>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

(bright, upbeat music playing) >> Hello, Brilliant Cloud community and welcome back to AWS re:Invent, where we are live all day everyday from the show floor, here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson joined by my beautiful co-host, Lisa Martin here on theCUBE. Lisa, you're smiling, you're radiating, day three, you would think it was day one. How you doing? >> Amazing. I can't believe the energy that has been maintained >> It's been a theme. on this show floor, since Monday night at 4:00 pm. >> I know, and I kind of thought today we might see some folks trickling out. It is packed, as our guests and I were, we were all just talking about, right before the segment, almost too packed which is a really great sign for AWS. >> It is. We're hearing north of 55,000 people here. And of course, we only get a little snapshot of what's at the Venetian. >> Literally this corner, yeah. We don't get to see anything else around The Strip, that's going on, so it's massive. >> Yeah, it is very massive. I'm super excited. We've got two guests from Infosys with us on this last segment from this stage today. David and Anant, welcome to the show. How you doing? >> Awesome. >> You're both smiling and I am really excited. We have our first prop of the show, (David and Anant laughing) and it's a pretty flashy, sexy prop. Anant, what's going on here? >> Oh, so this is something that we are very proud of. Last year we won one award, which was very special for us because it was our first award with AWS, and that was, "The Industry Partner of The Year Award." And on the back of that, this year we won three awards and this is super awesome for us, because all of them are very special. One was in collaboration, second was in design, and third was in sustainability. So we are very proud, and we thank AWS, and it's a fantastic partnership. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> Anant: Yes. I mean that's huge. >> Yes, it's absolutely huge. And the second one is, we are the Launch Partner for MSK, which again is a very proud thing for us. So I think those are the two things that we wanted to talk about. >> How many awards are you going to win next year then? (all laughing) >> We want to target more than three. (Savannah chuckles) >> Keep it going up. >> Probably five, right? >> So it's the odd numbers, one, three, five, seven, ten. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Savannah: There you go. >> I think we got that question last year and we said we'd get two, and we ended up over-delivering with three, so who knows? >> Hey, nothing wrong with setting the bar low and clearing it. And I mean, not setting it low, setting it with one and clearing it with three is pretty fantastic. We talk about it as an ego thing sometimes with awards and it feels great for internal culture, but David, what does it mean on the partnership side to win awards like that? >> So what's really important for us with our partners is to make sure that we're achieving their goals, and when their goals are achieved in our partnership it's just the byproduct that we're achieving our own with our clients. The awards are a great representation of that to see, you know, again, being recognized in three different categories really shows that we've had success with AWS, and in turn, you know, Anant and I can attest to it. We've been very successful at the partnership on our side. >> Yeah, and I bet it's really exciting for the team. Just speaking for Energy (indistinct) >> And there's celebration, you know, there's been a few cocktails being raised... >> Has there? In Las Vegas? >> David: I know. Cocktails? >> Lisa Martin: Shocking! I'm shocked! >> Lisa Martin: I know! (all laughing) I wouldn't mind one right now to be really, really honest. Let's dig into the product a little bit. Infosys Cobalt. What's the scoop, Anant? >> Yeah, so first of all, we were the first ones to actually launch a Cloud brand called Cobalt, right? We were the first ones in the world. In fact, one of our competitor followed us soon after. So essentially what we did was we brought all our Cloud offerings into one brand called Cobalt. It becomes very clear to our customers on what our proposition is. It is very consistent to the market in terms of what our narrative is. And it's a little easy for our customers to understand what we bring to the table. So Cobalt is not one product or what one platform it's a set of services, solutions and platforms that we bring to accelerate customer's journey where they're leveraging Cloud. So that's what Cobalt is. >> Awesome, everyone wants to do everything faster. >> Yes. >> Lisa Martin: Yeah. >> And the booth was packed. I walked by earlier, it was absolutely buzzing. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nobody wants to do, you know, wants less data slower. >> Anant: Yes. (Savannah laughs) >> It's always more faster. >> Anant: More faster. And we're living in this explosion unlike anything this swarm of data unlike anything that we've ever seen before. Every company, regardless of industry has to be a data company. >> Anant: Yes. But they have to be able to work with the right partners to extract, to first of all harness all that data, extract insights in real time, because of course on the consumer side we're not patient anymore. >> Anant: Yes. We expect a personalized, realtime, custom experience. >> Anant: Absolutely. >> How do you work with AWS to help deliver that and how do the partners help deliver that as well? >> Well I'll start with on the partner side of it. You walk through the hallways