charge in reimagining retail through innovation.
Chris Sullivan & Tarkan Maner | AI + Cloud Leaders
Chris Sullivan
VP of America's Partners & AlliancesAWS
Tarkan Maner
CCONutanix
In this exclusive segment from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI + Cloud Leaders event, Nutanix Chief Commercial Officer, Tarkan Maner, and AWS VP of Americas Partners and Alliances, Chris Sullivan, join theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack how rapid advancements in AI and cloud infrastructure are accelerating digital transformation at scale. Speaking from the New York Stock Exchange, the duo dives into how their strategic partnership is enabling faster, more secure migrations for enterprise customers – especially in highly regulated sectors like banking, insurance and go...Read more
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What is the context of the conversation taking place in Silicon Valley related to the AI Cloud Leader series and the involvement of AWS and Nutanix?add
What is the current approach to integrating systems within enterprises, particularly in relation to migration from legacy systems to modern platforms like Nutanix and AWS?add
What does customer success look like for Nutanix with AWS?add
What approach has the organization taken in its go-to-market strategy regarding partnerships and customer use cases?add
Chris Sullivan & Tarkan Maner | AI + Cloud Leaders
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>> Two.>> Welcome back, everybody, to theCUBE here at our New York Stock Exchange East Coast Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, connecting Silicon Valley from Palo Alto here at Wall Street. I have a great lineup as part of the AI Cloud Leader series. Of course, we did a Halftime Report with connecting in midpoint between re:Invent at the end of the year, AWS's flagship event. It feels like a whole year has transpired in the first half, a lot of announcements, a lot of major accelerations around generative AI, certainly within the ecosystem. Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer of Nutanix is here, and Chris Sullivan, VP at AWS, handles the Americas for the Partners and Alliances. Chris, great to have you on.
Chris Sullivan
>> Thanks so much.>> AWS, and the Partners and Alliances, big part of the ecosystem. Tarkan, welcome back. We had you on at your show at NEXT and, of course, talking about the ecosystem. So Chris, the partners were all gathered in New York this week. They're here. Everyone comes to town. I love New York. It's like a mini re:Invent, because it's all the customers here. It's a free event. All the customers are here, but it's a huge practitioner show. End user customers come in, but partners, the banks, the insurance companies. Robotics is hot. Everything's smoking hot with AI. Tons of announcements. What's on the minds of the partners in your ecosystem? Because we're at a whole fast pace. I saw some of the coding announcements, just the intelligence, and the product development, the ability to turn stuff around, do integrations, run networks, run clouds. What's going on in the Partner and Alliances? How's that changed?
Chris Sullivan
>> So it's a great question, and I'll tell you from a consulting partner perspective and from a technology partner perspective, which Tarkan can hit on this even more strongly than I can. But in the consulting world, it's gone way past integrations, and migrations, and modernization. The power of AI has customers inspired, but in order to achieve that, they need to migrate. They need to modernize. They need up-leveled security controls. They need the power of the AWS marketplace. So for us, it's a super exciting time. It's an incredible inflection point, and people are really, really fired up.>> Yeah. I've covering Amazon, I mean, you've been a customer since the early days, but 13 ... So it's our 14th year covering re:Invent, so it'll be a 15th year. I remember Andy Jassy four years ago, before he handed the baton over, he did a tutorial on how to work backwards from the customer. It's kind of like a training class for like, "Oh. Call leader, is this how you innovate?" I'm hearing now, this year on theCUBE, certainly around the ecosystem and this Halftime Report, they're doing live coding on sales calls. It's like, "Hey. You see this integration challenge you have? Is that a demo?" "No. Actually, we just shipped it." So the coding, and the integration, and the capabilities that are now enabled, which throws off, obviously, gross margin and a lot of profits. Just the enablement now with AI has changed the game, not just high-end GSIs, but every single technology partner, alliances. They're doing more. What specifically is jumping off the page in your mind that's enabled from this? What are some of the structural changes that you're seeing?
