>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> On Friday, December 10th, Oracle announced a strong earnings beat and raise, on the strength of its licensed business, and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock was up sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing 280 billion in market value. Oracle's success is due largely to its execution, of a highly differentiated strategy, that has really evolved over the past decade or more, deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogeneous experience across its application portfolio, and becoming the number one platform. Number one for the world's most mission critical applications. Now, while investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being weighed toward licensed revenue and likely keep one finger on the sell button until they're convinced Oracle's cloud momentum, is more consistent and predictable. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibond CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll review Oracle's most recent quarter, and pull in some ETR survey data, to frame the company's cloud business, the momentum of fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps and opportunities that we see. The numbers this quarter was strong, particularly top line growth. Here are a few highlights. Oracle's revenues that grew 6% year on year that's in constant currency, surpassed $10 billion for the quarter. Oracle's non-gap operating margins, were an impressive 47%. Safra Catz has always said cloud is more profitable business and it's really starting to show in the income statement. Operating cash and free cash flow were 10.3 billion and 7.1 billion respectively, for the past four quarters, and would have been higher, if not for charges largely related to litigation expenses tied to the hiring of Mark Hurd, which the company said would not repeat in the future quarters. And you can see in this chart how Oracle breaks down its business, which is kind of a mishmash of items they lump into so-called the cloud. The largest piece of the revenue pie is cloud services, and licensed support, which in reading 10Ks, you'll find statements like the following; licensed support revenues are our largest revenue stream and include product upgrades, and maintenance releases and patches, as well as technical support assistance and statements like the following; cloud and licensed revenue, include the sale of cloud services, cloud licenses and on-premises licenses, which typically represent perpetual software licenses purchased by customers, for use in both cloud, and on-premises, IT environments. And cloud license and on-prem license revenues primarily represent amounts earned from granting customers perpetual licenses to use our database middleware application in industry specific products, which our customers use for cloud-based, on-premise and other IT environments. So you tell me, "is that cloud? I don't know." In the early days of Oracle cloud, the company used to break out, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS revenue separately, but it changed its mind, which really makes it difficult to determine what's happening in true cloud. Look I have no problem including same same hardware software control plane, et cetera. The hybrid if it's on-prem in a true hybrid environment like exadata cloud@customer or AWS outposts. But you have to question what's really cloud in these numbers. And Larry in the earnings call mentioned that Salesforce licenses the Oracle database, to run its cloud and Oracle doesn't count that in its cloud number, rather it counts it in license revenue, but as you can see it varies that into a line item that starts with the word cloud. So I guess I would say that Oracle's reporting is maybe somewhat better than IBM's cloud reporting, which is the worst, but I can't really say what is and isn't cloud, in these numbers. Nonetheless, Oracle is getting it done for investors. Here's a chart comparing the five-year performance of Oracle to some of its legacy peers. We excluded Microsoft because it skews the numbers. Microsoft would really crush all these names including Oracle. But look at Oracle. It's wedged in between the performance of the NASDAQ and the S&P 500, it's up over 160% in that five-year timeframe, well ahead of SAP which is up 59% in that time, and way ahead of the dismal -22% performance of IBM. Well, it's a shame. The tech tide is rising, it's lifting all boats but, IBM has unfortunately not been able to capitalize. That's a story for another day. As a market watcher, you can't help but love Larry Ellison. I only met him once at an IDC conference in Paris where I got to interview Scott McNealy, CEO at the time. Ellison is great for analysts because, he's not afraid to talk about the competition. He'll brag, he'll insult, he'll explain, and he'll pitch his stories. Now on the earnings call last night, he went off. Educating the analyst community, on the upside in the fusion ERP business, making the case that because only a thousand of the 7,500 legacy on-prem ERP customers from Oracle, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft have moved Oracle's fusion cloud ERP, and he predicted that Oracle's cloud ERP business will surpass 20 billion in five years. In fact, he said it's going to bigger than that. He slammed the hybrid cloud washing. You can see one of the quotes here in this chart, that's going on when companies have customers running in the cloud and they claim whatever they have on premise hybrid, he called that ridiculous. I would agree. And then he took an opportunity to slam the hyperscale cloud vendors, citing a telco customer that said Oracle's cloud never goes down, and of course, he chose the same week, that AWS had a major outage. And so to these points, I would say that Oracle really was the first tech company, to announce a true hybrid cloud strategy, where you have an entirely identical experience on prem and in the cloud. This was announced with cloud@customer, two years, before AWS announced outposts. Now it probably took Oracle two years to get it working as advertised, but they were first. And to the second point, this is where Oracle differentiates itself. Oracle is number one for mission critical applications. No other vendor really can come close to Oracle in this regard. And I would say that Oracle is recent quarterly performance to a large extent, is due to this differentiated approach. Over the past 10 years, we've talked to hundreds literally. Hundreds and hundreds of Oracle customers. And while they may not always like the tactics and licensing policies of Oracle in their contracting, they will tell you, that business case for investing and staying with Oracle are very strong. And yes, a big part of that is lock-in but R&D investments innovation and a keen sense of market direction, are just as important to these customers. When you're chairman and founder is a technologist and also the CTO, and has the cash on hand to invest, the results are a highly competitive story. Now that's not to say Oracle is not without its challenges. That's not to say Oracle is without its challenges. Those who follow this program know that when it comes to ETR survey data, the story is not always pretty for Oracle. So let's take a look. This chart shows the breakdown of ETR is net score methodology, Net score measures spending momentum and works ETR. Each quarter asks customers, are you adding in the platform, That's the lime green. Increasing spend by 6% or more, that's the fourth green. Is you're spending E+ or minus 5%, that's the gray. You're spending climbing by 6%, that's the pinkish. Or are you leaving the platform, that's the bright red retiring. You subtract the reds from the greens, and that yields a net score, which an Oracle's overall case, is an uninspiring -4%. This is one of the anomalies in the ETR dataset. The net score doesn't track absolute actual levels, of spending the dollars. Remember, as the leader in mission critical workloads, Oracle commands a premium price. And so what happens here is the gray, is still spending a large amount of money, enough to offset the declines, and the greens are spending more than they would on other platforms because Oracle could command higher prices. And so that's how Oracle is able to grow its overall revenue by 6% for example, whereas the ETR methodology, doesn't capture that trend. So you have to dig into the data a bit deeper. We're not going to go too deep today, but let's take a look at how some of Oracle's businesses are performing relative to its competitors. This is a popular view that we like to share. It shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Think of it as mentioned share. That's on the x-axis. And we've broken down and circled Oracle overall, Oracle on prem, which is declining on the vertical axis, Oracle fusion and NetSuite, which are much higher than Oracle overall. And in the case of fusion, much closer to that 40% magic red horizontal line, remember anything above that line, we consider to be elevated. Now we've added SAP overall which has, momentum comparable to fusion in the survey, using this methodology and IBM, which is in between fusion and Oracle, overall on the y-axis. Oracle as you can see on the horizontal axis, has a larger presence than any of these firms that are below the 40% line. Now, above that 40% line, you see companies with a smaller presence in the survey like Workday, salesforce.com, pretty big presence still, Google cloud also, and Snowflake. Smaller presence but much much higher net score than anybody else on this chart. And AWS and Microsoft overall with both a strong presence, and impressive momentum, especially for their respective sizes. Now that view that we just showed you excluded on purpose Oracle specific cloud offering. So let's now take a look at that relative to other cloud providers. This chart shows the same XY view, but it cuts the data by cloud only. And you can see Oracle while still well below the 40% line, has a net score of +15 compared to a -4 overall that we showed you earlier. So here we see two key points. One, despite the convoluted reporting that we talked about earlier, the ETR data supports that Oracle's cloud business has significantly more momentum than Oracle's overall average momentum. And two, while Oracle is smaller and doesn't have the growth of the hyperscale giants, it's cloud is performing noticeably better than IBM's within the ETR survey data. Now a key point Ellison emphasized on the earnings call, was the importance of ERP, and the work that Oracle has done in this space. It lives by this notion of a cloud first mentality. It builds stuff for the cloud and then, would bring it on-prem. And it's been attracting new customers according to the company. He said Oracle has 8,500 fusion ERP customers, and 28,000 NetSuite customers in the cloud. And unlike Microsoft, it hasn't migrated its on-prem install base, to the cloud yet. Meaning these are largely new customers. Now this chart isolates fusion and NetSuite, within a sector ETR calls GPP. The very giant, public and private companies. And this is a bellwether of spending in the ETR dataset. They've gone back and it correlates to performance. So think large public companies, the biggest ones, and also privates big privates like Mars or Cargo or Fidelity. The chart shows the net score breakdown over time for fusion and NetSuite going back to 2019. And you can see, a big uptick as shown in the blue line from the October, 2020 survey. So Oracle has done a good job building and now marketing its cloud ERP to these important customers. Now, the last thing we want to show you is Oracle's performance within industry sectors. On the earnings call, Oracle said that it had a very strong momentum for fusion in financial services and healthcare. And this chart shows the net score for fusion, across each industry sector that ETR tracks, for three survey points. October, 2020, that's the gray bars, July 21, that's the blue bars and October, 2021, the yellow bars. So look it confirms Oracles assertions across the board that they're seeing fusion perform very well including the two verticals that are called out healthcare and banking slash financial services. Now the big question is where does Oracle go from here? Oracle has had a history of looking like it's going to break out, only to hit some bumps in the road. And so investors are likely going to remain a bit cautious and take profits off the table along the way. But since the Barron's article came out, we reported on that earlier this year in February, declaring Oracle a cloud giant, the stock is up more than 50% of course. 16 of those points were from Friday's move upward, but still, Oracle's highly differentiated strategy of integrating hardware and software together, investing in a modern cloud platform and selectively offering services that cater to the hardcore mission critical buyer, these have served the company, its customers and investors as well. From a cloud standpoint, we'd like to see Oracle be more inclusive, and aggressively expand its marketplace and its ecosystem. This would provide both greater optionality for customers, and further establish Oracle as a major cloud player. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of both AWS and Azure is the momentum being created, by their respective ecosystems. As well, we'd like to see more clear confirmation that Oracle's performance is being driven by its investments in technology IE cloud, same same hybrid, and industry features these modern investments, versus a legacy licensed cycles. We are generally encouraged and are reminded, of years ago when Sam Palmisano, he was retiring and leaving as the CEO of IBM. At the time, HP under the direction ironically of Mark Hurd, was the now company, Palmisano was asked, "do you worry about HP?" And he said in fact, "I don't worry about HP. I worry about Oracle because Oracle invests in R&D." And that statement has proven present. What do you think? Has Oracle hit the next inflection point? Let me know. Don't forget these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search it. Breaking Analysis podcast, check out ETR website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconANGLE.com. You can get in touch with me on email David.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me @dvellante on Twitter or, comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights. Powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(high intensity music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit live in Washington, D.C. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Finally, great to be in-person. We had a remote interviews. We have a hybrid event going on. We're streaming everything all over the place. Next guest is Matt Mandrgoc, who's the Head of Public Sector at Zoom. The company that everyone loves and have happy meetings, happening events. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me today. >> So, I'll say Zoom is in the center of all the action pandemic. Everyone knows what's going on with Zoom. Household name. Company's exceptionally well on the performance side, what's going on in Public Sector? >> It's exciting. You know, over the last 18 months, we've just exploded across all the marketplace, both in federal state, local government and education. And what's exciting is we've just scratched the surface for our customers. So, if you look at what we've done in getting in front of inaugural events, courts, legislation, all kinds of other types of meetings and webinars, getting the message out around the pandemic. It's exciting to know that we have that opportunity to make a difference. Now, part of this whole thing around Public Sector, since we just scratched the surface, what's exciting is how do we start to look forward to the next 12, 24, 36 months in helping our customers? How do we really add value in accelerating that mission value for them? >> You know, Matt, it's interesting. There's two things that happened during the pandemic that I point to and I talk about all the time. The internet didn't break. So, all those service providers that had the pipes, good job, packets from moving around, And Zoom, you guys really saved society and educate, so many use this. Education, government, meetings, courtrooms, I never thought about the speeding tickets. People have to go free Zoom. All this stuff's happening. Now, you've got a partnership with AWS. What's the next level? I'm assuming more immersion, more connections, more integration. What's the next? What's the plan? >> Great question. So, our next step is we looked at this relationship and we were going to customers and go in there, we go in there and then they go in there. There's wasn't any synergy. So, what we decided to do is come together. So, think about this, Zoom and AWS going into our public sector customers, bringing solutions and helping them evolve, innovate, and transform. As they're evolving through this people-centric hybrid network or workplace journey that they're going through. And then the best part about this is these ecosystem of partners that help both of us, and be a part of that process as well. >> Not to toot your own horn, but we just had a remote interview on Zoom connected to our gear here. Here with a guest sitting right here, just now, that's the kind of impact. How is that transformed some of the government agencies, like military for instance? >> Great question. So, we had, one of the things that the, even back in April 2020, the Air force was recognized by military.com for recruiting and how they use to keep their numbers up, to get in front of recruits. And think about this, if I'm a recruiter, I can't drive three hours to go see somebody, find out if they can join or not and come back. Now they could use Zoom, something that people were comfortable with. Ease of use, simple, ingrained in the fabric of people's lives. Now they could have that, keeping their numbers up and being recognized by a two star general for what they did around the recruiting and keeping the numbers up. >> All right. So I'll ask you cause I know you have a federal background with one. You know the industry pretty well, over the years you've stunned. You've seen the old way now, the new way, what's it like at Zoom? Because you guys exploded onto the scene. Been around for a while, but once you hit the tipping point, it was a rocket ship plus the pandemic. Now you come into federal. You've got FedRAMP issues, what do you do? How do you get through all that? >> We were excited about the fact that we're really catapulted us. We were at FedRAMP Impact Level 2, Moderate back in April of 2019. So, what set the groundwork? So when the pandemic occurred, we were able to explode forward, help our customers. Now, we've even looked past that and go, "What do we do next?" DOD Impact Level 4. We have an authorization to operate with conditions from the Department of the Air Force. And it was set as we go through our provisional process with DISA. The exciting part is, our customers can use this. Now, they have a set of conditions. Those conditions are basically guidelines of how to use and set up an IL-4 call. >> So, just Impact Level 4 is just below top secret if I understand that correct, right? >> So, Impact Level 4 allows our customers and the DOD to use it for a CUI, which is Controlled Unclassified Information or FOUO, For Official Use only conversations. >> Got it. And there's six levels, right? >> Yes. >> Five, six is like the ultimate, like- >> yes. >> super top secret, secret. >> Yes. >> Okay, cool. All right. So four is good? >> It's very good. >> So this is interesting, in 2019, you've mentioned that stuff. That kind of highlights the whole Cloud way before the pandemic. The winners and losers tend to see who was winning and who's losing. And I think a lot of agencies realize the ones that were in the cloud early before the pandemic and the ones that didn't get there fast enough are really lagging behind. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, you're absolutely right. And the interesting thing about the pandemic, what it brought forth is a horrible event, but what it brought forth was transformation that customers had to go through. So think of it this way. If a customer, you know, they were at all this equipment sitting on staff, on site and they had to go home. And all of a sudden when they went home, legacy systems could not transform and allow them to evolve into this work from home environment. So, what it brought forth of these systems that were just not capable of being able to scale. And all of a sudden, as they went forward, they were able to go ahead and us. For us, it was easy because ease of use, scalability, innovation, extensibility and security, allowed us to really jump right in there. And as people I mentioned earlier, it became ingrained in the fabric of people's lives. So, the ease of use for everybody made it easy for them to move home. >> Yeah. And that's a big impact. All right. Let me ask about the Amazon Marketplace, AWS Marketplace. News there? Share. >> Yeah. We're excited we announced over the last two days, we've announced our relationship with AWS, and the AWS Marketplace via Kairosoft. So, Kairosoft is a world-class public sector distributor. The great relationship we have there that help us really accelerate this relationship was Amazon already had that AWS Marketplace distributor. We had Kairosoft as our main distributor for all Public Sector, solar suburb. So, the relationship already there and with the integration with Tackle.io, allowed us to really accelerate this relationship and be able to transact for our customers. And you think about the transaction, now our customers can start to leverage AWS contracts and accelerate the pieces that they have across there. >> Talk about the Tackle.io piece, how does that fit in? Cause you've got Kairosoft, Distributor, Zoom, what's Tackle do? They integrate? >> Tackle was just the integration piece allowed us to get these transactions going for back and forth. So, the transaction you think about, a customer will buy through AWS contract. They'll get transacted through the AWS Marketplace at Kairosoft, and it come to Zoom from there. Tackle.io was just the integration piece allowed that to happen. >> Yeah. And just a plug for Tackle.io. Those guys are start-up that's growing really fast. They make it easy. The Marketplace is not that easy. (laughs) Dave McCain would argue with me, but yeah, it's can be unwieldy, but they manage it and make it easier. >> Matt: Well, if you think about typically, if you had direct integration, it would take you many months to get through that process and a lot of times. This helped us, with the Marketplace being at Kairosoft, and Tackle.io, allowed us to really accelerate this relationship. >> I mean, that's a consumption model in the future. I mean, you're looking at, from a Zoom standpoint, you look at the marketplace, that's just more distribution. That's a selling vehicle for you, right? >> Exactly. But it's also, you think, but it's selling people for us. But you think about it from the customer side. If they have a contract already in place and they have consumption, you know, minimums they have to hit and they can be a part of the solution set now that we come together. It really becomes that, "Hey yeah, it's easy to use as a great way." But now we're giving, as we mentioned earlier, an acceleration point for our customers to drive that innovation and quickly procure it. >> Now, you've been around the block on Public Sector. You've seen the waves of innovation over the years. Now, it's kind of like the perfect storm. Multiple waves colliding into a big wave with cloud and with the new normal that's coming. From telemedicine to education, to military, to top secret, to distribution via marketplaces cloud scale, where there's now a new stack emerging, horizontal and vertical. What is your take on that as a industry participant? You're like, "We're putting perspective." Like how big is this compared to what was once other waves? >> Well, you know, what the pandemic brought forth was, as Max mentioned earlier today in his keynote, it really accelerated transformation of people how to do it, which would may take three to five years. Took weeks and months. Now we have the opportunity to go forward and really push this and say, "How do we transform while this pandemic happened?" People are now, the governments are, in education are now looking at transformation on how they accelerate this for the next five to seven years. Because the decisions are making, the money they're settling, and the investments they're making are transforming how they're going to do that. And they realize they cannot do it the way they did it before. >> Well, congratulations in all the success that Zoom, for you and your teammates. Eric, over there as CEO and Collin, and the rest of the team, Ross Mayfield, amongst others. We love you guys. I think you're great company. You really made a dent in the universe in a positive way. I'm looking forward to seeing what's on the roadmap. IOT devices, edge, what's happening? >> Actually, it's great timing of that because we just had our Zoomtopia. So we announced a number of different innovative things that we've done out there, white boarding and such. That really is going to come forward. So I would encourage everybody to go to the Zoom website, look at some of the videos we had from Zoomtopia. Talked about some of the actual, really cool innovative things that we've done. >> John: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, almost imagined was the camera technology, the collaboration technology, things are going to be a little bit different. It's not going to be what people think it's going to be. It might look different. What's your view on that? >> I think it's going to look different than it was a year ago. I think it's going to look different than two years from now. And so, with innovation, we look at, we have hundreds of different innovative things that occurred out there. So we look at, you know, virtual classrooms, things that they have out there to change the environment, to make that feel like it's a real life experience. And that's what makes the difference on us. >> You know, I watched companies like Facebook saying, they're going to drop 50 million into metaverse for the next two years. They're throwing engineers at it. But all it points down to is a better user experience. That's the goal, right? To make that user experience immersive, clean, elegant, simple but effective. >> Yeah. It's intuitive. It's the number one thing I hear form every single person. They want something easy to use when the send them home, they want to be able to turn it on for it to work. And we had one department, one agency has sent people home. They found the productivity was doing so well that they actually have decided to hire people in different parts of the country. It's very specialized group around, it moved the D.C. area. Now it's changed the whole scope of how you bring people in with these different skillsets, how not having a move to an area. We'll be able to leverage them at a remote location, but really embrace that expertise. >> Matt, thank you for coming on theCUBE, Matt Mandrgoc, Head of Public Sector. U.S. Public Sector for Zoom. A name you're going to keep hearing about more and more. It's not going away. Establish themselves as the leader in collaboration, certainly video meetings, conferences, events. Thanks for coming on. >> Matt: Thanks for having me on theCUBE. >> Okay. Well, more coverage from a live personal in-person event with remote Zoom's coming in as hybrid. It's theCUBE coverage of AWS Summit 2021, here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>>Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit here in Washington D. C. We're live on the ground for two days. Face to face conference and expo hall and everything here but keith brooks who is the director and head of technical business development for a dress government Govcloud selling brains 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. Thank you john happy to be E. C. 2 15 S three is 9.5 or no, that maybe they're 10 because that's the same day as sqs So Govcloud. 