here or down the aisles you see partners like MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks and such, they're all attesting their commitment and their strong partnership with AWS, and coincidentally they're also very good partners of our own. And as a result... >> Savannah: One big happy family here at AWS when you met. >> And this is something that I'm calling, coining the phrase sub-ecosystems. These are partnerships where one is successful with each other, and then the three come together, and we go together with an integrated solution. And it's really taking off. It's something that's really powerful. The fun thing about re:Invent here is isn't just that we're having amazing discussions with our clients and AWS, but we're also having with the other partners here about how we can all work together so... And data analytics is a big one, security is another hot one-- >> Lisa Martin: Security is huge. >> Savannah: Yeah. Cost optimization from the start. >> Absolutely. And Ruba was saying this, right? Ruba said, like she was giving example of a marathoner. Marathon is not a single man or a single woman sport, right? So similarly Cloud journey is a team's, sort of you know, team journey, so that's why partners play a big role in that and that's exactly what we are trying to do. >> So you guys get to see a lot of different companies across a lot of different industries. We're living in very interesting times, how do you see the Cloud evolving? >> Oh, yeah. So what we did when we launched Cobalt in 2020 we have now evolved our story. We call it Cobalt 2.0. And essentially what we wanted to do was to focus on industry Clouds. So it's not just about taking a workload and moving it from point A to point B or moving data to Cloud or getting out of data centers, but it's also being very specific to the industry that this specific customer belongs to, right? So for example, if we go to banking they would say we want to better our security posture. If we go to a retailer they want to basically have smart stores. If we go to a manufacturing customer they want to have a smart factory. So we want to make sure that there are specific industry blueprints and specific reference architectures that we bring and start delivering outcomes. So we call it something called... >> Savannah: I know you're hot on business outcomes. >> Yes. >> Savannah: Yes. So we call it something called the link of life forces. So there are six technologies; Cloud, Data, Edge, IOT, 5G, and AI. They will come together to deliver business outcomes. So that's where we are heading with Cobalt 2.0, And that's essentially what we want to do with our customers. >> Savannah: It's a lot to think about. >> Yes. >> David: Yes. >> And, yeah, go for it David. >> I was just saying from a partnering perspective, you know prior to Cloud, we were talking about transactional type businesses where if you ask a technology company who their partner is its generally a reseller where they're just basically taking one product and selling it to their client. What's happened with cloud now it's not about the transaction upfront it's about the actual, you know, the consumption of the technology and the bringing together all of these to form an outcome, it changes the model dramatically, and quite honestly, the global system integrators like Infosys are in great position because we can pull that together to the benefit of our partners, put our own secret sauce around it and take these solutions to market and drive consumption because that's what the Cloud's all about. >> Right. Well, how are you helping customers really treat Cloud as a strategic focus? You know we often hear companies talk about we're Cloud first. Well not everything belongs in the Cloud. So then we hear companies start talking about being Cloud smart. >> Anant: Yes. How are you helping, and so we'll go with that. How are you helping enterprises really become Cloud smart and where is the partner angle? So we'll start with you and then we'll bring the partner angle in. >> Oh yeah, big time. I think one of the things that we have been educating our customers is Cloud is not about cost takeout. So Cloud is about innovation, Cloud is about growth. And I'll give two examples. One of the beauty products companies they wanted to set up their shop in US and they said that, you know, "we don't have time to basically buy the infrastructure, implement an ERP platform, and you know, or roll it out, test it and go into production. We don't have so much time. Time to market is very important for us." And they embarked on the Cloud journey. So expanding into new market, Cloud can play a big role. That is one of the ways to expand and you know, grow your business. Similarly, there is another company that they wanted to go into retail banking, right? And they didn't have years to launch a product. So they actually use AWS and it's a joint Infosys and AWS customer. A pretty big bank. They launched retail banking and they did it in less than six months. So I think these are some of the examples of cloud not being cost takeout but it's about innovation and growth. So that's what we are trying to tell customers. >> Savannah: Big impacts. >> Big impact. Yes, absolutely. >> And that's where the Cobalt assets come into play as well. You know, as Anant mentioned, we have literally thousands of these industries specific and they're derived in a lot of cases in partnership with the companies you see down the aisles here, and AWS. And it accelerates the deployments and ensures a successful adoption, more so than before. You know, we have clients that are coming to us now that