Chris Sullivan
>> Yeah. Well, I think it all comes from, as you're saying, AWS Transform, a product that we recently announced. That gives the capability to compress the timelines of the way that we used to think about taking everything from mainframes, to VMware environments, to Microsoft environments. All of those environments can be addressed. They can be migrated and modernized much, much more quickly. For partners using those technologies, they can immediately begin to take those workloads, take those data estates, think about new use cases, and they're building them so much faster. The ability to develop code, as you said, using the tools that we've announced ... We recently announced Kiro from a development perspective. Those types of tools and capabilities, they're compressing not only the time to write the code, but to test it, to validate it, to ensure that it's secure, and then to launch it into production. So all of those timelines are being compressed, which is, it's a frenzy of good news in a lot of ways.>> Yeah. Tarkan, as the chief commercial officer, I know the relationship with AWS has accelerated, because not only does the tool chain efficiencies create leverage around the models ... Again, Bedrock has proven. Matt Garman was on the record years ago saying multiple models will be the use case. Of course, we've published the first power law saying the same thing. Now, tooling is so elegant with all the new tools, okay, Kiro, others. So your relationship to scale up your infrastructure has become cool. What's up with you and your relationship with Amazon? How are you guys integrating in? Because now, you're the substrate inside the enterprise, across the hybrid.
Tarkan Maner
>> Absolutely. Look, first of all, great to be here with Chris, and great to be with you, John. New York Stock Exchange, phenomenal. re:Invent events, always phenomenal. I think this is another mini event. It's a huge event. I'll tell you, yesterday, very quick, I'm at dinner with one of my top customers, banking customers in New York, and next table, talking about all these migration problems they have from legacy systems to Nutanix and to AWS. I was like, "Is this happening? Really?" They were talking about their mainframe, then all VMware systems, and how they're going to migrate huge issues around security. They need to find the tools, and they believe that ... This is exactly what our story is. It was phenomenal when I was witnessing this. The partnership is incredible. We built this partnership over the past few years. It's a strategic agreement around joint go to market, joint R&D. We are super excited about it. That's why we are full force here in New York. As you know, in regulated industries, we have a phenomenal presence, with banking, financial services, insurance, federal government, state and local healthcare. We see huge opportunities, obviously globally. New York event is phenomenal for us. We have a two-tier distribution. Our channel partners are super excited. We installed the partnership over the past nine months. Have been a phenomenal success. A lot of progress right now.>> Yeah. Talk about the money-making, not to bring up sort of in the stock exchange. This is a capitalism center. Channels, alliances, relationships have to be strong, just first principles, good partnerships. Monetization with partners is really about enablement and frictionless environments. There's always some friction, but that's kind of the . How is AI bringing that into the table? Because we're seeing a lot more services coming out of the woodwork. We're seeing kind of like vibe partners coming to the table. '.
Things have, I mean, thing that Amazon ... Strands came out of a kind of a vibe or accident. Some of the Kiro stuff came out of Deepak Singh's group. Okay? So these are new things that comes, and this isn't what we want, not just the specs. So how has the alliance side and the economics changed? Because I'd imagine that's going to create more opportunities, and the other, on your side, on AWS, you've got to run just as fast, like, "Okay. What programs support that?" So you got to have kind of the scaffolding to enable Nutanix. Talk about the dynamic on how you guys worked to enable that economic value.
Chris Sullivan
>> Yeah. I think it really started, you mentioned it earlier, working backwards from the customers. We want to meet the customers where they are. There's obviously an inflection point in the industry when it comes to virtual machines. We want to address that and provide customers pathways that help them solve that problem. The ease of the Nutanix NC2 on AWS, that solution is so portable. It moves them so quickly. It runs on bare-metal EC2. It provides the security, and now, as soon as the workload moves, all the work that the Nutanix team is doing across our AI portfolio makes those workloads, that data, those opportunities become relevant very, very quickly. So we look at it as a catalyst to customers being able to access all of that opportunity, and the simplification of the solution, I think it's very gracefully architected. That's just all goodness for customers. It helps them move with speed, which is what everyone's demanding.
Tarkan Maner
>> Just to add very quick, tying everything, what Chris said, now, all these inflection points, Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, huge disruption in the industry, as you know. Obviously, Broadcom has a different strategy, focusing on a few accounts. A very large ecosystem is now needing more innovation. Obviously, Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration. As of October, Windows 10 is out of support. There's a lot of opportunities from an end-user competing perspective, is another workload. AI, open source, huge opportunities and risks for our customers, especially in regulated industries, especially in New York. That's why we're seeing a lot of interest, and both companies focus on customer, phenomenal partner intimacy. We have really differentiated offering combined and operational excellence. He is a machine and operational excellence. We are also focused on that, and those things come together, create success for our customers.>> Customer satisfaction, you guys obviously take pride in having Nutanix as a partner, customer from your VP position. He's a partner, customer.