10 years, 20 years. What time >>flies? 10 years? >>Big milestone. Congratulations. A lot of history involved in Govcloud. Yes. Take us through what's the current situation? >>Yeah. So um let's start with what it is just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS Govcloud is isolated. AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our U. S. Government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications and workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS Govcloud. It is subject to the fed ramp I and D O D S R G I L four L five baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as Seaga's N'est ce MMC and Phipps requirements and gives customers a multi region architecture that allows them to also designed for disaster recovery and high availability in terms of why we built it. It starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand and that's what we delivered. So back in august of 2011 we launched AWS GovCloud which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission critical workloads. Who >>was some of the early customers when you guys launched after the C. I. A deal intelligence community is a big one but some of the early customers. >>So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud. But one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the Nasa jet propulsion laboratory and Nasa Jpl used AWS GovCloud to procure Procure resources ahead of demand which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just I. T. Operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the mars curiosity rover, Nasa Jpl actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the curiosity rover on AWS Govcloud They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data responded to over 80,000 requests per second and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well. That led to additional efficiencies for future. Over there >>were entire kicking they were actually >>hard core missing into it. Mission critical workloads that also adhere to itar compliance which is why they used AWS GovCloud. >>All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the jetty uh stories that were out there was always like level for those different classifications. What does all that mean like? And then this highly available data and highly high availability all these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meetings >>of those? Yeah absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are Fed ramp and Dodi srg fed ramp is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels low moderate and high in the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the fisma requirements of the government. So there's fisma low fisma moderate fisma high depending on the sensitivity of the government data you will have to align to those levels of Fed ramp to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for D. O. D. With srg impact levels to 45 and six uh impacts levels to four and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data levels. Four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems and impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance, luckily with AWS GovCloud celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address Fed ramp high for our customers that require that and D. O. D impact levels to four and five for a sensitive defense guy. >>And that was a real nuanced point and a lot of the competition can't do that. That's real people don't understand, you know, this company, which is that company and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry. It's unfortunate, but it happens. Um, I do want to ask you about the Fed ramp because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote targeting public sector are coming in on the Fed ramp. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work to accelerate that. Any new, any new information to share their. >>Yes. So we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to Fed ramp over the last number of years and GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through Fed ramp high and we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the Fed ramp, Jabor the joint authorization board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency A. T. O. S. And in fact we actually have more agency A. T. O. S. With AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U. S. Government set means that they have the assurance to run control and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So Fed ramp set that standard. It's interesting >>that the cloud, this is the ecosystem within an ecosystem again within crossover section. So for instance um the impact of not getting Fed ramp certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier vendor uh software developer or whatever used to being a miracle, no one no one would know right bed ramp. I'm gonna have to hire a whole department right now. You guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? >>Correct. And you see it with a number of I. S. V. S. And software as the service providers. If you visit the federal marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have Fed ramp authorized third party SAAS products running on GovCloud industry leading SAAS companies like Salesforce dot com driven technology Splunk essay PNS to effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant fed ramp, moderate fed ramp high capabilities to customers both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. >>Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson now it's plunk Govcloud yesterday. That was a nice little positive gesture uh, for you guys at GovCloud, what other areas are you guys moving the needle on because architecturally this is a big deal. What are some areas that you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? >>Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second Govcloud infrastructure region in 2018 And that gave customers that use GovCloud specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance. The ability to build fault tolerant, highly available and mission critical workloads in the cloud in a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud Us East gave customers to regions a total of six availability zones that allowed them accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another D O D program called the cybersecurity maturity model, C M M C and C M M C is something where we looked around the corner and said we need to Innovate to help our customers, particularly defense customers and the defense industrial based customers address see MMC requirements in the cloud. So with Govcloud back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS compliant framework for federal defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability and tooling and resources to spin up environments that are configured to meet see MMC controls and D. O. D. Srg control. So those things represent some of the >>evolution keith. I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of Govcloud outside the United States. Tactical Edge get wavelength coming on board. How does how do you guys look at that? Obviously us is global, it's not just the jet, I think it's more of in general. Edge deployments, sovereignty is also going to be world's flat, Right? I mean, so how does that >>work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question effectively we built Govcloud to respond to our U. S. Government customers and are highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance and that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the US. It starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched a W. S. Outpost in Govcloud last year. So outpost brings the power of the AWS cloud to on premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or Coehlo environments by bringing AWS services, a. P. I. S and service and points to the customer's on premises facilities >>even outside the United States. >>Well, for Govcloud is focused on us right now. Outside of the U. S. Customers also have availability to use outpost. It's just for us customers, it's focused on outpost availability, geography >>right now us. Right. But other governments gonna want their Govcloud too. Right, Right, that's what you're getting at, >>Right? And it starts with the data. Right? So we we we spent a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements and we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with govcloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, >>I've been, I love the D. O. D. S vision on this. I know jet I didn't come through and kind of went scuttled, got thrown under the bus or whatever however you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge, it was pretty brilliant idea. Um so I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. That's where I was supposed to come in, get snowball, snowmobile, little snow snow products as well, how are they doing? And because they're all part of the family to, >>they are and they're available in Govcloud and they're also authorized that fed ramp and Gov srg levels and it's really, it's really fascinating to see D. O. D innovate with the cloud. Right. So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using outposts in the future, I think the D. O. D. And our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to the space we want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial base defense contractors have access to the best debris capabilities like those edge devices and edge capable. I >>think about the impact of certification, which is good because I just thought of a clean crows. We've got aerospace coming in now you've got D O. D, a little bit of a cross colonization if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I got to ask you about just how you view just in general, the intelligence community a lot of uptake since the CIA deal with amazon Just overall good health for eight of his gum cloud. >>Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers are defense customers and all of the customers and the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best of breed capability. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense are the federal agencies and quite frankly we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads that run in Govcloud, >>what's your strategy for partnerships as you work on the ecosystem? You do a lot with strategy. Go to market partnerships. Um, it's got its public sector pretty much people all know each other. Our new firms popping up new brands. What's the, what's the ecosystem looks like? >>Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for Govcloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build I tar compliant E. R. P. Application, software development environments etcetera. We work with software companies I mentioned salesforce dot com. Splunk and S. A. P. And S. To uh and then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Pay It that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the Icann app, which is pretty fascinating. It's a app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allow citizens to interact with citizens services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner uh broad the AWS partner network to bring those type of people >>You got a lot of MST is that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here uh 10 years. Congratulations. What's the coolest thing uh you've done or seen. >>Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate right? And, and tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best of breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government leveraging the count now. It's just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I love the innovation and it's hard to pick a favorite >>Child that we always say. It's kind of a trick question I do have to ask you about just in general, the just in 10 years. Just look at the agility. Yeah, I mean if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any, any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procure Man, you name it. It's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. So, so, but they weren't, they were slow and money now. Pandemic hits this year. Last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped >>exactly. And you know what, what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early Govcloud user and way back in 2015 they launched vets dot gov on gov cloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for manage and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today, even as soon as last year with the U. S. Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year, during 2020 during the pandemic and the Census Bureau was able to use Govcloud to launch and run 2020 census dot gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're saying is it's kind >>of an awakening. It is and I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that way, the younger people like finally like and so it's cooler. It is when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turned into naysayers turned into like out of a job or they don't transform so like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed just like shelf where software you don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing, its not good. Right, right. >>Right. Into that point. That's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and up skilling the workforce to, because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey, >>keith brooks great conversation, great insight and historian to taking us to the early days of Govcloud. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks thanks for having me cubes coverage here and address public sector summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich and today we'll highlight the best cybersecurity solution. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike and Jennifer Dvorak information security architect for the State of Arizona. Thank you so much for being with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yep, thank you. >> Perfect. Well you know obviously a really wild year with COVID and it certainly pushed a lot of boundaries. Cyber security resiliency also a hot topic as ransomware really spiked up. How have you addressed this concern and really accelerated this push with COVID-19 in the backdrop? I'd love it if either one of you would just like to jump in here. >> Well, CrowdStrike was one of our initiatives for 2020 and it was significantly increased, accelerated due to COVID. So we had to roll out in a matter of weeks when we had a matter of months previously and it really provided us the visibility that we needed for folks taking their computers home. We had no way of triaging any of our incidents when the computers were at home. So rolling out CrowdStrike as quickly as possible it gave us remote access, it gave us visibility and that was huge for our organization. >> Tina, if you could weigh in on this as well, that would be terrific. >> Sure absolutely. And you know, Jen with the State of Arizona is one of our premier customers but across the board with the 2021 global threat report that we issue each year, what we saw there was a fourfold increase in the number of intrusions. So to your point about the threat activity and it's not getting better. So what CrowdStrike is on a mission to do is stop regions and protect organizations against these bad actors so that they're, that we minimize disruptions. It's really been tremendous to see and build a ecosystem from a platform approach that started with visibility on the end point that Jen was just alluding to. >> And Jennifer, I'd love to get your insight how the public sector and the private sector can work better in tandem with each other in order to protect customers and also communities against ransomware attacks and other kinds of cybersecurity threats that we've seen coming from Russia for instance. >> Certainly so our state CISO Tim Roemer, he has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors. So that's one of his strategic initiatives and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We don't want to just spend money and then the vendor runaway, we want somebody that's going to be with us every step of the way. We've had some incidents this past year and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don't typically work with a lot. And that was really helpful because we were able to act quickly and address the issues that arose. So just having somebody that's looking out for your best interests and being a true partner is what we're really looking for. And that's the only way that we can circumvent these ransomware attacks. >> And Tina I'd love it if you'd weigh in as well. How do you see your role in this effort to protect the public evolving now in 2021? >> So I love that question and especially with the role of my role brand new in COVID interestingly enough, to create this bi-directional executive alignment with our customers and our internal teams and overall at CrowdStrike our goal, as I said is to stop breaches and it's really to bring, to minimize the frustration that comes sometimes with rolling out security tools. I've been at this a long time and tools like CrowdStrike are really game changers for security teams that are really about protecting organizations. And essentially what we do is we brought a single platform where when it, when the, when our software is deployed to an organization across their laptops, desktops, server and cloud infrastructure, we were born in the cloud kind of before it was cool and now we serve more than 11,000 customers. And that threat activity goes to a single AWS instance where we look across all of the threat activity. And then when we see activity in one area, we can protect all of our customers. That's the power of the cloud. >> Perfect and I'd love Jennifer's insights here too. What steps are you taking now to keep the public protected and the state cyber ready? >> And I like Tina's point about being born in the cloud. So State of Arizona is a cloud first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we're able to be more nimble. We're able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud first, even though it's, it wasn't embraced initially, I think that it's something that we've been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud first initiative that we have. >> And Tina what's top of mind? What are some of the key initiatives that your team and teams are going to be focused on in the years ahead? What's the next phase for cybersecurity? >> Great question and we've talked quite a bit about the end point but where we're headed and really where we've invested heavily the last couple of years and we'll continue moving forward is now that we have, we've brought this game-changing visibility to our security teams on the end point of each one of the systems in their environment where we've expanded the platform to now include cloud services like I mentioned. Now include indicators of misconfigurations which are so detrimental to teams working in a hybrid cloud environment. And then we've also moved into the identity protection space. And essentially what we're doing there is the same thing we've been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we're also in a zero trust principles way looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity. >> Terrific, well, in light of COVID-19, we saw a big spike in ransomware and I'd love to hear specifically from Tina why do we need trusted partners rather than software vendors in this fight? >> You know, it's so important to get out in front of all of the adversaries and most recently that we've seen huge growth in the e-crime actors that are taking advantage of the tools that are unfortunately in the market today, sometimes even free that allow them to hold organizations hostage. And the reason that's so important to partner with organizations and companies like CrowdStrike, is that we've been thinking ahead and we are designed in a way to stop an individual, a breach or adversary attack from occurring but we've been watching how their adversary works and now we can see their activity very early on before they have a chance to gain a foothold in an organization's server or laptop or even a phone or a tablet. And really what we're doing is we're providing protection so that it doesn't even need to move to an analyst to do further review. We just stop it right at the gate before it causes harm. And the reason that this is so important probably is obvious, but we're about making sure that the organizations like the State of Arizona can continue on their business and without these kinds of disruptions. So we haven't designed against one particular adversary but we really designed an approach that works across them all because we've been watching so closely how they move through environments for years. And we use the power of artificial intelligence delivered from the cloud to protect against all things including ransomware. >> Right it's really an evolving process. You constantly have to be vigilant for the next threat. Now I'd love to hear how you see things change with your tech partners and providers at the moment. >> So from a CrowdStrike perspective, we aim to be absolutely the best in class for the products and services that we provide whether that's your products that you can purchase like our endpoint solutions or whether that's services like our 24/7 threat hunting teams or Falcon Complete Teams that basically serve as an extension of an organization's team. But it's absolutely critical that we move this direction and not try to be the best at everything and instead partner. So we have extensive partnerships with Zscaler and Proofpoint and so many others, Okta. I mean the list goes on and on with now hundreds. And we also have a CrowdStrike store. So once you're a customer we've reduced the friction to taking on and trying out new modules, either from us or new options that maybe you haven't considered before from our trusted partners, much like the AWS marketplace we've got the CrowdStrike store and it's a growing set of partnerships where we build those integrations. So, my prior life I was the CISO for Arizona State University most recently. And we spend an awful lot of time integrating these solutions in a CrowdStrike. We're about building those integrations so that the teams within the organizations that can get on to doing innovative things within their space, rather than having to spend all their time tying these technologies together. >> Yeah now shifting to Jennifer late last year we learned that suspected Russian hackers broke into the US government agencies including a county in Arizona. So what measures has the State of Arizona put in place now to ensure that something like that won't happen again or that at least the state is very vigilant and ready to protect citizens and the government against these threats? >> We're definitely partnering with products like or vendors like CrowdStrike. That's what we, we're looking to extend those partnerships. And not only that we're developing our information sharing program across state, local and territorial governments. So we're looking to partner with the cities, the counties. Cybersecurity is a team sport. Cybersecurity is, it takes everyone. It takes the whole state working together. And that's one of the things that we've been trying to build. So working in conjunction with the state fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, we've been working to do more indicators of compromise sharing, any intelligence that we've been gathering from these counties that maybe did have an incident or a breach. We want to make sure that the information is disseminated to everyone so that we can be stronger and protect against it. Additionally, we we're always looking for grants that we can extend so that we're able to extend our products that we use to some of the smaller cities and towns and counties so that they can leverage some of the same technologies like CrowdStrike in their environments at a fraction of the cost or paid for by a grant. >> Terrific, well, Tina how does your experience as a CrowdStrike customer now come into play in your current role? >> Well, how's it come into play? Well, I think that it makes it really easy for me to be a liaison internally and help internal teams understand what it's like to sit as a CISO or as a CIO or deputy CIO. And to understand the kinds of challenges that these teams are (indistinct) these leaders of these teams are facing as they're moving forward with their innovation agenda while making sure to make sure that they're gaining those operational efficiencies that are so important today and wowing their customers all the while, right? So I think really what I bring to it is that level of experience to make sure that the voices of our customers are heard internally and that we continue to build products and services that make sense for the needs of our customers additional capabilities. Like we just released Falcon X Recon is an example of one of our newer capabilities where we're basically looking at their deep and dark web activity and bringing that together in the single platform, single event console that we've leveraged for years now. And in highlighting that activity many, in many cases, pre breach. So before you'd ever see it hit your, in your organization's operational environment, we would detect it through that service. So, I think it's those, all those things combined. >> Terrific well, CrowdStrike won a number of key accolades this year, and I was curious, Tina what you attribute to this huge success. >> Well, I have to tell you that I've been in the security space for far too long. And what I can say is that until CrowdStrike came along, there wasn't a solution, a security solution that we could get software running on an end point that wasn't just frustrating across the board. There were conflicts with other software running or the software would work great for one platform but it wouldn't work for the other. So we really have this new approach. And I think that that's what's made us, in fact I'm sure it's certainly what made me a wildly happy customer is that staff, faculty, employees, if we hadn't told them the software was being rolled out, they wouldn't have even noticed. You know it doesn't impact the machines and it's really provided this amazing experience and bringing all that with 150 different adversary groups that we track and we take that on for the customers and just bring visibility for the immediate things they need to take action on. I think those are all of the things that got us to this point in building out this platform is going to be really amazing to see in the years to come as we expand across other areas within the security space, either developing our own or really driving partnerships to make it easier for our customers. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, I pulled up the stat here for us to examine because I think it's really important for our viewers to understand just how important cybersecurity is and how it's going to be even more important for customers and for the private citizens and public citizens. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year reaching 10.5 trillion by 2025. That's just in about four years. And not only that, cyber crime will become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. So, I mean, it's really terrific that you're stepping up. You know just if you could both, perhaps Jennifer can go first and then Tina, what are the key lessons that you have for even the federal government to take a more proactive stance against these threats? >> Well, I think it's clear that this is a very lucrative venture, business venture. It's treated like a business venture by these criminal actors and they have a formula and it works. So I don't see that it's going to be changing anytime soon. And it's also not something that is highly sophisticated, highly technical. It's very easy. It's very much phishing, you know, users clicking on emails and vulnerabilities and environments. It's really a very easy formula that they continue to repeat. So I think until the federal government has more ways to recoup some of these ransomware payments, or we're able to stop some of these ransomware as a service products from being used, I think it's going to continue. So we're defenders so we need to make sure that we're ready for anything that comes and using products that keep us safe is really the best way and training our users. >> Terrific and Tina? >> Thank you. So we are so passionate about making sure that our customers can sleep better at night. When it comes down to tips it really comes back to the basics in many regards but the basics are sometimes really hard to do. So they sound simple, but they aren't so easy to do. And it's basics like making sure your systems are patched. Every organization has just a growing number of devices and pieces of software and infrastructure and all of those things need to be patched nearly immediately to stay out in front of today's adversaries. And Jen's right, Some are sophisticated, some are not but the reality is if we leave those windows open, we will have adversaries, oh, you know walk into our house if you will. So the basics like that also making sure that you have great backups, right? So if you do run into an instance of a ransomware where your systems are locked that you have the ability to recover quickly, being proactive and making sure that you have the partnership arrangement ahead of time is a third really important thing to do. Many organizations now have IRR retainers that they, incident response retainers that you can use proactively in years where you don't find yourself on your heels in a reactive situation but then it's there when you need it. Sometimes it's hard to find great services when there are the flood of ransomware attacks like we've seen in recent months. And then lastly, and I should have started with this 'cause it's the most important part, train your people. It's so important to make sure that security is just a culture, a part of the culture, just like you lock your car and you lock your house. Making sure that you're thinking about those things that will help keep you safe and your organization safe. >> Really excellent points. Thank you both so much for your insights. That was Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, as well as Jennifer Dvorak, information security architect for the State of Arizona. Again, really appreciate your insights. This was a fantastic conversation with you. And that's all for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards or in this session of that. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and see you very soon. (bright music)

>>Mhm Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 aws Global Public Sector partner awards. I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and I'm delighted to present our guests. They are Jose Montero, ceo logitech the central America and Rafael Ramirez Product manager. Costa rica Ministry of Education. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >>Think in Italy >>religion and belief. Well, let's start with Rafael. Please tell us about some of the key challenges that are affecting the Ministry of Education in Post A Rekha. >>One of the main challenges was to be able to have a product that is always available to schools that is easy to use for schools and at the same time that the product should be user friendly. That is you don't need so much training for schools to use it more. A few things that we thought of was to consider our client because schools have a very limited connectivity so we could not use very highly tech technologies because that required very huge. Both advanced and our clients, the schools would be subject to a service that was not available to them. One of the main things was to consider the client and how to reach them. Thanks to Ed attack, the ministry made an alliance with a company that thought about the innovation and they recommended different services that we can provide with a cloud through the cloud so that we are able to get to take the service to deliver the service to our clients and then they can use the platform that we are building in an easy way and at the same time to take care of the quality they need. Something important about schools was that while they were using the product, they were getting benefit that made schools to be willing to participate. >>Terrific. Well Jose I'd love it if you could give us some insight on some of the services that you are providing to the ministry. >>Sure. Um, so when, when the ministry approaches and um, and we had the opportunity to work with them um, of course, as an AWS partner, we thought, well, this is couldn't be better, right? And um, so we um, we we started to think on all of the different services that AWS offers in the cloud to provide to the ministry to be able to reach this gap. That has been for a long time where you see still, you know, people using Excel, using access Microsoft access as databases, um, instead of using all of the energy and all of the, the power that the cloud has. So when we approach to them and um, and we were able to um um, to show all of these different services that AWS could um, could provide to the Minister of Education. It was it was a perfect marriage. So, um, we we started to work with uh, with them and I think it's been awesome. This is only the first part of of a project of eight stages, We are currently working on stage two and stage Three, which will come in August and in January of 2020, And, um, but we're we're super happy to to see just in this first face, everything that has come and all of the data that has come to help the Ministry of Education in order to take action in the student's lives. >>Yeah, that's really terrific to hear. Um, you know, I'd love to hear from Rafael further about why he thinks it was so important to have cloud data at the Ministry of Education level. >>Okay, I >>will give you an important example for us in our country. We would rather gather the, collect data in paper and take that to the central office and this would enter into an Excel file. This take around two months to process all this later and make decisions. Mm When we started with the first service, which was to record the number of enrollees of the students, we could pay teachers on time, we could get the number of students and know where we had the biggest needs. So this would make a very innovative solution. And when the pandemic started, we had the first active service. This allowed us to react very quickly and we realized that in the first quarter, 19,000 students were not in in our schools because we were from a face to face service to a virtual service. So we could react very quickly. We plant a strategy with the Ministry of Education that was to come back. That is the idea goes to locate where students were. And in the next four months we could reduce the dropout From 90 students to 18,000 students. After that, we initiated a Another stage to retrieve those 18,000 students back to school. This was thanks to having the information online in some countries that may not have this problem. This might be very little. But for us, this was very, very important because we were able to reach the poll a wrist households so as to bring those students back to the school. >>Terrific. Well, that's really fantastic. Um, you know, in a non covid world, how do you think this technology will really help you, uh, to enhance education within Costa rica? See I can't. The important thing. >>This is important in the idea of this innovative product for us has a strategy of having a single file of the student. This allows us to do a follow up of what the student has done during the different school years and we can identify their lacks the weaknesses and we can see which are the programs that are more appropriate. Was to replicate this in the rest of the country without a centralized file. Like we have now, we are looking to have this traceability of students so as to have strengthened our witnesses and replicate our strength in the rest of the educational system. one of the most important things when you is that this technological unit, this implementation not only reached primary school students, but also preschool kindergarten, primary school, secondary school higher education, technical Education. So we reached every single sector where the Ministry of Education was able to detect where there was a need in the country. >>Yeah, Terrific. Well, I'd love to hear more from our other guest Jose monteiro Ceo of ecotech to central America. Uh, you know, if you could give us a, you know, more insight, more depth on the services that you provide. You, you talked about like an eight step plan. If you could just highlight those eight steps. >>Sure. Um, so part of this aid stages that we're going to be developing and um, and we hope that we'll be working with the Ministry of Education and every single one of them. Um, It causes where it brings a lot of technologies. For example, there's one that were planning on using, which is recognition from AWS. Um, the fact of um, there was, there's a lot of students that come to the country that have no documentation. There's no passports, There's no um, document I. D. There's nothing, right? So it's really hard for a um within the same school system to be able to track these students, right? Because they can they can go, they can come and they can, if they want, they can change their name. They can they can do a lot of things that are maybe are not correct. And um and sometimes it's not even because they want to do something incorrect. It's just that the uh the system or the yeah the the way of doing things manually, it allows us to do these types of changes. So for example, with with the service like recognition have been able to recognize their face or or recognize their um their idea with their with their fingerprints um and and being able to a um to interact and give give an actual recognition as the word says to this student. It's amazing. It's amazing technology that allows the Ministry of Education and the students to have a voice to have a presence even though they don't have their actual documentation because of whatever reason. Um There is something behind this that helps them um b be valuable and the b at the same time, a present in the in the system. Right? And so and and with with not only that, but with the grading with um with the attendance, with with the behavior with um with a lot of things that we're creating within these stages. Uh It's gonna be, for example, let me give you a quick example. Um There's, for example, the system that we've created for the dropouts. Um The student doesn't come one day, two days, three days and automatically. Now it'll, it'll become an alert and it will start to shot emails and alerts to the different people involved in order to see, hey listen, this student has not come for the last week, two classes. Um, we need you to go and see what's going on, Right? So this is maybe it is something very small, but it can, it can change people's life and they can change students lives and um, and, and the fact of, of knowing where they are, how they are, how are they doing, how their grades are, where we can help them and activate these different types of alerts that, um, that the system allows them to, um, to do that. It helps incredibly, the life of the student in the future, of this, of this student. And uh, in that exact, that is exactly what we're trying to do here. At the end. It's not only, um, it's okay, all of the technological and all of the different efforts that we're doing, but at the end, that's what it matters. It's, it's the student, right? It's it's the fact that, um, that he can come and he can finish his school, he can graduate, he can go to college, he can, he can become an, uh, an entrepreneur and, and be some, some day here and I at AWS conference and give him give a conference, and, and and that is exactly what the Ministry of Education is looking at, what we are looking at the project per se. >>Yeah, I mean, that's a really excellent point that you're making. I mean, this technology is helping real people on the ground and actually shaping their lives for the better. So, I mean, it's really incredible, you know, I'd love to hear more now from Rafael, just a bit what insight he can provide to other ministries, who, you know, also, you know, ministers of Education, who also would consider implementing this kind of technology and also his own experience um with this project in the AWS. >>Well, the connectivity for us is really important, not only with within the institutions of the Ministry of Education, but we also have connections with the Ministry of Health, we also have connections with the software called Sienna Julia, which allows the identification of people within the country and the benefits provided by the stage. So the country where all by little is incorporating the pieces and these cloud services, we have found that before we developed everything AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem and instead of on the solution of the technology, because services are already available. So at the country level, other ministries are incorporating these services nowadays, for covid management, the Minister of Health has a set of applications that allowed to set links between people that has positive. So this has allowed us to associate the situation with that particular student in our classrooms. So little by little services are converting education and other services into a need that allows us to focus on the problem instead of on technological solutions because services are already there for us to consume >>terrific. You know, I'd love to now shift to our other guest um Jose could you give us some insight what is the next phase for your business when you look at 2021? You know, it's gonna be, I mean, we hope it's going to be a wonderful year. Uh post Covid. Uh you know, what's your vision? >>It's it's interesting that you're saying that Natalie um education has changed Covid has um has put an acceleration to um has accelerated the the whole shift of the technological change in in education. It will not, well I hope it will not go back to the same before Covid. Um it's all of these technologies that are being created that are being organized, that are being it developed um for education specifically um an area where everything has been done the same for a long time. Um we need it, it's crazy to say this, but we needed a Covid time in order to accelerate this type of of organizations right in and now like ministry, the ministries of Education, like like the Minister of Education of Costa rica, they've had this for a long time and they've they've been thinking of the importance of making changes and everything, but until now it became a priority. Why? Because they realized that without these technologies with another pandemic, oh boy, we're going to see the effects of this and, and, and it's going to affect a lot of countries and a lot of students. Um, but it's gonna help to accelerate and understand that for example, internet, it has to be a worldwide access, just like water or electricity is in some, in our countries right now. You know, the fact of a student not having internet, um, we're taking away lot of development for this student. So I believe that after this post covid time education is going to continue to do a lot of changes and you and you'll see this and you'll see this in all of the areas in elementary, in preschool, in university, in high school. Um, you're going to see the changes that this is, um, is starting to do and we've seen it and we've seen it, but now it's going to be at a 23 or four X. So we're pretty excited. We're pretty excited what what the world it's gonna what the world's gonna bring to this table and to this specific area which is education. >>Yeah. That's really terrific to hear a silver lining in this pandemic. And just real quick uh final thoughts from rafael, are you looking to ramp up further? Uh you know, in light of what Jose has said, you know, to ramp up the digital transformation process? >>Yes, I believe this is an opportunity. The country is facing the opportunity, the resistance that we had in the sector of education, the current emergency situation. And they need to use virtual tools Have flattened these curves and narratives. Since 2000 and 20, Costa Rica started a very strong uh teach that trainer process that every four years ago it was very difficult to set to involve all teachers. But nowadays all teachers want to get trained. So we are getting there with virtual trainings with new tools, with the implementation and the use of technology in the classroom. So these kinds of emergencies somehow we have to uh, we know the pain but we know that also the gain of this whole idea of this whole situation. So this opportunity for change is something that we have to take advantage of. Thanks to these cloud services, I believe this is nowadays available and the country realized that these things are closer than what we thought of. An innovation is here to stay and I believe we have to exploit this a little by little >>terrific. Well gentlemen, thank you so much for your insights, loved hearing about the innovations taking place in the classroom, especially overseas in Costa rica. And that of course was Rafael Ramirez, the Product Manager, Costa rica, Ministry of Education, as well as Jose monteiro, the ceo of Ecotech D central America. And of course, I'm Natalie ehrlich, your host for the cube for today's session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks very much for watching. >>Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. This session's award is going to be profiling the Most Customer Obsessed Mission-based Win in the education domain. I'm your host, Donald Klein, with theCUBE. And today we are joined by Fernando Castillo. He's the Business Development Manager at CloudHesive, and then also Luis Muñoz, who's the Information Director at the Unibersidad de Los Lagos. >> Okay, everyone. Welcome to today's session. All right. Fernando, thanks for taking some time out and joining us today. Wanted to start with you and wanted to hear a little bit of background about CloudHesive. Obviously, you're a company that had won an award last year, but you're back on this year, again. Want you give us some a little bit of the story of CloudHesive, and what kind of services you provide? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Thank you very much, Donald. Yes, CloudHesive is a managed consulting service provider in the cloud. We are AWS Partner and since 2014 we have been providing solutions focusing on security, trustability, and scalability in the cloud. Accompany companies to their main objective, which is reducing operational costs and increasing their productivity as they move forward in the adaption of cloud services. >> Very good. Okay. And then Luis, I'm going to turn to you now, want you talk to us a little bit about your role there at the Unibersidad de Los Lagos, and how you started this project? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Good afternoon. I belong to the academic department of the engineering department at the University of Los Lagos and the director of the IT of this school. For several years, for about five years, we've been analyzing the deployment of these automation at universities of Chile. Since it's not a common item in the country, we've done several benchmarking worldwide, especially in Spain, Mexico, Columbia, and places where it's more developed. And eventually, we have to take some demos that allowed us to make some decisions. This topic was not going to be considered in 2020, but it happened because of a political situation, social political in Chile in 2019. So we have to move forward the process, but we had already made a global analysis and this was one of the reasons why we have to get closer to AWS Partners and this allowed us to move this process forward within the university. >> Okay. Very good. All right. Well then, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come back to you, Fernando, and I want you to talk a little bit about the overall goal of what you were trying to help the university with. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, within the main objectives we had in the project was to have a platform that would support a concurrent load of thousands of students, especially in University of Los Lagos. They had requested to have around 15,000 students and the main complication or the main challenge was to keep a virtual attendance, which is now known as learning management system, but also having the possibility of having video classes in two days, something similar to what we are doing today, but with 50 or up to 100 students. This was one of the main objectives of the project. >> Okay, understood. So the goal is here to deploy this platform and open source platform and make it available for about 15,000 students. Okay. Now coming back to you, Luis, there was a time constraint here, correct? You needed to get the system going very quickly. Maybe you could explain why you needed to accelerate this program so quickly. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, literally, the pandemic conditions in the country started to be more evident and more severe since the first week of March in 2020. And so we have to make the decision, the double-sided decision of choosing an infrastructure that we could not buy at that time, given the emergency, logistic emergency of the pandemic at the server's room and to keep a stable platform for that number of users, student and professors of university. So we started conversations to make this scale up and move everything to the cloud. This was the first decision. So we decided to use Amazon and with CloudHesive, we were able to organize the academics charter in the same platform. So as to move no longer than three weeks so that we could give classes, online classes with the students while we were learning this new normal, which was virtual distance education. This was very difficult of every morning, afternoon, and evening of work, but this allowed us not to fall behind in the first semester of the educational needs of the students. With this modality, we have around 5% more students that we used to last year in 2020, in March 2020. And this allowed us to have a more visible structure for those who were questioning this new modality and we were applied to take this new modality in the end. >> Okay. So because of the pandemic, you had to accelerate the deployment of this learning management system very quickly. And you had to learn how to manage the system at the same time that you were deploying it. Okay. Understood. So a lot of challenges there. All right. So then maybe coming back to you, Fernando. Wanted you talk about your role and how CloudHesive helped with this sort of this very rapid deployment of this LMS system. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, talking about the challenges and how we were able to get to the objective, within the plan, deployment and development have to accompany the University of Los Lagos not only with the use of the platform, but also how to change management. One of the biggest challenges was to do a security audit, the deployment of scalable infrastructures. And one of the main topics was, one of the main challenges for CloudHesive that we can now talk about and obtained objective was to do the tests from the point of view of scalability and security getting into 15,000 students, concurrent students, stimulating the workload of the university, keeping 99.5 availability of the platform. Going back to the challenges, it's not only the scalability and stability. Nowadays, the University of Los Lagos platform can continue to grow, as Luis mentioned, without the need to look for new resources. But with our implementation, deployment and development, we already have a scalable resource as they increase the number of professors and students to their university. >> Okay. Understood, understood. Now, maybe talk a little bit just to continue with that point. Maybe talk for a minute about how you leverage the AWS platform in order to be able to accelerate this project. What aspects of your partnership with AWS enabled you to deploy the system so quickly? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, talking about that, we based on a referential architecture of AWS, which is an open source middle platform, and within these competencies and within things, they belong to the education. We also have the problems, the presence of (indistinct), which allows us to deploy new solution and new integrations. So this allowed us as the team to, within weeks, to develop new features that would allow us to deal with each of the requirements of the universities, specifically. So within the first week, the University of Los Lagos had the connectivity with the academic sector. On the second week, they had the infrastructure to support out two-way videos. And on the third week, they already had the platform completely deployed with all the security safeguards that we already have in all of our products and services. So having worked hand-in-hand with AWS allowed us to have success in time with this platform. >> Wow. So that's fantastic. You were able to deploy this entire system from the connection with the academics to the video infrastructure to actually getting all the security implementations in place. You were able to do that in a three week cycle, is that correct? >> Yeah, that's correct. >> Fantastic. Okay. So Luis, coming back to you then, so working with CloudHesive as a partner to help deploy the platform on AWS gave you fantastic speed and agility to get the system working. Maybe talk a little bit now about the challenges of getting students and educators to adapt the system, and what kind of successes you had? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: First of all, they have to, we need to need to know the geography, the landscape of the university. The geography is very varied. We have mountains and lakes and so forth, and connectivity concepts are very difficult in this area. In addition, University of Los Lagos has the characteristic of receiving students from very poor sectors within the region. So this means that more than 80% have a free education, as there are few universities that exist in the country. So one of the technological challenges was for these students to receive the mechanisms and technology to have the connectivity they needed. After that, we had a very big training plan with the deployment company, CloudHesive, with the permissions, and eventually together, we were able to go beyond students and professors. And I remember we had 50% students and professors logged in to the platform, and nowadays, we have 100% students and professors logged in having classes in the platform. But most importantly, nowadays, we have an analytical control because of an integration with CloudHesive, with certain tools that allow us to gather data in real time. And we can do a follow-up of the student that is closer actually from the previous situation when we didn't have this technology. If the student is not logged in, we can reach them directly or indirectly to know, what is happening with his meeting, which is the kind of support, academic, social or economic support that they need. Before, it was harder to get this. So we have a communion between technology and social services that we can provide as a university. And of course, the adaptability of CloudHesive in as much as most of the requirements that we needed. So as to have a good response, they've been very providing, they provided a very robust service in this terms. >> Fantastic. So you were able to reach 100% percent of your target audience very quickly. Is that correct? Great. >> Yes. >> And maybe just to kind of follow up one more. Just talk a little bit about the future of your program. Now that you've worked so hard to establish the system and to connect your students and your teachers and to optimize the system, what is your plan to use it going forward? Are you looking to expand it? What would you say are your goals? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: First of all, for better or for worse, this modality came here to stay. The pandemic may end, but it generated opportunities that nationwide, it moved forward at least seven or eight times faster, these kinds of possibilities. So it's hard to use or waste this opportunity with the face-to-face classes. The university nowadays, thanks to the platform and the work done by CloudHesive and AWS, the university won ministry projects from the Ministry of Education in the country, have a strengthening plans for other kinds of services that were not incorporated before, like the idea of virtual library, research work, academic development work, of training and cultural transformation as well. But eventually, they are happening in this virtually environments. And the university won this possibility through the ministry, bridging the gap between the academic sector and the students. And in order to elaborate a little bit more from the previous question, we did a survey last year and ended not long ago. And most professors said that 80%, more than 80% said that the virtual environment was considered as good or very good. So we have a very good assessment in order to participate in this project that were won by the university and they are nowadays being applied. So this generates development in the academic sector, in research, in library, in content creation, global communication, working together with other universities with work postgraduate courses and other universities without the need of getting out of home. So this is a very competitive advantage that we didn't have before. And since 2020, we were able to develop. >> Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a really well put together program. And I'm excited to hear that you've won an award in your country and that you're planning to expand the system more broadly. I think that's a fantastic success story. So maybe just to wrap this up here with you Fernando, why don't you talk a little bit about, so obviously, you guys were very critical in helping this system be deployed very quickly, but very securely at the same time. How do you see your role going forward in enabling these types of situations, this distance learning type formats? (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Well, just as Luis said, taking this project with the University of Los Lagos, this showed the importance of looking at technological advances and to improve the universities and research centers and how to focus on innovation and bringing the future education down. For us, the data generated in this virtual interactions are very valuable and having a clear perspective, so as to organize this data for, to make more effective decisions that allow us to act in real time. This is what we are focusing on right now. So as to keep, I mean, prove, and being able to provide new tools, the research centers and universities to operate quickly, safely, and cost effectively. >> Okay, fantastic. So really, the real lesson learned here is by working with a partner like yourself, you were able take an open source learning management system and then deploy it very quickly, manage it, and then secure it in a way that allowed the university then to do their work. So I think that's a really great end-to-end delivery story. So I think, maybe if you want to make one last comment, Fernando, about your role in any kind of future expansion for this type of work. (speaking in foreign language) >> Translator: Yes, of course. I would like to thank Amazon and University of Los Lagos, of course for giving us the chance to work together and develop this project successfully. And answering your question, I would like to say that this is a good incentive to build more robust solutions, as long as we have our focus on our clients, when working and as a final comment, I would just would like to thank you and hope to see you again with a new project. >> Okay, well, congratulations to you both on winning this award. And for CloudHesive, this is your second year in a row of winning a Public Sector Award. So with that, I'm going to sign off today and I'm going to thank you both for attending. Today, we've had Fernando Castillo, the Business Development Manager from CloudHesive and then Luis Muñoz, the Information Director at the Uniberisdad de Los Lagos, and thank you both for attending. This is Donald Klein for theCUBE, until next time. (bright music)

>>Mhm. Yes one. >>Hello and welcome. Today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I am pleased to introduce our very next guests. Their names are a lean black S. V. P. Public sector at culebra and Marco Timon are Chief Enterprise Architect at the HQ. D. A. Office of business transformation at the U. S. Army. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich, we're going to be discussing the award for best partner transformation. Best data led migration. Thank you both for joining the program. >>Thank you for having us. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>Well, a lien, why is it important to have a data driven migration? >>You know, migrations to the cloud that are simply just a lift and ship does take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud but not really about how to innovate and leverage what truly the AWS cloud has to offer. Um so a data led migration allows agencies to truly innovate and really kind of almost reimagine how they make their mission objectives and how they leverage the cloud, you know, the government has, let's face it mountains of data, right? I mean every single day there's more and more data and you you can't pick up a trade magazine that doesn't talk about how data is the new currency or data is the new oil. Um, so you know, data to have value has to be usable, right? So you to turn your data into knowledge. You really need to have a robust data intelligence platform which allows agencies to find understand and trust or data data intelligence platform like culebra is the system of record for their data no matter where it may reside. Um no strategy is complete without a strong data, governments platform and security and privacy baked in from the very start, data has to be accessible to the average data. Citizen people need to be able to better collaborate to make data driven decisions. Organizations need to be united by data. This is how a technology and platform like cal Ibra really allows agencies to leverage the data as a strategic asset. >>Terrific. Well, why is it more important than ever to do this than ever before? >>Well, you know, there's just the innovation of technology like Ai and Ml truly to be truly leveraged. Um you know, they need to be able to have trust the data that they're using it. If it if the model is trained with only a small set of data, um it's not going to really produce the trusted results they want. ML models deliver faster results at scale, but the results can be only precise when data feeding them is of high quality. And let's say Gardner just came out with a study that said data quality is the number one obstacle for adoption of A. I. Um when good data and good models find a unified scalable platform with superior collaboration capabilities, you're A I. M. L. Opportunities to truly be leveraged and you can truly leverage data as a strategic asset. >>Terrific. Well marco what does the future look like for the army and data >>so and let me play off. Do you think that Allen said so in terms of the future um obviously data's uh as you mentioned the data volumes are growing enormously so. Part of the future has to do with dealing with those data volumes just from a straight >>technological >>perspective. But as the data volumes grow and as we have to react to things that we need to react to the military, we're not just trying to understand the quantity of data but what it is and not just the quality but the nature of it. So understanding authoritative nous. Being able to identify what data we need to solve certain problems or answer certain questions. I mean a major theme in terms of what we're doing with data governance and having a data governance platform and a data catalog is having immediate knowledge of what data is, where what quality and confidence we have in the data. Sometimes it's more important to have data that's approximately correct than truly correct as quickly as possible, you know. So not all data needs to be of perfect quality at all times you need to understand what's authoritative, what the quality is, how current the information is. So as the data volumes grow and grow and grow. Keeping up with that. Not just from the standpoint of can we scale we know how to scale pretty well in terms of containing data volume but keeping up what it is, the knowledge of the data itself, understand authoritative nous quality, providence etcetera, uh that's a whole enterprise to keep keeping up with and that's what we're doing right now with this, with this project. >>Yeah. And I'd like to also follow up with that, how has leveraging palabras data intelligence platform enabled the army to accelerate its overall mission. >>So there's uh there's sort of interplay between, you know, just having a technology does something doesn't mean you're going to use it to do that something, but often having a place to do work of governance, work of knowledge management can be the precipitating functions or the stimulus to do so. So it's not and if you build it they will come. But if you don't have a place to play ball, you're not going to play ball to kind of run with that metaphor. So having technology that can do these things is a precursor to being able to. But then of course we, as an organization have to do it. So the interplay between making a selection of technology and doing the implementation from a technical perspective that plays off of an urgency, we've made the decision to use a technology, so then that helped accelerate getting roles, responsibilities of our ceo of our missionary data. Officers of data Stewart's the folks that have to be doing the work. Um, when you educate system owners in cataloging and giving a central environment, the information is needed. If you say here's a place to put it, then it's very tangible, especially in the military where work is done in a very uh, concrete task based way. If you have a place to do things, then it's easier to tell people to do things. So the technology is great and works for us. But the choice to to move with the technology has then been a productive interplay with with the doing of the things that need to be done to take advantage of the technology, if that makes >>sense? Well, >>yeah, that's really great to hear. I mean, speaking of taking advantage of the technology, a lien can collaborate, help your other public sector customers take advantage of A. I and machine learning. >>Well, people need to be able to collaborate and take advantage of their most strategic asset data to make those data driven decisions. It gives them the agility to be able to act 2020 was a great lesson around the importance of having your data house in order. Let's face it, the pandemic, we watched organizations that, you know, had a strong data governance framework who had looked at and understood where their data were and they were very able to very quickly assess the situation in react and others were not in such a good situation. So, you know, being able to have that data governance framework, being able to have that data quality, being able to have the right information and being able to trust it allows people to be effective and quickly to react to situations >>fascinating. Um do you have any insight on that marco, would you like to weigh in? >>Well, definitely concur. Um I think our strategy, like I said has been to um use the technology to highlight the need to put governance into place and to focus on increasing data quality the data sources. And I would say this has also helped us uh I mean things that we weren't doing before that have to do with just educating the populace, you know all the way from the folks operators of systems to the most senior executives. Being conversant in the principles that we're talking about this whole discipline is a bit arcane and kind of back office and kind of I. T. But it's actually not. If you don't have the data to make, if you don't know where to get the data to make a decision then you're going to make a decision based on incorrect data and and you know that's pretty important in the military to not get wrong. So definitely concur and we're taking that approach as well. >>I'd like to take it one step further. If if you're speaking the same language then so if you have an understanding what the data governments framework is you can understand what the data is, where it is. Sometimes there's duplicate data and there's duplicate data for a reason, but understanding where it came from and what the linage is associated with, it really gives you the power of being able to shop for data and get the right information at the right time and give it the right perspective. And I think that's the power of what has laid the foundation for the work that the army and MArco has done to really set the stage for what they can do in the future. >>Terrific and marco, if you could comment a little bit about data storage ship and how it can positively dry future outcomes. >>Yeah, So um data stewardship for us um has a lot to do with the functional, so the people that were signing as a senior data Stewart's are the senior functional in the respective organizations, logistics, financial management, training, readiness, etcetera. So the idea of the folks who know really everything about those functional domains, um looking at things from the perspective of the data that's needed to support those functions, logistics, human resources, etcetera. Um and being, you know, call it the the most authoritative subject matter experts. So the governance that we're doing is coming much more from a functional perspective than a technical perspective, so that when a when a system is being built, if we're talking about data migration, if we're talking about somebody driving analytics, the knowledge that were associated with the data comes from the functional. So our data stewardship is less about the technical side and more about making sure that the understanding from functional perspective of what the data is for, what the provenance is, not from a technical perspective, but what it means in terms of sources of information, sources of personnel, sources of munitions et cetera um is available to the folks using it. So they basically know what it is. So the emphasis is on that functional infusion of knowledge into the metadata so that then people who are trying to use that day to have a way of understanding what it really is and what the meaning is. And that's what really what data stewardship means from were actually very good at stewarding data. From a technical perspective. We know how to run systems very well. We know how to scale, We're good at that, but making sure that people know what it is and why and when to use it. Um that's where it's maybe we have some catching up to do, which is what this efforts about. >>Terrific. Well, fantastic insights from you both. I really appreciate you taking the time uh to tell all our viewers about this. That was Eileen Black and Marco Timoner and that, of course, was our section for the AWS Global Public Partner Sector Awards. Thanks for watching. I'm your host, Natalie Early. Thank you. >>Yeah. Mm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, Bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected US GDP growth at six to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery, including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT Project budgets. However skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing, VDI, and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right. In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate, means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE's Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome back Erik Porter Bradley of ETR who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data. Erik, great to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Always good to see you and happy to be on the show again. >> Okay, we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from ETR's most recent March COVID survey and also the latest April data. So Erik, the first chart that we want to show, it shows CIO and IT buyer responses to expected IT spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020, and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement. Erik, what are the key takeaways, from your perspective? >> Sure, well, first of all, for everyone out there, this particular survey had a record-setting number of participation. We had a 1,500 IT decision makers participate and we had over half of the Fortune 500 and over a fifth of the Global 1000. So it was a really good survey. This is seventh iteration of the COVID Impact Survey specifically, and this is going to transition to an overlarge macro survey going forward so we can continue it. And you're 100% right, what we've been tracking here since March of last year was, how is spending being impacted because of COVID? Where is it shifting? And what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend. I know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a 9% number, but what we're seeing is right now, it's at a midpoint of over six, about 6.7% and that is accelerating. So, we are still hopeful that that will continue, and really, that spending is going to be in the second half of the year. As you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at, it was about 1.7% versus 3% for Q1 spending year-over-year. So that is starting to accelerate through the back half. >> I think it's prudent to be cautious (indistinct) 'cause normally you'd say, okay, tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than GDP, but it's really so hard to predict this year. Okay, the next chart here that we want to show you is we asked respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that I'll call out and then I'll ask Erik to chime in. First, there's been no meaningful change of course, no surprise in tactics like remote work and holding travel, however, we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward, like hiring freezes and freezing IT deployments, a downward trend in layoffs, and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new IT deployments and in hiring. Erik, what are your key takeaways? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out here that we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing. Now, the trajectory might be coming down a little bit, but that is really key, I think, to the backdrop of what's happening here. So people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the IT decision makers themselves, but what we're seeing here is that, most importantly, these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring, and that's something that I think is really important to point out. It's showing a real following, and to your point right in the beginning of the intro, we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels, which means early on, they had no plans to launch new tech deployments, then they said, "Nope, we're going to start." and now that stalling, and I think it's exactly right, what you said, is there's an IT skills shortage. So people want to continue to do IT deployments 'cause they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office, but they just don't have the skills to do so, and I think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart, is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling. >> Yeah, so we're going to get into that for sure, and I think that's a really key point, is that accelerating IT deployments, it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey, but before we get deep into the skills, let's take a look at this next chart, and we're asking people here how our return to the new normal, if you will, and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications. And so the first two bars, they're Cloud-friendly, if you add them up, it's 63% of the respondents, say that either they'll stay in the Cloud for the most part, or they're going to lower their on-prem spend when they go back to the office. The next three bars are on-prem friendly. If you add those up it's 29% of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-COVID levels or actually increase, and of course, 12% of that number, by the way, say they've never altered their on-prem spend. So Erik, no surprise, but this bodes well for Cloud, but isn't it also a positive for on-prem? We've had this dual funding premise, meaning Cloud continues to grow, but neglected data center spend also gets a boost. What's your thoughts? >> Really, it's interesting. It's people are spending on all fronts. You and I were talking in the prep, it's like we're in battle and I've got naval, I've got air, I've got land, I've got to spend on Cloud and digital transformation, but I also have to spend for on-prem. The hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported. So this is spending is going to increase. When you look at this chart, you're going to see though, that roughly 36% of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on Cloud. So that is still the clear direction, digital transformation is still happening, COVID accelerated it greatly, you and I, as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going, but spend has always lagged a little bit behind 'cause it just takes some time to get there. Inversely, 27% said that their on-prem spending will decrease. So when you look at those two, I still think that the trend is the friend for Cloud spending, even though, yes, they do have to continue spending on hybrid, some of it's been neglected, there are refresh cycles coming up, so, overall it just points to more and more spending right now. It really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for IT growth. >> So I want to talk a little bit about the ETR taxonomy before we bring up the next chart. We get a lot of questions about this, and of course, when you do a massive survey like you're doing, you have to have consistency for time series, so you have to really think through what the buckets look like, if you will. So this next chart takes a look at the ETR taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple-to-understand terms. So the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating, and the red is the portion that is decelerating. So Erik, what are the key messages in this data? >> Well, first of all, Dave, thank you so much for pointing that out. We used to do, just what we call a Net score. It's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending. Some people found it confusing. Our data scientists decided to break this sector, break down into what you said, which is really more of a mode analysis. In that sector, how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing? So again, I just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the reasoning behind our analysis there. But what we're seeing here goes back to something you and I did last year when we did our predictions, and that was that IT services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021, and that's what this is showing right here. So in this chart, you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery, 2020 had a lot of the clients and they have the biggest sector year-over-year acceleration sector wise. The other thing to point out on this, which we'll get to again later, is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing. We will get to that, so I'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one, but what we're seeing here is IT consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing having a little bit more trouble. >> Great, okay, and then let's take a look at that services piece, and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes, Erik, what you were just talking about. And we saw this in IBM's earnings, where still more than 60% of IBM's business comes from services and the company beat earnings, in part, due to services outperforming expectations, I think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pent-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for IBM and other services companies, it's not just IBM, right, Erik? >> No, it's not, but again, I'm going to point out that you and I did point out IBM in our predictions when we did in late December, so, it is nice to see. One of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on IBM at the moment is because they are in the process of spinning out this large unit, and so there's a little bit of a corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline. But I would also want to point out here, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant 'cause they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both IT consulting and outsourced IT services. So we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those. So again, at the Tata, Infosys and Cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well. >> So we've been talking a little bit about this skills shortage, and this is what's, I think, so hard for forecasters, is that in the one hand, There's a lot of pent up demand, Scott Gottlieb said it's like Woodstock coming out of the COVID, but on the other hand, if you have a talent gap, you've got to rely on external services. So there's a learning curve, there's a ramp up, it's an external company, and so it takes time to put those together. So this data that we're going to show you next, is really important in my view and ties what we were saying at the top. It asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans. The light blue is "We're increasing staff", the gray is "No change" and the magenta or whatever, whatever color that is that sort of purplish color, anyway, that color is decreasing, and the picture is very positive across the board. Full-time staff, offshoring, contract employees, outsourced professional services, all up trending upwards, and this Erik is more evidence of the services bounce back. >> Yeah, it's certainly, yes, David, and what happened is when we caught this trend, we decided to go one level deeper and say, all right, we're seeing this, but we need to know why, and that's what we always try to do here. Data will tell you what's happening, it doesn't always tell you why, and that's one of the things that ETR really tries to dig in with through the insights, interviews panels, and also going direct with these more custom survey questions. So in this instance, I think the real takeaway is that 30% of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months. That's really powerful, that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period. So we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time, and I don't see it slowing down. You and I are speaking about we have to increase Cloud spend, we have to increase hybrid spend, there are refresh cycles coming up, and there's just a real skills shortage. So this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for IT services and consulting. >> You know, Erik, when I came out of college, somebody told me, "Read, read, read, read as much as you can." And then they said, "Read the Wall Street Journal every day." and so I did it, and I would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper, and what happens is you begin to connect the dots. And so the reason I bring that up is because I've now taken a bath in the ETR data for the better part of two years and I'm beginning to be able to connect the dots. The data is not always predictive, but many, many times it is. And so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names. A lot of times people don't like it because they're either marketing people at organizations, say, "Well, data's wrong." because that's the first thing they do, is attack the data. But you and I know, we've made some really great calls, work from home, for sure, you're talking about the services bounce back. We certainly saw the rise of CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, well before people were talking about that, same thing with video conferencing. And so, anyway, this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on companies. So first, how does ETR derive this data and how should we interpret it, and what are some of your takeaways? >> Sure, first of all, how we derive the data, are systematic survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis, and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well. We do find that our data, because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions, is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months, three months in the future, not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened, they're looking in the past, ETR really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so. So thank you for that question, It's a enjoyable lead in, but to get to the fun stuff, like you said, what we do here is we put ratings on the datasets. I do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue. It is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items, so this is only to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself, not the company, that's not what we're in the game of doing. So I think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they take a look at this. We're just talking about what we can control, which is our data. We're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list. One, we're going to go back to that you and I spoke about, I guess, about six months ago, or maybe even earlier, which was the observability space. You and I were noticing that it was getting very crowded, a lot of new entrants, there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard players in the space, and that is continuing. So I think in a minute, we're going to move into that observability space, but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other. We're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing, where we're capturing some spend deceleration, and then ultimately, we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that. But yeah, these are the highlighted vendors for April, we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data, but they're not usually whipsawed around, the data doesn't move that quickly. >> Yeah, so you can see some of the big names in the left-hand side, some of the SAS companies that have momentum. Obviously, ServiceNow has been doing very, very well. We've talked a lot about Snowflake, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all very positive, as well as several others. I guess I'd add some things. I mean, I think if thinking about the next decade, it's Cloud, which is not going to be like the same Cloud as the last decade, a lot of machine learning and deep learning and AI and the Cloud is extending to the edge and the data center. Data, obviously, very important, data is decentralized and distributed, so data architectures are changing. A lot of opportunities to connect across Clouds and actually create abstraction layers, and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to Moore's law. It's probably instead of doubling every two years, it's quadrupling every two years, and so that is a huge factor, especially as it relates to powering AI and AI inferencing at the edge. This is a whole new territory, custom Silicon is really becoming in vogue and so something that we're watching very, very closely. >> Yeah, I completely, agree on that and I do think that the next version of Cloud will be very different. Another thing to point out on that too, is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and organizations are extremely serious about that now. It seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in, every company is a data company, and that also bodes well for the storage goal. We do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage, and yes, hopefully that'll become portable across multi-Cloud and hybrid as well. >> Now, as Erik said, the ETR data, it's really focused on that top-line spend. So if you look on the right side of that chart, you saw NetApp was kind of negative, was very negative, right? But it is a company that's in transformation now, they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations, that's why the stock has been doing better, but at the macro, from a spending standpoint, it's still stout challenged. So you have big footprint companies like NetApp and Oracle is another one. Oracle's stock is at an all time high, but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles are relative to, like for instance, Snowflake, much, much smaller, not as high growth, but they're managing expectations, they're managing their transition, they're managing profitability. Zoom is another one, Zoom looking negative, but Zoom's got to use its market cap now to transform and increase its TAM. And then Splunk is another one we're going to talk about. Splunk is in transition, it acquired SignalFX, It just brought on this week, Teresa Carlson, who was the head of AWS Public Sector. She's the president and head of sales, so they've got a go-to-market challenge and they brought in Teresa Carlson to really solve that, but Splunk has been trending downward, we called that several quarters ago, Erik, and so I want to bring up the data on Splunk, and this is Splunk, Erik, in analytics, and it's not trending in the right direction. The green is accelerating spend, the red is in the bars is decelerating spend, the top blue line is spending velocity or Net score, and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, first I want to go back. There's a great point, Dave, about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective. I used to be an equity analyst, that is not what we do here. And the main word you said is expectations, right? Stocks will trade on how they do compare to the expectations that are set, whether that's buy-side expectations, sell-side expectations or management's guidance themselves. We have no business in tracking any of that, what we are talking about is the top-line acceleration or deceleration. So, that was a great point to make, and I do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there. Now, to move to Splunk, yes, I've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on Splunk even before the data turns. So this has been a about a year-long, our analysis and review on this name and I'm dating myself here, but I know you and I are both rock and roll fans, so I'm going to point out a Led Zeppelin song and movie, and say that the song remains the same for Splunk. We are just seeing recent spending attentions are taking yet another step down, both from prior survey levels, from year ago levels. This, we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single group, and we went to one of our other slide analysis on the ETR+ platform, and you do by customer sub-sample, in analytics, it's dropping in every single vertical. It doesn't matter which one. it's really not looking good, unfortunately, and you had mentioned this is an analytics and I do believe the next slide is an information security. >> Yeah, let's bring that up. >> And unfortunately it's not doing much better. So this is specifically Fortune 500 accounts and information security. There's deep pockets in the Fortune 500, but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that I personally moderate for ETR, people are upset, that they didn't like the strong tactics that Splunk has used on them in the past, they didn't like the ingestion model pricing, the inflexibility, and when alternatives came along, people are willing to look at the alternatives, and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their SIM and security. >> Yeah, so I think again, I pointed Teresa Carlson. She's got a big job, but she's very capable. She's going to meet with a lot of customers, she's a go-to-market pro, she's going to to have to listen hard, and I think you're going to see some changes there. Okay, so sorry, there's more bad news on Splunk. So (indistinct) bring this up is Net score for Splunk and Elastic accounts. This is for analytics, so there's 106 Elastic accounts in the dataset that also have Splunk and it's trending downward for Splunk, that's why it's green for Elastic. And Erik, the important call out from ETR here is how Splunk's performance in Elastic accounts compares with its performance overall. The ELK stack, which obviously Elastic is a big part of that, is causing pain for Splunk, as is Datadog, and you mentioned the pricing issue, well, is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental? >> It's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our ITDMs teams that take the survey. So yes, you did a great job with this analysis. What we're looking at is the spending within shared accounts. So if I have Splunk already, how am I spending? I'm sorry if I have Elastic already, how am I spending on Splunk? And what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12% Net score, whereas Splunk overall, has a 32% Net score among all of its customers. So what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where Elastic is draining spend from Splunk and usage from them. The reason we used Elastic here is because all observabilities, the whole sector seems to be decelerating. Splunk is decelerating the most, but Elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency, so that's why we decided to choose these two, but you pointed out, yes, it's also Datadog. Datadog is Cloud native. They're more dev ops-oriented. They tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to Splunk. So a really good point. Dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and Splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their Cloud services, they are also changing their pricing model, right? They're trying to make things a little bit more flexible, moving off ingestion and moving towards consumption. So they are trying, and the new hires, I'm not going to bet against them because the one thing that Splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey, they're still very well entrenched. So they do have a lot of accounts, they have their foothold. So if they can find a way to make these changes, then they will be able to change themselves, but the one thing I got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing, and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves. It really seems pretty hard to get away from that, and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be even more disruptive. >> I think I want to key on the pricing for a moment, and I've been pretty vocal about this. I think the old SAS pricing model where you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years, pay up front, or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky, that's a one-way street and I think it's a flawed model. I like what Snowflake's doing, I like what Datadog's doing, look at what Stripe is doing, look at what Twilio is doing, you mentioned it, it's consumption-based pricing, and if you've got a great product, put it out there and damn, the torpedoes, and I think that is a game changer. I look at, for instance, HPE with GreenLake, I look at Dell with Apex, they're trying to mimic that model and apply it to infrastructure, it's much harder with infrastructure 'cause you've got to deploy physical infrastructure, but that is a model that I think is going to change, and I think all of the traditional SAS pricing is going to come under disruption over the next better part of the decades, but anyway, let's move on. We've been covering the APM space pretty extensively, application performance management, and this chart lines up some of the big players here. Comparing Net score or spending momentum from the April 20th survey, the gray is, sorry, the gray is the April 20th survey, the blue is Jan 21 and the yellow is April 21, and not only are Elastic and Datadog doing well relative to Splunk, Erik, but everything is down from last year. So this space, as you point out, is undergoing a transformation. >> Yeah, the pressures are real and it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that, but also the direct feedback we get from the community. Pretty much all the interviews I do, I've done a few panels specifically on this topic, for anyone who wants to dive a little bit deeper. We've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors. People are using a Datadog for certain aspects, they are using Elastic where they can 'cause it's cheaper. They're using Splunk because they have to, but because it's so expensive, they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into Splunk, which is dangerous, particularly on the security side. If I have to decide what to put in and whatnot, that's not really the right way to have security hygiene. So this space is just getting crowded, there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well, and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is Elastic on a survey-over-survey basis with a slight, slight uptick. Everywhere else, year-over-year and survey-over-survey, it's showing declines, it's just hard to ignore. >> And then you've got Dynatrace who, based on the interviews you do in the (indistinct), one-on-one, or one-on-five, the private interviews that I've been invited to, Dynatrace gets very high scores for their roadmap. You've got New Relic, which has been struggling financially, but they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this APM space, and then of course, you've got Cisco with AppD, which is a strong business for them, and then as you mentioned, you've got startups coming in, you got ChaosSearch, which Ed Walsh is now running, leave the data in place in AWS and really interesting model, Honeycomb is getting really disruptive, Jeremy Burton's company, Observed. So this space is it's becoming jumped ball. >> Yeah, there's a great line that came out of one of them, and that was that the lines are blurring. It used to be that you knew exactly that AppDynamics, what they were doing, it was APM only, or it was logging and monitoring only, and a lot of what I'm hearing from the ITDM experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names. They all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other. And the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring, but as you know, infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more, and as infrastructure becomes code, there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring. So we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space, which really doesn't bode well, and a great point about New Relic, their tech gets good remarks. I just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now. As one of my experts said, a CTO of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still standalone, that there needs to be some M and A or convergence in this space. >> Okay, now we're going to call out some of the data that really has jumped out to ETR in the latest survey, and some of the names that are getting the most queries from ETR clients, many of which are investor clients. So let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names, Zoom. Let's look at this. Erik is the ride over for Zoom? >> Ah, I've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually. I do believe it is, and we'll get into it, but again, pointing out, great, Dave, the reason we're presenting today Splunk, Elastic and Zoom, they are the most viewed on the ETR+ platform. Trailing behind that only slightly is F5, I decided not to bring F5 to the table today 'cause we don't have a rating on the data set. So then I went one deep, one below that and it's pure. So the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in, which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well. So to get to Zoom, yeah, I call Zoom the pandemic bull market baby. This was really just one that had a meteoric ride. You look back, January in 2020, the stock was at $60 and 10 months later, it was like 580, that's in 10 months. That's cooled down a little bit into the mid-300s, and I believe that cooling down should continue, and the reason why is because we are seeing huge deceleration in our spending intentions. They're hitting all-time lows, it's really just a very ugly dataset. More importantly than the spending intentions, for the first time, we're seeing customer growth in our survey flatten. In the past, we knew that the deceleration of spend was happening, but meanwhile, their new customer growth was accelerating, so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that. This is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory, and that in tandem with just dominance from Microsoft in every sector they're involved in, I don't care if it's IP telephony, productivity apps or the core video conferencing, Microsoft is just dominating. So there's really just no way to ignore this anymore. The data and the commentary state that Zoom is facing some headwinds. >> Well, plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that, "Hey, we're, we're using the freebie version of Zoom, and we're not paying them." And that combined with Teams, I mean, it's... I think, look, Zoom, they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their TAM, but let's move on. Here's the data on Pure Storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions. Pure announced it's earnings in May, IBM just announced storage, it was way down actually. So still, Pure, more positive, but I'll on that comment in a moment, but what does this data tell you, Erik? >> Yeah, right now we started seeing this data last survey in January, and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself, and it's just really continuing. So we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey, which is a really good spot to be. Pure is also a leading position among its sector