used to buy, run their own procurement. You know they would have... Literally there was one bank that came to us with a over a hundred products >> The amount of work. I'm just seeing it... >> A list of a hundred products. Some they bought directly from a vendor, some they went through a distributor, some they went through a reseller and such, >> Savannah: It's so ad-hoc. And they're looking at this in a completely different way and they're looking to rationalize those technologies, again, look for companies that will contract for a business outcome and leverage the cloud and get to that next era, and it's a fun time. We're really excited. >> I can imagine you're really a part of the transformation process for a lot of these companies. >> Anant: Absolutely. Anant when we were chatting before we went live you talked about your passion for business outcomes. Can you give us a couple examples of customers or business outcomes that really get you and the team excited? Same thing to you David, after. >> Well, absolutely. Even our contractual structures are now moving into business outcomes. So we are getting paid by the outcomes that we are delivering, right? So, one of the insurance customers that we have we actually get paid by the number of claims that we process, right? Similarly there is a healthcare customer where we actually get paid by the number of customers that we cater to from a Medicare and Medicaid standpoint, right? >> Savannah: Tangible results processed and projected-- >> Successful process of claims. >> Interesting. >> Anant: Exactly. >> Yeah. (indistinct) reality. >> Yeah, reality, (chuckles) What a novel idea. >> Yeah. (Savannah and Lisa chuckle) >> One of the great examples you hear about airplane engines now that the model is you don't buy the engine, you basically pay for the hours that it's used, and the maintenance and the downtime, so that you take the risk away. You know, you put that in the context of the traditional business. You're taking away the risk of owning the individual asset, the maintenance, any of the issues, the bug fixes. And again, you're partnering with a company like Infosys, we'll take on that based upon our knowledge and based upon our vast experience we can confidently contract in that way that, you know, years ago that wasn't possible. >> Savannah: It's kind of a sharing economy at scale style. >> David: Exactly. >> Anant: Absolutely. >> Yeah, which is really exciting. So we have a new challenge here on theCUBE this year at re:Invent. We are looking for your 32nd Instagram real sizzle soundbite. Your hot take, your thought leadership on the biggest theme or most important thing coming out of this year's show. David, we'll start with you. We've been starting with Anant, so I'm going to go to you. We're making eye contact right now so you're in the hot seat. (all laugh) >> Well, I think there was a lot of time given to sustainability on the stage this week, and I think that, you know, every CEO that we talk to is bringing that up as a major priority and that's a very important element for us as a company and as a service provider. >> Savannah: I mean, you're obviously award winning in the sustainability department. >> Exactly. Nice little plug there. >> Yeah. >> You know, and I think the other things that have come up we saw a lot about data analytics this week. You know, I think new offerings from AWS but also new partnerships that we're going to take advantage of. And again, security has been a hot topic. >> Absolutely. Anant, what's your hot take? >> Yeah. I think one very exciting thing for partners like us is the re-imagining that is being done by Ruba for the partners, right? The AWS marketplace. I think that is a big, big thing that I took out. Of course, sustainability is huge. Like Adam said, the fastest way to become sustainable is to move to Cloud, right? So rather than overthinking and over-engineering this whole topic just take your workloads and move it to Cloud and you'll be sustainable, right? So I think that's the second one. And third is of course cybersecurity. Zscaler, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, these are some of the big companies that are at the event here, and we have been partnering with them. Many more. I'm just calling out three names, but many more. I think cybersecurity is the next one. So I think these are three on top of my mind. >> Just a few things you casually think about. That was great. Great responses from both of you Anant, David, such a pleasure to have you both with us. We hope to have you back again. You're doing such exciting things. I'm sure that everything we talked about is going to be a hot topic for many years to come as people navigate the future as well as continue their business transformations. It is always a joy to sit next to you on stage my dear. >> Likewise. And thank all of you, wherever you're tuning in from, for joining us here at AWS re:Invent live from Las Vegas, Nevada. With Lisa Martin, I'm Savannah Peterson, and for the last time today, this is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright, upbeat music playing)