Tarkan Maner
>> Absolutely.>> What's the customer success look like for Nutanix with AWS?
Chris Sullivan
>> The uptick's been really amazing in just the last handful of months. I mean, I think we've got over 90 customers have already completed migrations. It's really, really fast-paced.
Tarkan Maner
>> Fast.
Chris Sullivan
>> I will tell you, and this is not a self-serving comment, because Tarkan's sitting to my left, and we have a long-term relationship, but they are customer-obsessed just like we are. It's very natural. The motion is natural. We're solving a problem, and we're providing a customer an opportunity that is fast, that is well-supported. The escalations that we have are how do we do more together, as opposed to, how do we help customers solve problems that we've created? So it's a really, really powerful partnership.>> I know this. Tarkan has a bias for action. One of the first principles.
Chris Sullivan
>> One of the reasons we get along so well. Both of ... We share wiring.>> I love to, I always like to quote some of those awesome principles. Okay. Tarkan, on your side, at the end of the day, you mentioned transitions and also migrations. In these transitions, people win in transitions. I'd like to ask both of you guys how you see this transitional market, because it's not just technology innovation. It's business model innovation, which includes partners. I mean, I see some partners operating full-on clouds on AWS on behalf of AW ... So like a whole change in the marketplace is great, too. You're seeing that being a fulfillment center. The role has changed big-time.
Tarkan Maner
>> Absolutely.>> This has become the core thing.
Tarkan Maner
>> Exactly. Look, it takes a village. Right? At the end of day, customers needing, especially if we're talking about large enterprise customers, mid-market customers ... Sometimes, there's talent shortage. They don't have all the talent they need. So two companies coming together with our service partners, with our MSP partners, with our ISP partners, with our cloud support partners, and as Chris talked about, in multiple workloads, providing that expertise, pre-sales, post-sales support. At the end of the day, all our focus are outcomes. We want to make sure, even though we are geeks in a way, we are tech geeks, we want to make sure there are business outcomes for the customers with that entire partner ecosystem. Last point that Chris talked about, very important. This is not just migrating bits and pieces. It's migrating use cases, sometimes licenses back and forth, user data back and forth, all securely with manageability, with availability, with reliability. Doing all those things takes a village. That's why we are very good at what we do, because we are so customer-oriented and use case-oriented.>> Kiro will help you with all the compliance and all that management, the agents, and-
Chris Sullivan
>> Absolutely. I mean, even just today, Matt Yanchyshyn announced a new category within Marketplace for AI agents and tools.>> Yeah.
Chris Sullivan
>> You take that capability, we launched with over 800 partnerships in that day one announcement. Just think about that. 800 partnerships participating in that, including Nutanix. I think when you look at that momentum and then things like ... You touched on it earlier, and I think it's a really important point to revisit. Nutanix is a channel-first company. We have the same capabilities and tools, and you look at how our channel partner private offer has expanded with Marketplace. Systems integrators and resellers, partners can participate in that community, in that transaction, pull Nutanix in, package an offering and a solution, and take it out to customers. Super, super powerful, because we have to bring the entire ecosystem along. Because that's what customers expect.>> I think that's a great point. I would just say it's going to accelerate, too, from some of the feedback we're hearing at this event in our Halftime Report, is that migrations, whether it's a Nutanix from old environment to a modern environment, just database stuff, I mean, stuff that was like no one would ever do four or five years ago, more move your Oracle database to AWS, completely get rid of it, AI is going to make these things so much easier. Already seeing use cases, 70% faster migrations in some cases, 30% cost savings out of the gate. Or maybe I might have it flipped, but it was still significant.
Chris Sullivan
>> I'll give you some data from today. AWS Transform or Amazon Transform, that tool being leveraged by TCS, their data shows 90% accuracy from a code perspective, 45 to 60% better efficiency. So we're compressing the time to value. Customers might've looked at those migrations in the past and been hesitant because of the time, because of the lack of efficiency, because of the resources it would take to complete those. We're compressing all of that.
Tarkan Maner
>> And doing all this in an open standard way, making sure we'll help customers leverage their past investments. We're not forklifting things, forklifting things out. It's a very unique partnership from that perspective, and again, as Chris said, tying cloud AI and cyber and security all in one to deliver outcomes for the customers at the end of the day.>> You know what I love about this market? You guys really kind of illustrate, I think, not only expanded partnership dynamics around how to create value and how customers extract that value, is that we had Bryson, Brighton Cook on, great engineer. He was talking about how AI with AWS is bridging theory to practice. When you get into hard infrastructure challenges, when you look at, say, a Nutanix role in the ecosystem, it's a significant underpinning part of the infrastructure that's going to run stuff. It goes invisible to the people, because it gets distracted away. It's all great, but it's got to run at high reliability, great speed, and these were hard things.