peers, and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players, Pure has the highest positive public Cloud correlation. So what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public Cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and Pure is best positioned. So as you and I both know, digital transformation Cloud spending is increasing, you need to be aligned with that. And among all storage sector peers, Pure is best positioned in all of those, in spending intentions and adoptions and also public Cloud correlation. So yet again, to start another really strong dataset, and I have an anecdote about why this might be happening, because when I saw the data, I started asking in my interviews, what's going on here? And there was one particular person, he was a director of Cloud operations for a very large public tech company. Now, they have hybrid, but their data center is in colo, So they don't own and build their own physical building. He pointed out that during COVID, his company wanted to increase storage, but he couldn't get into his colo center due to COVID restrictions. They weren't allowed. You had 250,000 square feet, right, but you're only allowed to have six people in there. So it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done. He said he would buy storage, but then the colo would say, "Hey, you got to get it out of here. It's not even allowed to sit here. We don't want it in our facility." So he has all this pent up demand. In tandem with pent up demand, we have a refresh cycle. The SSD depreciation cycle is ending. SSDs are moving on and we're starting to see a new technology in that space, NVMe sorry, technology increasing in that space. So we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle, and this particular ITDM that I spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that storage could be a good sector for some time to come. >> That's really interesting, thank you for that extra metadata. And I want to do a little deeper dive on storage. So here's a look at storage in the industry in context and some of the competitive. I mean, it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted, Cloud has been eating away that flash headroom. It used to be you'd buy storage to get more spindles and more performance and we're sort of forced to buy more, flash, gave more headroom, but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle. So that's good news. So ETR combines, just for people's benefit here, combines primary and secondary storage into a single category. So you have companies like Pure and NetApp, which are really pure play primary storage companies, largely in the sector, along with Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik, which are kind of secondary data or data protection. So my quick thoughts here that Pure is elevated and remains what I call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but that's positive tailwinds there, so that's good news. Rubrik is very elevated but down, it's big competitor, Cohesity is way off its highs, and I have to say to me, Veeam is like the Steady Eddy consistent player here. They just really continue to do well in the data protection business, and the highs are steady, the lows are steady. Dell is also notable, they've been struggling in storage. Their ISG business, which comprises servers and storage, it's been softer in COVID, and during even this new product rollout, so it's notable with this new mid range they have in particular, the uptick in Dell, this survey, because Dell is so large, a small uptick can be very good for Dell. HPE has a big announcement next month in storage, so that might improve based on a product cycle. Of course, the Nimble brand continues to do well, IBM, as I said, just announced a very soft quarter, down double digits again, and they're in a product cycle shift. And NetApp, it looks bad in the ETR data from a spending momentum standpoint, but their management team is transforming the company into a Cloud play, which Erik is why it was interesting that Pure has the greatest momentum in Cloud accounts, so that is sort of striking to me. I would have thought it would be NetApp, so that's something that we want to pay attention to, but I do like a lot of what NetApp is doing, and other than Pure, they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage. So long-winded, intro there, Erik, but anything you'd add? >> No, actually I appreciate it as long-winded. I'm going to be honest with you, storage is not my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes, but I actually think that a lot of what you said is spot on. We do capture a lot of large organizations spend, we don't capture much mid and small, so I think when you're talking about these large, large players like NetApp not looking so good, all I would state is that we are capturing really big organization spending attention, so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest, in those accounts, and at least according to our data, we're not seeing it in. It's longterm depression, as you can see, NetApp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis. So, I can go dig around a little bit more, but right now the names that I'm hearing are Pure, Cohesity. I'm hearing a little bit about Hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space, but I'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one, but pure Cohesity are the ones I'm hearing a lot from our community. >> So storage is transforming to Cloud as a service. You've seen things like Apex in GreenLake from Dell and HPE and container storage. A little, so not really a lot of people paying attention to it, but Pure bought a company called Portworx which really specializes in container storage, and there's many startups there, they're trying to really change the way. David Flynn, has a startup in that space, he's the guy who started Fusion-io. So a lot of transformations happening here. Okay, I know it's been a long segment, we have to summarize, and let me go through a summary and then I'll give you the last word, Erik. So tech spending appears to be tracking US GDP at 6 to 7%. This talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating IT deployments, so that's kind of good news actually for services companies. Digital transformation, it remains a priority, and that bodes, well, not only for services, but automation. UiPath went public this week, we profiled that extensively, that went public last Wednesday. Organizations that sit at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources. They're running the business, growing the business, transforming the business, and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors, and that remains a theme that we're watching. Erik, your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending, 'cause there's one thing I think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small. So it seems like early on in the COVID recovery or COVID spending, it was the deep pockets that moved first, right? Fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work, they started spending first. Around that in the Fortune 500, we're only seeing about 5% spend, but when you get into mid and small organizations, that's creeping up to eight, nine. So I just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch up right now. I also would point out that this is heavily skewed to North America spending. We're seeing laggards in EMEA, they just don't seem to be spending as much. They're in a very different place in their recovery, and I do think that it's important to point that out. Lastly, I also want to mention, I know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out, with Pure doing container storage, we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called Emerging Technology, and that's for the private names. That's going to be launching in May, for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors, but also private equity players. Keep an eye out for that. We do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well. And then lastly, one comment, because you mentioned the UiPath IPO, it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their dataset, but ultimately, the data was muted, unfortunately, and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an IPO like we saw with Snowflake, the data was resoundingly strong. We had no choice, but to listen to what the data said for Snowflake, despite the hype. We didn't see that for UiPath and we wanted to, and I'm not making a large call there, but I do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two, that when snowflake was heading to its IPO, the data was resoundingly positive, and for UiPath, we just didn't see that. >> Thank you for that, and Erik, thanks for coming on today. It's really a pleasure to have you, and so really appreciate the collaboration and look forward to doing more of these. >> Yeah, we enjoy the partnership greatly, Dave. We're very happy to have you on the ETR family and looking forward to doing a lot, lot more with you in the future. >> Ditto. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you have to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast, and please subscribe to the series. Check out ETR website it's etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I could see you in Clubhouse. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Porter Bradley for the CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. If the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 20, 20 special coverage sponsored by AWS worldwide public sector. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. To the cubes, virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, this is the cube virtual. I'm your host John farrier with the cube. The cube normally is there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is the cube virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, worldwide public sector day. And the theme from Teresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special cube alumni and special guests. Alan Cohen. Who's a partner at data collective venture capital or DCVC, um, which we've known for many, many years, founders, Matt OCO and Zachary Bogue, who started the firm, um, to over at about 10 years ago. We're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm thought big data, data, collective big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm. Alan. You're now a partner retired, retired, I mean a venture capitalist over at being a collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you as well. John, thanks for being so honest this morning. >>I love to joke about being retired because the VC game, it's not, um, a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data collective has a unique, um, philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding, huge, you got huge demand and education, real societal benefits, uh, cybersecurity contested in space, more contention and congestion and space. Um, there's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on at the cloud. And AI are enabling, you're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? >>Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever 40, 50 years in the it and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms, and we, we kind of created software with it. So we took Adam's and we turned them into bets. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're targeting bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like, like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better met medicines and vaccines we're investor, um, and a company called abs Celera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J and J has, um, taken to market. Uh, people are actually spaces, a commercial business. >>If it's not a science fiction, novel we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and compel a space so people can see right out. So you're sitting on your terrorists of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. Um, you talked about gene sequencing, uh, folding of proteins. Um, so I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems, and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. Uh, and we would have been able to do that before, without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and on now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world, from the virtual world. Okay. >>Pella space was featured in the keynote by Teresa Carlson. Um, great to tie that in great tie in there, but this is the kind of hard problems. And I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, you know, it reminds me of the old days where, you know, when you didn't go back to the.com, when that bubble was going on, and then you got the different cycles and the different waves, um, the consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B to B's hot, you got the enterprise is super hot, mainly because of Amazon >>Sure. Into the Jordash IPO. Obviously this morning, >>Jordache IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers. They started in Palo Alto. We know them since the carton Jordache, these are companies that are getting massive, uh, zoom. Um, the post pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that this some economic values are digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and philosophy of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's your, it's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations, >>Well, there's always hard problems, but what's different now. And from a perspective of venture and, and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Uh, traditionally you think about these things as like a division of a company like J and J or general electric or some very massive global corporation, and because of the capabilities that are available, um, in the computing world, um, as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other, uh, any other type of background, uh, for, for founders, they can go after these things, they can create. Uh, we, uh, we have a company called pivot bio, uh, and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, Sean, they have created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. Um, so it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and wheat. >>So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning. And where did that machine learning come from? So what does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. Uh, that means water and air management, all major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that, um, as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination. And you have to actually, you know, you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them and then tear it apart to its actual molecules, just the little inside joke, right? And, and then move that through. >>And, you know, this means that you have to be able to invest in work on things. You know, these companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. Um, but though, but we're seeing that, uh, you know, that everywhere, I mean, rocket lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC, which we actually launched the last couple of space, um, satellites, they print their rocket engines with a 3d printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that, that come to bear? Um, and it started as a dangerous scale style of investments. So, you know, Peter Beck, the founder of that company had a dream to basically launch a rocket, you know, once a year, once a month, once a week, and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, um, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet from a, not just from a security point of view, but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after it now starts to become enabled. Yeah. >>I love the, uh, your investment in Capella space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He he's up, he's up there now. He can see everything, but now I've got to get the data down because say, say the wildfires in California, or whether, um, things happening around the globe now that you have the, uh, the observation space, you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. >>Well, let me, let me, let me give you something. That's also, so w you know, we are in a fairly difficult time in this country, right? Because of the covert virus, uh, we are going to maybe as quickly as next week, start to deliver, even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation, literally in a year, how did all these things, I mean, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes, and maybe, you know, uh, of the past century, uh, how did that happen? How did it all day? Well, you know, some, I mean, the ability to use, um, computing power in, in assistance, in laboratory, in, in, uh, in, um, development of, of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem, because the traditional methods of creating vaccines that take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right. We're in a really difficult situation, but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because of the ability of people to apply technology and to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. So great points, absolutely amazing. >>Let's just, let's just pause that let's double down on that and just unpack that, think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlight is on Andy Jesse's keynote carrier, which makes air conditioning. They also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging their cloud is they may call it cold chain managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food. And in this case vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it does the waste involved in food alone was a problem, but the vaccine, they had the cold, the cold, cold, cold chain. Can you hear me? >>Maybe this year, the cold chain is more valuable than the blockchain. Yeah. >>Cold don't think he was cold chain. Sounds like a band called play. Um, um, I had to get that in and Linda loves Coldplay. Um, but if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago, um, you know, YouTube was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, so, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have zoom education would be where we would be Skyping. Um, there's no bandwidth. So, I mean, you, you know, the, the bandwidth Wars you would live through those and your career, you had no bandwidth. You had no video conferencing, no real IOT, no real supply chain management and therapeutics would have taken what years. What's your reaction to, to that and compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. >>Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, you know, we're gonna lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of, um, uh, pain for people and potentially death because of the ability to accelerate, um, these abilities to react. I think the biggest and the, the thing that I look for and I hope for, so when Theresa says, how do you think big, the biggest lesson I think we're going to we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds of parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view and the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. >>Like there isn't like people don't love zoom school, but without zoom school, what we're going to do, there is no school, right? So, which is why zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on a too much, or you've got zoom fatigue, does it really matter the concept? What we're going to do, call into a conference call and listen to your teacher, um, right in, you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that, the ability to repurpose, um, our supply chain and, you know, uh, we, we, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the, in the global supply chain. You're going to see, uh, whether it's re domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up, uh, because we're never going to go without PPE again, and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurposed from B2B to B to C and their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those are forms of resilience. >>And, and, and, and taking that to the next level. If you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event, and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted, and then Dr. Matt wood, who's the machine learning lead there in Swami says, Hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now, and with AI and machine learning, every industry, vertical global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying that in the queue for a long time, that that's just going to happen. So we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal, scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization really high-fidelity decisions. Or as you say, down to the molecule level or atomic level, but this is clear what, what I found interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investor leading investor >>Investor, and you made up a word. I like it. Okay. >>Jesse talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You've got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real-world problems. Speed. Don't complexify. That's his message. I said to him, in my interview, you need a wartime conciliary cause he's a big movie buff. I quote the godfather. Yeah. Don't you don't want to be the Tom Hagen. You don't want to be that guy, right? You're not a wartime. Conciliary this is a time there's times in companies' histories where there's peace and there's wartime, wartime being the startup, trying to find its way. And then they get product market fit and you're growing and scaling. You're operating, you're hiring people to operate. Then you get into a pivot or a competitive situation. And then you got to get out there and, and, and get dirty and reinvent or re-imagine. And then you're back to peace. Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way, you know, and some people don't want to hold on to hold onto the past. That's the way we did it before I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new ways, terrible, the mainframe, we've got to keep the mainframe. So you have a kind of a, um, an accelerated leadership, uh, thin man mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because, >>Sorry. So if you're going to have your F R R, if you're going to, if you are going to use, um, mob related better for is I'll share one with you from the final season of the Soprano's, where Tony's Prado is being hit over the head with a bunch of nostalgia from one of his associates. And he goes, remember, when is the lowest form of conversation and which is iconic. I think what you're talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership, and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative has to understand which 50 matters in which 50 doesn't matter. >>So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is, you know, lead follow or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a, for a, for an, a, for a technology, a market, a customer base, or a set of people are managing that doesn't really exist anymore, that the world has moved on. And I think that we're going to be kind of permanent war time on some level we're going to, we're going to be co we're because I think the economy is going to shift. We're going to have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal any time soon. Yep. So I, I think that is the part that leadership in, in technology really has to, would adopt. And it's like, I mean, uh, you know, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right. Then only the paranoid survive. Right. Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work and that's, that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis, and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. Yeah. And, you know, >>Sam said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. You know? Um, as a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. >>Yeah. I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year. Right, too. Right. Which is like, when people stayed home and like that, you know, you know, th that will fade. People will get back on their bikes and go outside. I'm a cyclist, but you know, a lot more people are going to look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising, then when it's dark or when the weather is inclement. So what I think is that you see these things, they go in waves, they crest, they come back, but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager, and then as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, like, like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on zoom, um, in a year from now, but we're going to still spend a lot of time on zoom and it's going to still be very important. >>Um, what I, what I would say, for example, and I, and looking at the COVID crisis and from my own personal investments, when I look at one thing is clear, we're going to get our arms around this virus. But if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to, to more react, more rapidly, create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly to be able to use that information, to make decisions. And so the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines, um, short, and this, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is going to happen again and again, in healthcare, right. There's going to be in, you know, in increasing pressure across that in part of the segment food supply, right. I mean, the biggest problem in our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. Um, and so you have far, I mean, you know, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, like, so you're going to see increased amount of optimization automation and mechanization. >>Lauren was on the, um, keynote today talking about how their marketplaces collected as a collective, you know, um, people were working together, um, given that, given the big ideas. Well, let's, let's just, as we end the segment here, let's connect big ideas. And the democratization of, I mean, you know, the old expression Silicon Valley go big or go home. Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and, and, and be big and get to be big at your own pace because the, the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute plan in months and execute weekly and month daily, you know, you can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about bit the big idea. Uh, if I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea that North star and then work backwards and figure that out. >>That sounds to the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be. What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say trying to re-imagine education. And I know a, some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it and saying, Hey, I don't need to have silos students, faculty, alumni, and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events. So they've been supplying siloed systems to them. Um, I mean, cause people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health and fitness. So there's, there's everyone is out there waiting for this playbook. >>Yeah. Unfortunately I, I had the playbook. I'd mail it to you. Uh, but you know, I think there's a couple of things that are really important to do. Maybe good to help the bed is one where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that. And sorry to just people I'm home today, right? It's, everybody's running out of the door. Um, and you know, so I talked about this structural change and you, we talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about kind of maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. Um, you, as you pointed out the traditional silos, right, since we have so much information at our fingertips, um, you know, people's responsibility as opposed to having products and services to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. >>Um, I think the other thing is that, uh, leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relations industry, um, background, I'm a product manager, I'm a sales person, I'm a CEO, I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking. Um, uh, particularly in early stage investors where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company is trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more, how people do that. So ultimately most of this comes down to leadership. Um, uh, and, and that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in their, in the business. They're trying to build, um, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. >>You do a lot, you take a lot fewer things for granted. Um, you read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers, and you start to look at enabling. So the, we have made between machine learning, computer vision, and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things. Cause it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to what you were asking. >>Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and, uh, always a pleasure to talk candidly. Um, normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID while working at home, I'm usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm. DCVC you guys have a really unique investment thesis you're in applied AI, computational biology, um, computational care, um, enterprise enablement. Geospatial is about space and Capella, which was featured carbon health, smart agriculture transportation. These are kind of like not on these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have >>No, I mean the further firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt, Zach started about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have bio fund, uh, kind of a sister fund. That's part of that. I mean, obviously we are, uh, traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional, um, um, investment funds and, and the confidence of our LPs. Uh, we are looking for bears. You said John, really large intractable, um, industry problems and transitions. Uh, we tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. Um, and we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. Uh, we, uh, it's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on the cube. >>Um, and these are people that work with us in the create, uh, you know, the creation of this. Uh, we've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity. And you'll start to see, you know, you're starting to hear more and more about them, uh, will probably be a couple of years of report. We're a household name. Um, but you know, we've, we we're, we're washing deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've. So we're less than itchy where people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that starting to come our way or we'll attract more, more great entrepreneurs in that space. >>I really saw the data models, data, data trend early, you saw a Realty impacted, and I'll say that's front and center on Amazon web services reinvent this year. You guys were early super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist. And you guys will be soon a household name if not already. Thanks for coming on. Right, >>Alan. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate >>It. Take care. I'm John ferry with the cube. You're watching a reinvent coverage. This is the cube live portion of the coverage. Three weeks wall to wall. Check out the cube.net. Also go to the queue page on the Amazon event page, there's a little click through the bottom and the metadata is Mainstage tons of video on demand and live programming there too. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage cube live program for re:Invent 2020. This is our Q virtual. We're not in person like we normally are. Today is the AWS public sector. Worldwide celebration day. A lot of content coming from Teresa Carlson and her team and highlighting everything. Of course, the cube channel on the re:Invent events site. Well, the content we streaming there, if you go to the description, you can click on the link and check out all the on-demand interviews. We've done hundreds of videos live before the event pre recorded as well as here live today for public sector day, I'm showing Lisa Martin co-hosts of the cube. Who's been involved in a lot of those interviews. Uh, Lisa, great to see you before we good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Likewise. Good to see you too, John. Glad that you're staying safe. >>Well, a lot of good action. And before we get started, I do want to put a plug out for, um, some Salesforce, big party virtual event. Uh, Salesforce is having a big party at re:Invent 2020 a virtual house party with chance the rapper performing an exclusive set with surprise celebrities and DJ in residence December 10th that's tomorrow at 5:00 PM Pacific, go to salesforce.com/big party to check out chance the rapper. Uh, I'm a big fan. Of course my kids are more fans than, uh, check out the sales report. Okay. Back to cube virtual Lisa. Great to see you. >>Likewise John. So public sector day, a lot of transformation mean re:Invent being reinvented, being virtual 500,000 registered. And so, so much has changed, but a lot also that Teresa Carlson spoke about in her keynote and this morning about the transformation across the public sector, that's really been driven by necessity with COVID. It was really impressive to hear and see all of the good things that AWS is facilitating across healthcare, government, education, state, and local. You name it. >>Yeah. The thing I love about Theresa is she's always been ever since I've known her now she's been on the cube every year, since 2013, since we've been covering re:Invent, she's always had a big, bold vision, and she's always kind of stayed on that track. And this year that was really clear out of the box on her, her leadership session. You got to think big and you got to look at the value of the data. That was the key message from her, her and her group public sector, by the way, has been highly active with the COVID pandemic. A lot of public services have been leveraging Amazon cloud to serve, uh, their, their, their people, whether it's getting them the checks for entitlements or getting them, you know, pharmacy drugs and whatnot, and helping them with the pandemic. But clearly Amazon has stepped up and helped education with, with, uh, remotes. So Theresa's team has been pretty busy. So I think that they had more time to prepare for the virtual keynote. I should've gotten chock full of more announcements. >>Yeah. And also some great examples. As you mentioned, we heard from UK biobank, some of the interviews also that have already happened on the kid that you've done showed some amazing work that AWS has helped to facilitate for school districts in Los Angeles, for example, the government of Rhode Island. And those are some of the great things cabbage, what they were able to enable Kevin's to do, to deliver small business loans of so quickly. A lot of that, I thought, I wish we're hearing more about how technology is facilitating so much. Goodness, in COVID on the news. Of course, we're hearing a lot of the challenges with online learning, but there's a lot of amazing things that AWS has been able to facilitate incredibly quickly. >>You know, one of the concerns I have with Theresa and her team years and years ago was this idea of national parks, right? You know, we have spaces where we can go visit and why isn't there a cyber version of that. And so you S you saw that progression and she'd been doing a lot of deals where they're using the cloud and donating their technology for the betterment of society. And one of the things that was, um, news today was an advancement of their open data registry, which has been kind of this open commons of, you know, health data and whatnot. And now they have all the sequencing data that's searchable, readable, uh, from the national Institute of health for DNA sequencing. So this is going to be, again, more commons, like approach is starting to see that I think this is going to be a real big trend lease. >>I think you're going to start to see the big companies have to really contribute to society in a way that we've never seen before, because they have the large scale. You can donate large compute to say research projects. So you starting to see, uh, from Teresa's team, the bubbling up of these new shared experiences around technology for the betterment of society. I think that sequencing was one, the renewable energy project. Another one, again, they're investing in women owned businesses and underrepresented minorities, and at small, medium size businesses to fund them, we saw a guy launching stuff in space that can create, you know, synthetic satellites. So you can look through clouds. This is new. I mean, this is interesting. >>It is interesting. And it actually, to your point is impactful at every level across the globe, going from when they talked about we farm creating this network of small scale of farmers, connectivity was their biggest problem. And now there's over a million. I'm sure that number it's probably even bigger. I've connected farmers due to AWS. You talked about also it's the cord 19 search, which is the expansion of their open research dataset. COVID open research data set that is only possible because of cloud computing and AWS hundreds of thousands of assets in there. Um, 200 plus open data sets for genomic research. She talked about how that's been at the of some of the things that we've seen go on so quickly with operation work speed, uh, with respect to the vaccine. So a lot of acceleration when we know public sector kind of traditionally not necessarily fast movers, but of course, as we've all said, a number of times recently necessity is the mother of invention and the speed element and the connectivity element were things that really spoke loudly to me with what Teresa said today, about the importance of extracting value from data. >>You know, when I talked to Andy Jassy and he talked about this in his keynote, the digital transformation is on full display. And the necessity being the mother of invention is a great phrase, the system and sticking because you can't hide. I mean, you have to deliver these services in the public sector, or, you know, people's lives are going to be impacted in certainly this there's death involved, right? So you have that and then you've got education. I mean, people want to see that changed quicker. There's always been conscious, Oh, education has got to be re-imagined well, guess what? There's no school open. So we got to re-imagine it now. So you get a lot of pressure, unprecedented demand. She said, Theresa said, three's a crosswind actually set onstage for education change. Um, so that's huge. Right? And then the other thing that she mentioned, I think that's going to be a big focus. >>It's not as, um, you know, headline news oriented is this whole jobs training piece. Um, that's a huge deal because the, the tsunami that hits so fast on this digital transformation, because the COVID, we're going to have a post COVID era of rapid acceleration of new skills. So people gotta get trained. So this ain't going to be the boring training programs, the guy who get kind of get better. So I think you're going to see some innovation Lisa, around how people think about delivering and constructing training programs to be much more real world thinking outside the box, you're going to start to see new things. Otherwise it's just going to be too slowly, the training right now. It's just, you know, sign up for the courseware and get a certification. Yeah, you got to do those things, but how can you get sort of cases done faster? How do you get people with the skills in their hands and virtual hands, if you will, to stand up more cloud, more AI, the pressure's there. So we can, that's going to be a huge thing to watch. >>Okay. The pressure is there. You're right. And a need is there. She talked about a lot of the demand that their customers are driving for some of the services and the education services as well that they're offering. But I'd like to point about upskilling focusing on the people, not just the people, but also the diversity inclusion. And we all know how impactful thought diversity is. So their, their dedication, their in their focus there, and also her recommendation to be bold. And I think in the education, respect was really critical. There is no time like now to move digital transformation. If education systems aren't there, then you know, it's a huge challenge and it impacts every person, every element of every family. So what they're able to do there, by focusing on the people and enabling folks to get trained faster, more resources online can only be a good, you know, Theresa >>Has always, um, has her own flare to style to her. She's incredible business woman and have such respect for her. She's been so successful. Um, but she always sends her presentations with the, kind of the, the kind of her to dues. Um, and you kind of pointed that out. So just review them with you. And I want to get your reaction. Number one, she said, you got to re-imagine and enable a digital, a digitally enabled business. Number two, identify data has an realized value and then increase your diversity. And she pointed to avis.training. Um, and that's kind of her kind of get out there and do those things so digitally enabled business, get that unrealized day to get it into work and increase your diversity. And then she had had a big party every year just said, instead of a party go out and do a random act of kindness act. So, yeah, typical, three's a flare, you know, she kind of ended it with a random act of kindness, but, but her bold vision, those are practical, uh, mandates. What's your reaction to, to that? >>I bold vision. I absolutely 100% I think right now is the time that no business can afford to be hiding under the covers. We have to be, they have to be very thoughtful and very prescriptive, but be bold. There's so much opportunity right now. We're seeing a ton of invention and innovation, John, that we've seen over the last nine months. There's a lot of COVID catalysts that we've been talking about on the cube that are really fantastic. So I think that recommendation to set a bold vision is absolutely imperative, not easy to achieve, but I think right now more than ever, it could really be what sets apart, the winners and losers of tomorrow. >>Yeah. I love it. I just say that on this final note, um, cloud and AI is really in play cloud-scale machine learning, which essentially feeds AI is all about data compute going down to the chip level, AI and software and data is critical for cloud. So really awesome keynote again, leadership session by Teresa Carlson, and there's a whole site of content available. Checkout the cube page, click down on the main page. You'll see that description. You'll see a link to the re:Invent page and check on public sector. A lot of great content. Lisa final question for us to kind of close out this keynote leadership session analysis here on all sector day. I want to get your take on, um, the interviews you've done with the Amazon folks and partners and customers. What are the themes that have been boiling out of those? What have you have been hearing? What's your take and observation of the common pattern? >>You know, given the fact that we haven't all been able to be together at my last cube event in person was reinvent 2019. And we're so used to having, you know, three, four days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sides, being able to have those close personal conversations with our guests this year really did a phenomenal job of recreating that same experience, digitally there's tremendous amount of innovation happening. I think that was the one thing that really jumped out at me, the speed with which it's happening, how so many different types businesses have pivoted, not once, but again and again, and again, as times are changing and how even I yesterday I interviewed Boone, supersonic CEO, some of the things that they're facilitating to get commercial supersonic flight back that fully cloud and AI machine learning can do that. There was no stoppage of innovation this year. In fact, that actually got faster. And I think that was a resounding theme and a lot of positivity from the guests. >>You know, the cue, his business was to go to events and extract the signal from the noise. Guess what? There's no physical events. We have the cube virtual. We have pivoted. We are now in our eighth, ninth month of cube virtual. It's been a new model. We've gotten more interviews, more people can just click into the cube virtual. We have more virtual sets, the Cuban virtualized Lisa. Although I miss them in real life as a whole new ballgame for us, >>It is a whole new ball game. And it also provides a lot of opportunities for businesses to get their messaging out and connect and engage with their audience, which is important. >>Well, I miss real life. I miss everybody out there. I wish we could be there in person. Uh, the world will stay hybrid. I think with virtual, I think this has been a great format. There's been some great benefits, but we want to be in person. I want you on the desk with us. So, and all the folks out there I wish we could see. And then we'll see you next year. Thanks everyone for watching the key. This is our keynote analysis and leadership analysis of the worldwide public sector. Teresa Carlson, Kenya. I'm John from Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector. >>Right. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Virtual our coverage of aws reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector experience. This is the day when we go through all the great conversations around public sector in context to reinvent great guest will for Justin, head of A W s ai and machine learning enablement and partnership with AWS Wilfred. Thanks for joining us. >>Thanks, John. Thanks for having me on. I'm pretty excited to be part of this cube interview. >>Well, I wish we could be in person, but with the pandemic, we gotta do the remote. But I want to get into some of the things you're working on. The A I m l Rapid Adoption Assistance Initiative eyes a big story. What is? What is it described what it is. >>So we launched this artificial intelligence slash machine learning rapid adoption assistance for all public sector partners who are part of the AP in network in September 2020. Onda. We launched this in response to the president's Executive water called the American Year Initiative. So the rapid adoption assistant what it provides us. It provides a direct scalable on automated mechanism for all the public sector partners to reach out to AWS experts within our team for assistance in building and deploying machine learning workloads on behalf of the agencies. So for all all the partners who are part off, this rapid adoption assistance will go through a journey with AWS with my team and they will go through three different faces. The first face will be the envisioning face. The second phase would be the enablement face on the third would be the bill face, as you know, in the envisioning face will dive deeply The use case, the problem that they're trying to solve. This is where we will talk about the algorithms and framework on. We will solidify the architecture er on validate the architecture er on following that will be an enablement face where we engage with the partners trained their technical team, meaning that it will be a hands on approach hands on on keyboard kind of approach where we trained them on machine learning stack On the third phase would be the bill face on the partners leverage the knowledge that they have gained through the enablement and envisioning face, and they start building on rolling out workloads on behalf of the agencies. So we will stay with them throughout the journey on We will doom or any kind of blockers be technical or business, so that's a quick overview off a more rapid adoption assistance program. >>It's funny talking to Swami over the years and watching every year at reinvent the A I. M L Portfolio. Dr Matt Wood is always doing something new. This year is no exception. Even Mawr Machine Learning and AI in the In the News on this rapid adoption assistant initiative sounds like it's an accelerant. Um, so I get all that, But I want to ask you, what problem does it solve for the customer? Or Amazon is because there's demand. There's too much demand. People wanna go faster. What problem does this initiative this rapid adoption of a I machine learning initiative solved? >>So as you know, John, artificial intelligence and related technologies like deep learning and machine learning can literally transform the way agencies operate. They can enable them to provide better services, quicker services and more secure services to the citizens of this country. And that's the reason the president released an executive water called American Initiative on it drives all the government agencies, specifically federal agencies, to promote artificial intelligence to protect and improve the security and economy of the nation. So if you think about it, the best way to achieve the goal is to enable the partners toe build workloads on behalf of agencies, because when it comes to public sector, most of the workloads are delivered by partners. So the problem that we face based on our interaction with the partners is that though the partners have been building a lot off applications with AWS for more than a decade, when it comes to artificial intelligence, they have very limited resources when it comes to deep learning and machine learning, right, like speech recognition, cognitive computing, national language frosting. So we wanted exactly address that. And that's the problem you're trying to solve by launching this rapid adoption assistance, which is nothing but a dry direct mechanism for partners to reach our creative, these experts to help them to build those kind of solutions for the government. >>You know, it's interesting because AI and machine learning it's a secret sauce for workload, especially modern workloads. You mentioned agencies and also public sector. You know, we've seen Certainly there's been pandemic a ton of focus on moving faster, right? So getting those APS out quickly ai drives a lot of that, so totally get it. Um, I think it's an accelerant great program. It just makes a lot of sense. And I know you guys have been going in tow by vertical and kind of having stage making all these other tools kind of be specialized within those verticals. So it makes a ton of sense. I get it, and it is a great, great initiative and solve the problem. The question I have is who gets access to this, right? Is it just agencies you mentioned? Is it all public sector? Could you just clarify who can apply to this program? >>Yes, it is a partner focused program. So all the existing partners, though it is going to affect the end agencies, were trying to help the agency's through the partners. So all the existing AP in partners who are part of the PSP program, we call it the public sector partner program can apply for this rapid adoption assistance. So you have been following John, you have been following AWS and AWS partners on a lot of partners have different kind of expertise on they. They show that by achieving a lot of competencies, right, it could be technical competencies like big data storage and security. Or it could be domain specific competencies like public safety education on government competency. But for a playing this program, the partners don't need to have any kind of competency, and all they have to have is they have to be part of the Amazon Partner Network on they have to be part of the public sector partner program. That is number one Second. It is open toe all partners, meaning that it is open toe. Both technology partners, as well as consulting partners Number three are playing is pretty simple, John, right? You can quickly search for a I M or rapid adoption assistance on a little pop up a page on a P network, the partners have to go on Phil pretty basic information about the workload, the problem that they're trying to solve the machine learning services that they're planning to use on a couple of other information, like contact information, and