Tarkan Maner
>> And doing it all securely and at scale->> So AI's helping....
Tarkan Maner
>> and at scale.>> Yeah.
Tarkan Maner
>> Yeah.>> So what's the customer impact? Because I'm imagining that, what's a long migration project, "Eh. Keep the old stuff. Pay the tax."
Chris Sullivan
>> Their confidence is going up. The confidence is going up, because the proof is being demonstrated very, very quickly. Right? In 2022, 2023, we did a lot of proof of concepts. We did a lot of learning together. We all invested. We supported customers. We built a lot of use cases. 2023, we accelerated. 2024, we went into production. 2025, now we're dealing with agentic, which is helping us go even faster and inspire confidence much more quickly.>> Well, super great to have you on, Tarkan. Great to see you.
Tarkan Maner
>> Always->> Chris, I'd love to get your vision of second half of the year. It feels like we should have run re:Invent now, because it feels like the year has already passed. I mean, Matt Garman's announcements after region after region, billion dollars after billion dollars in real deployments, and just expansion, just so many nose announcements. What's your focus for the second half of the year for Partners and Alliances? What's your goals? What are you optimizing for?
Chris Sullivan
>> So we're optimizing to deliver these AI-based outcomes with our partners, and it's in every conversation I have, whether it's a technology or a software provider who's reimagining their platform, they want to ensure that they build on AWS so that all of our AI tools are inherently available so that they can customize and deliver increased value propositions and unique differentiators. Our consulting partners are using these technologies to deliver faster for customers. So across my organization, supporting all of those partnerships to make sure we're doing the absolute best job we can to support our customers.>> Yeah. I always say in platform businesses now, you have a large-scale global platform. You got sovereignty right here on the doorstep. It's going to be probably the biggest story that no one's talking about right now. It's going to extend it to next year across all sectors, money, cloud, AIs. That's going to be a big part of next year. Having an ecosystem is proof that the platform's working. To me, I think ecosystems, people look at ecosystems like, "Oh. Yeah. Sales channel."
Of course, is great economics with market placing and enablement. That's always a good formula. But the value of the proof points, if a growing ecosystem is developing, that mean the platform's working. So how do you look at those KPIs? What's a thriving ecosystem look like? How do you ... A thousand flowers are blooming. Everyone's making money. What's the benchmark?
Chris Sullivan
>> That's a great question. I'm not sure there's a singular answer for that. That's a pretty big question.>> That's a whole other show.
Chris Sullivan
>> That's a ... Yeah. We could spend an hour on that. But I think for us, we've moved into being very industry-centric in our go-to-market motions. So from our perspective, a lot of the work that we're doing now is ensuring that, in each partnership that we build and spend time investing and developing, that we are addressing customers' use cases more specifically to help them move more quickly. So the horizontal use cases are interesting. Industry-specific use cases, delivering AI-based outcomes with partners like Nutanix, that's inspiring, and that's what customers look at-
Tarkan Maner
>> And tying to this, very quick one, is, obviously, the geographic aspect of it, because sometimes, the financial services customer in the US might be behaving differently in Japan based on the regulation and so on. That's why you have two vendors, two partners globally entrenched, and they understand that vertical contextual intelligence in each vertical based on customer size. Again, I love it when you talk about use cases and workloads.>> We should . I mean, that whole point is counter, and we should do a whole program on that. Because sovereignty is something misunderstood. Having good sovereignty actually creates a borderless. Because get sovereign first, and it is borderless.
Chris Sullivan
>> Absolutely. Yep.>> So not try to lock it all down.
Tarkan Maner
>> Spot on.>> Sovereignty will be a big theme. Again, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Again, love having the AWS ecosystem again. It's been one of the best in the business. They do have their own products, but the ecosystem is a big part of it. We appreciate what you do. Chris, thanks for coming on, Tarkan.
Tarkan Maner
>> Always good to see you.
Chris Sullivan
>> Thanks for having us.>> My pleasure. Here at the Stock Exchange, this is our East Coast Hub, of course, Palo Alto connecting Wall Street, bringing all the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, of course, doing our best. Thanks for watching.