then our team reaches out to the partner on help them with the journey. >>So real. No other requirements are prerequisites. Just part of the partner program. >>Absolutely. It is meant for partners. And all you have to do is you have to be a part off 18 network, and you have to be a public sector apartment. >>Public sector partner makes sense. I mean, how you're gonna handle the demand. I'm sure the it's gonna be a tsunami of interest, because, I mean, why wouldn't someone take advantage of this? >>Yep. It is open to all kinds of partners because they have some kind of prerequisites, right? So that's what I'm trying to explain. It is open to all partners, but we have since it is open to existing partners, we kind of expect the partners toe understand the best practices off deploying a machine, learning workloads, or for that case, any kind of workload which should be scalable, land secure and resilient. So we're not going to touch? Yeah, >>Well, I wanna ask you what's what's the response been on this launch? Because, you know, I mean to me, it just makes it's just common sense. Why wouldn't someone take advantage of it? E. Whether responses partner or you have domain expertise or in a vertical just makes a lot of sense. You get access to the experts. >>The response has been great. As I said, the once you apply the journey takes six weeks, but already we just launched it. Probably close toe. Two months back in September 2nd week of September, it is almost, uh, almost two months, and we have more than 15 partners as part of this program on dykan name couple of partners say, for example, we worked with delight on We Are. We will be working on number of work clothes for the Indy agencies through delight. And there are other couple of number of other partners were making significant progress using this rapid adoption assistance that includes after associates attained ardent emcee on infinitive. So to answer your question, the response has been great so far. >>So what's the I So I gotta ask, you know, one of things I thought that Teresa Carlson about all the time in Sandy Carter is, you know, trying to get the accelerant get whether it's Fed ramp and getting certifications. I mean, you guys have done a great job of getting partners on board. Is there any kind of paperwork? What's the process? What should a partner expect to take advantage of that? I'm sure they'll be interest beyond just the launch. What's what's involved? What zit Web bases it check a form? Is that a lot of hoops to jump through? Explain what? What? The process >>is. Very interesting question. And it probably is a very important question from a part of perspective, right? So since it is offered for a peon partners, absolutely, they should have already gone through the AP in terms and conditions they should have. Already, a customer agreement or advanced partners might have enterprise agreement. So for utilizing this for leveraging this rapid adoption assistance program, absolutely. There's no paperwork involved. All they have to do is log into the Web form, fill up the basic information. It comes to us way, take it from there. So there is no hard requirements as long as you're part of the AP network. And as long as you're part of the PSP program, >>well, for great insight, congratulations on a great program. I think it's gonna be a smash hit. Who wouldn't wanna take? I know you guys a lot of goodness there with Amazon Cloud higher level services with a I machine learning people could bring it into the table. I know from a cybersecurity standpoint to just education the range of, um, workloads is gonna be phenomenal. Obviously military as well. Eso totally cool. Love it. Congratulations. Like my final question is, um, one about the partner. So I'm a partner. I like this. Say I'm a partner. I jump in Easy to get in. Walk me through What happens? I mean, I signed some paperwork. You check the boxes, I get involved, I get, like, a rep. Do I do things? Do I? What happens to me? Walk me down the path of execution. What's expectation of what will happen? >>I'll explain that in two parts, John. Right? One is from a partner journey perspective and then from AWS perspective. What? What we expect out off partners, right? So, from a experience perspective, as long as they fill out, fill out the web form on, fill out the basic information about the project that they're trying to work. It comes to us. The workflow is automated. All the information is captured on the information comes to my team on. We get back to the partners within three days, but the journey itself can take from 6 to 8 weeks because, as I mentioned during the envisioning case, we try to map the problem to the solution. But the enablement phases the second phase is where it can take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks because, as I mentioned, we focused on the three layers of the machine learning stack for certain kind of partners. They might be interested in sage maker because they might want to build a custom machine learning model. But for some of the partners, they want the argument that existing applications using S. R or NLP or nL you so we can focus on the high level services. Or we can train them on stage makers so it can take anywhere between 2 to 3 weeks or 3 to 4 weeks. And finally, the build phase varies from partner to partner on the complexity of the work. Lord at that point were still involved with a partner, but the partner will be taking the lead on will be with them to remove any kid of Glaucus being technical or, uh, business couple of Yeah, well, I just >>want to say the word enablement in your title kind of speaks volumes. This isn't about enabling customers. >>It is all about enabling the in customers through partners. So we focus on enabling partners. They could be business big system integrators like Lockheed's or Raytheon's or Delight. Or it could be nimble in small partners. Or it could be a technology partner building an entire pass or SAS service on behalf of the government agencies. Right or that could help the comment agencies in different verticals. So we just enabled the in the agency's through the partners. And the focus of this program is all about partner enablement. >>Well, for just ahead of a does a i machine learning enablement in partnership, part of public sector with a W. S. This is our special coverage. Well, for thanks for coming on being a cube virtual guest. I wish we could be in person, but this year it's remote. This is the cube virtual. I'm John for a year. Host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thanks a lot, John.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBES coverage, of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. We're not there in person this year because of the pandemic, but we're doing the remote. This is special coverage of the public sector, we got two great guests, Manpreet Mattu, who was the Worldwide Public Sector of Startups and Venture Capital team with AWS, and Michael Jackson who's the leader, general manager of Public Health and Venture Capital and Startups. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming up. >> Okay, it's my pleasure, thanks for having. >> I loved love welcome to theCUBE. I just want to say that Amazon never forgets the startups, that's where are they were born and bred it's been a startup. It's always day one as the expression goes, but truly even with the success, not just in the enterprise and starts within public sector, it's still a startup agility mindset, just want to call that out and say congratulations. Okay, let's get into it. Tell us about your roles and your backgrounds and why you're here. >> So, I believe so, I'm the head of AWS Public Sector, VC and Startups team, and our mission really is to help our public sector customers, adopt innovation that is built by the startups. I've been with AWS for about two and a half years. And prior to that, I was in a similar role with Booz Allen, helping our public sector customers, adopt innovation data as well. >> Michael. >> Yeah, so I am the general manager of Public Health, for on the Venture Capital and Startups team. My career here at AWS began just over four years ago. I was brought on to the state and local government team, initially building the public health practice from inception, and I also built and led our U S elections business. And I'm really excited now to transition into this global role, to lead our public health VC and startups practice, and really democratize access to innovation for our startups in the healthcare space. >> Well, great journey. You guys are converging, the VC and startup teams are coming together. A lot of macro trends certainly are tailwinds for you guys. Obviously, the pandemic is forcing, more accelerated modern applications in public sector, and we've been covering more and more success stories, of the change happening quickly. As access to capital continues to be great, and agility with the cloud, how has that impacted your teams and your approach? Can you guys share how that's changed this year? Because there's more pressure now to be digital, there's more opportunities, there's more still capital flowing, how has it impacted your roles? >> Now, so at the very high level, Amazon invests in companies because, we want those companies to be successful. And AWS itself makes a substantial investment, in agility, the startup customers success. We have things like service credits and things like, business nurturing programs that we have built over the course of the last seven, eight years. For example, over the past, you had a loan, Amazon has provided more than a billion dollars in credits, through AWS Activate program, to help startups grow and scale their businesses. And not only that a total of more than three and a half billion dollars in credit to more than 140,000 startups, over the last seven years, all through the course of the Activate program. From more so, on the healthcare side, I would want, certainly MJ to also, speak through or speak to, the challenges that the health system has faced in the COVID times, and how AWS is helping the provider, healthcare providers and the startups, really achieve success, and help the patient populations on that note. >> Michael, weighing on this new programs, you guys are launching in the impact healthcare, I see where we're seeing the frontline workers, I mean, it's everyone seeing it on TV and the newspaper, and it's impacting friends and family, give us the update. >> Absolutely, so we're here today to launch a new program. We call it the Healthcare Acceleration program. And basically, there are two halves to the program, with an undercurrent or a recurring undercurrent, I should say. Just really quickly before I touch on that though, I'd be remissed if I didn't make note of the fact that, you're right capital is still flowing, and it's a really big deal particularly, as healthcare and public health becomes such a priority, but one of the strategic imperatives of our team's role, similar to the way we democratize access to innovation for startups, we also find it really important to democratize access, to resources for founders, underrepresented founders, so, that everyone can have a level playing field, and equal access to those resources and funding, and things of that nature. Getting back to some of the healthcare priorities, in particular, I don't have to tell you about, this pandemic where on the third, and possibly the deadliest wave losing over 1000 Americans per day. And so, not only are we interested in helping our customers, our enterprise customers inject innovation from startups so that they can address clinical aspects, of the pandemic and beyond, but there are underlying rippling societal implications as well. Things that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Things like mental health, behavioral health, including substance use abuse, clinical clinician burnout, things like social determinants of health, which lead to disproportionately impacted demographics. So, there's a whole lot to unpack and I'm sure we will, but at the highest level, that's what we're looking to help, our enterprise customers address, with the help of our innovative high potential startups. >> I mean, strategic focus, just go a little bit further on how important this is, because, programs are needed, there is burnout, okay. >> Yeah. >> You have mental health, physical health, everything in between. What are you guys launching? What's new? What can people take away right now from AWS, and what startups and when, 'cause a lot of people are changing their focus. I was seeing people leave their jobs, to have to get on this new mission. They're seeing the pain, there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy, happening right now here. Go further, please. >> So, you touched right on it. So, there are two sides. I mentioned there are two halves, and an underlying current, right? So, the two halves are the supply and the demand. The supply side is what we refer to as the startups, vetted high potential, high growth startups, in the health tech space, that we can help to accelerate their go to market, right? We can pair them with mentorship, credits, we call it the 4Cs. There's capital, mapping them potentially to investors, who are interested into accelerating their growth. There's code, technical support, whether it's cloud formation templates, or technical expertise, connections such as other startups, incubators, accelerators, etcetera, and finally mapping them to customers. So, that's, what's in it for the startups. And then on the other side, the enterprise side, again, there are so many enterprises from payers to providers and others who are looking to accelerate their efforts, to digitally transform their enterprise. And so, by partnering with AWS, and the Healthcare Acceleration program, they can trust that there are AWS powered startups, that are vetted and prepared, to inject that sense of urgency, that sense of innovation. And the underlying current, the dots that are being connected is, workforce modernization or economic development, because in many cases, you're right, people are losing their jobs, people are looking at ways that they can, modernize the workforce is locally leverage local talent. And so, entrepreneurship is a great way, to stimulate the local economy, and help older workers or workers who are looking to transition into a more relevant occupations, to do just that. So, this is an all encompassing program. >> Let's get into this health accelerator from AWS. This is something that is on the table, AWS Health Accelerator, who are the stakeholders, and what are the benefits of this program? >> Well, I mean, before we actually, go to the accelerator for me, I think there's this focus on the healthcare, as an industry, as a vertical, is very important to talk about. The industry is experiencing transformation. It is experiencing disruption and the COVID-19 pandemic, has only accelerated that. If you made, it has sort of magnified some of the stressors, which were already there in the system. If you combine that with the sort of the undercurrent that MJ mentioned from a technological perspective, the delivery of healthcare globally is going digital. So, you see technology is like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, augmented reality, IoT based variables. All of these technologies are coming together, to enable applications, such as remote diagnostics, patient monitoring, predictive prescriptive healthcare. And we truly feel that this presents a tremendous opportunity to improve the patient experience, and more importantly, the patient outcomes, using these technologies, and these newly enabled applications through those technologies. And as an example, in the U S alone, there are 22 key healthcare AI use cases, that are projected to grow by, or to approximately around $22 billion by 2025. So, in AWS, we are collaborating with the wide spectrum of healthcare providers, with public health organizations, with government agencies, all around the globe to support their effort, to cope with the rippling effects of the COVID-19. And arguably, many of them are visible to us today, but I would argue that many many are not even yet, have been begun to understand by us and by our customers. So, that is the reason why we want to put some emphasis, on healthcare from a public sector standpoint. >> Yeah, that's a great call-out Manpreet, I want to just highlight that, maybe get an additional commentary because, the old days it was just the institution, the hospital and then you're done. And then it was okay, hospital plus the caregiver, the doctors, and the workers, and now the patient. So, holistically, you're calling out the big picture, the patient care, right. Their families, their environment, the caregivers, and the institution, and now the supply chain, all of it integrated together. That's where the action is. And that's where the data comes in, that's where cloud scale can come in. Is that right? Am I getting that right there? >> Yeah, that's absolutely. I'm sorry Manpreet. >> Welcome MJ, go on. >> I was going to say you're absolutely right. In fact, we like to look at it almost like a bullseye, right? So, at the center of the bullseye, like you said, usually, the first stakeholder that comes to mind, is the provider or the coordinator of care. Outside of there, you have the payer, outside of there, you have researchers. And in any even further outside still are your regulators, your healthcare agencies at the local state, and federal levels, including military health. So, it's a rippling effect of customers on that side, as well as you asked about stakeholders on the startup side, there's also a bullseye of influence. Starting with the founder herself, the founder, and her executive team, moving out from there to the startup, as an organization outside from there, we've got incubators and accelerators that are in place, to help accelerate that growth as well. And then farther out you've got investors, VCs, and investors, and so on both sides, supply and demand we're looking to tap into, and accelerate the growth, and make connections between the two. >> Yeah, (indistinct) but when I, in back in real life, when we used to go to games, you walk into the stadium, you buy your ticket with your phone, you go to your seat, concessions guys, deliver things there for you, the fan experience, the players are there. I mean, why can't we have that in healthcare? I was just everything is happening, right. Go for good, yeah. And I think that's the Nirvana, hopefully soon. >> We're working on it. >> Good stuff. I know, I just love the vision, I think is so relevant and super important. Now, let's get into this health accelerator. What's this all about? Let's get into that. >> So, the health accelerator will be, a multi-week on-demand program. Where we're going to map high potential vetted startups, to a number of resources, right. I mentioned before that there will be mentorship, there will be technical experts who will be able to, take these startups who have established some presence, but we want to accelerate their ability to go deeper specifically into public health, throughout that ecosystem that I just described, right? Starting with providers and coordinators, payers, researchers, regulators. We want to give them a way to go deep into this, heavily regulated industry, so that they can not only have access to the innovation that many startups would not otherwise, like Manpreet mentioned machine learning AI, but they also have access to the resources, to ensure their success. >> What kind of problems are you guys trying to solve with this? I mean, is there a specific vetting process, is there a criteria? Is there a bar to all over share some specifics? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, for the past few years, a lot of the major change challenges, for our public health customers have been the same, but they require a new approach. And I like to call our approach the HIGH FIVE. So, some of those challenges that have been traditionally, lingering for the past few years, equal social determinants of health. Social determinants, when we talk about that, we not only refer to the nonclinical contributors to a person's overall wellness. So, you think about issues like food deserts or recidivism homelessness, all of that transportation to access to care, right, all of that contributes. But then there's also disparities and health outcomes. When you think about socioeconomic differences, rural health, ethnic and racial minorities, so, that all factors into social determinants of health. Then there's also aging. Now, these are the strategic pillars that we like to focus on, or that we are focusing on. When I mentioned aging every day in the U S, 10,000 people celebrate their 65th birthday. Many of those individuals are suffering from comorbidities, from hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and now the lingering impact of COVID-19. And so, as these aging individuals continue to live longer, the goal is to improve the quality of their life as well. And so, many of them look to technology to age independently at home, etcetera. So, that's our second strategic pillar. The third, is mental and behavioral health. So, when I talk about mental health, I mean, everything from mild depression, all the way through suicide prevention, and especially these days with COVID-19, we see a lot of clinicians suffering from burnout. And so, it's important, that we take care of the frontline workers, those healthcare providers, and even outside of COVID-19, you think about the ways that the patient population, has continued to expand, and the growth within the provider market has not, or the pool of providers has not nearly expanded at the same rate. We've got people living longer, we've got more people than ever insured. And so, we need to leverage technology to help a stagnant, number of providers to treat a growing pool of patients, without sacrificing the quality of care. And then finally, we've got environmental health. From air quality to water purity. It's important to understand the correlation between, the environment and the health care of our population. So, those are the pillars. I know I mentioned the HIGH FIVE, the fifth is not specific to healthcare. I touched on it a little bit earlier, but the fifth is, it is democratizing access to innovation, to resources, specifically for founders from underrepresented communities. >> And that's great insight, Michael great, great Schaeffer pointed that out. Manpreet take us on the final word here. Venture Capital, Startups, AWS, what's the current state share with us, the current worldview from your perspective. >> Oh, so, bringing home this point that MJ mentioned, the strategic plan of focus areas. And if you, look at all those strategic areas there's, you can really sort of put those into two buckets. One is the patient side of the bucket, and then there's the provider side of the bucket, or the caretaker side of the bucket. And if the patient side, what we want to do is work with startups that are, really working across a broad spectrum of use cases, but to solve those two key challenges of the, one on the patient's side and other on the provider side. Then the end goal of providing patient experience, and patient outcomes. For the patient side, it's the patient experience, patient engagement, patient outcomes. So, the startups looking on those sides, on those use cases of criteria. And then we have the provider side where, we want to ensure that the providers have the right set of technologies, the right set of solutions, right set of innovation, to help them where healthcare operations. You have all seen in COVID times, how the provider systems are getting overwhelmed. And that's where the healthcare operations comes into play. Clinical decision support. Now, many patients cannot get to the hospitals. So, how do we provide through our startup partners for startup customers, those solutions where remote diagnostics, remote imaging or remote health delivery could be provided. Things like predictive and prescriptive health solutions. How can we work with our startups to provide, those sort of solutions to the providers, to again, at the end, the better the outcome of the patients, right? So, that's what we were looking at. And that's what this program is all about. Working with public sector provider side of the house and the customers understanding, and helping them understand the need as well, and then bringing the right set of startup solutions, and help solve those challenges that they are facing, and the patients are facing as well. MJ, I'm sure you want to close it out, with some thoughts too. >> Okay. >> Absolutely, I would just close it with this, our goal, like Manpreet said, is to match the high potential startups, with the, the enterprises who are desiring those solutions, and success for us, we'll have three traits. It will be valuable, meaning that there will be a true alignment between what our startups offer and what the market needs. It will be measurable, so that we can quantify the improvement and outcomes. And finally, it will be sustainable. So, beyond COVID-19 beyond the opioid crisis, beyond any situation or condition, we look to bring solutions to market through our startups, that are going to truly sustain a transformative approach to modernizing public health enterprises. >> Great job again, and important work and DevOps, impacting healthcare in all kinds of ways. And it's super important work. I'm glad you guys are doing it, and it's going to develop out beautifully, and if I can give you a high five, Michael, I'll give you a high five off in-person, but remotely, >> Virtual. >> Get virtual high five great program. We're going to spread the word, good work. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for doing it, I appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, it's theCUBE coverage virtual, we are theCUBE virtual bringing all the coverage, super important work being done in public sector, cloud enabling it, great people important, and of course, happening at re:Invent. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)