>>Hello, brilliant cloud community and welcome back to AWS Reinvent, where we are live all day every day. From the show floor here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my beautiful cohost Lisa Martin here on the cube. Lisa, you're smiling. You're radiating Day three. You would think it was day one. How you doing? >>Amazing. I can't believe the energy that has been maintained omni show floor since Monday night at 4:00 PM >>I know. And I, I kind of thought today we might see some folks trickling out. It is packed as our, as our guests and I were, we were all just talking about right before the segment, almost two packed, which is a really great sign for aws. It is. We're >>Hearing worth of 55,000 people here. And of course we only get a, a little snapshot of which literally >>This corner, >>We don't get to see anything else around the strip that's going on. So it's massive. Yeah, >>It is a very massive, I'm super excited. We've got two guests from Infosys with us on this last segment from this stage today. David and Anant, welcome to the show. How you doing? >>Awesome. >>You're both smiling and I am really excited. We have our first prop of the show and it's a pretty flashy, sexy prop. Anant, what's going on here? >>Oh, so this is something that we are very proud of. Last year we won one award, which was very special for us because it was our first award with aws and that was the industry partner of the year award. And on the back of that, this year we won three awards. And this is super awesome for us because all of them are very special. One was in collaboration, second was in design, and third was in sustainability. So we are very proud and we thank AWS and it's a fantastic partnership. Yeah. And >>Congratulations. Yes. I mean that's >>Huge. Yes, it's absolutely huge. And the second one is we are the launch partner for msk, which again is a very proud thing for us. So I think those are the two things that we wanted to talk about. >>How many awards are you gonna win next year then? >>Do you want to target more than three? >>So we keep going up probably fine, >>Right? I >>Love, >>That's the odd numbers. 1, 3, 5, 7, 10. There you go. >>Yeah, >>I think you, we got that question last year and we said we get two and we ended up overdelivering with three. So who >>Knows? Hey, nothing. Nothing wrong with the setting the bar low and clearing it and I mean, not setting it low, setting it with one and clearing it with three is pretty fantastic. Yes, yes. We talk about it as an ego thing sometimes with awards and it feels great for internal culture. But David, what does it mean on the partnership side to win awards like that? So >>What's really important for us with our partners is to make sure that we're achieving their goals and when, when their goals are achieved in our partnership, it's just the byproduct that we're achieving our own with our clients. The awards are a great representation of that to see, you know, again, being recognized three in three different categories really shows that we've had success with AWS and in turn, you know, know and not, I can attest to it, we've been very successful with the partnership on our side. >>Yeah. And I bet it's really exciting for the team. Just speaking for energy, are your >>Team sponsor? Absolutely. There's celebration, you know, there's been a few cocktails being raised >>In Las Vegas >>Cocktail. Oh, >>I wouldn't mind one right now to be really be really honest. Let's dig into the, into the product a little bit. Infosys Cobalt, what's the scooping on? >>Yeah, so first of all, we were the first ones to actually launch a cloud brand called Cobalt. Right? We are the first ones in the world. In fact, one of our competitor followed us soon after. So essentially what we did was we brought all our cloud offerings into one brand called Cobalt. It becomes very clear to our customers on what our proposition is. It is very consistent to the market in terms of what our narrative is. And it's little easy for our customers to understand what we bring to the table. So is not one product or one platform. It's a set of services, solutions and platforms that we bring to accelerate customers journey where they're leveraging cloud. So that's what Cobalt is. >>Awesome. Everyone wants to do everything faster. Yes. And Booth was packed. I walked by earlier, it was absolutely buzzing. Yes. >>Yeah. Nobody wants to do it, you know, wants less data slower. Yes. Always more faster. More faster. And we're living in this explosion unlike anything, this swarm of data, unlike anything that we've ever seen before. Yes. Every company, regardless of industry, has to be a data company. Yes. But they have to be able to work with the right partners. Absolutely. To extract, to first of all, harness all that data. Yes. Extract insights in real time. Yes. Because of course, on the consumer side, we're not patient anymore. Yes. We expect a personalized, real time custom experience. Absolutely. How do you work with AWS to help deliver that and how do the partners help deliver that as well? >>Well, I'll start with on the partner side of it. You walk through the hallways here or down the aisles, you see partners like MongoDB, snowflake, data Bricks and and such. They're all attest their commitment and their strong partnership with aws. And coincidentally, they're also very good partners of our own. And as a result, what >>Big happy family here at AWS when you >>Met? Yes, and this, this is something that I'm, I'm calling coining the phrase sub ecosystems. These are partnerships where one is successful with each other and then the three come together and we go together with an integrated solution. And it's really taking off. It's something that's really powerful. The, the fun thing about, you know, reinvent here is it's just that we're having amazing discussions with our clients and aws, but we're also having it with the other partners here about how we can all work together. So, and data analytics is a big one. Security is another hot one. This is huge. >>Yeah. Optimization. >>The absolutely. And I, and Ruba was saying this, right? Ruba said like she was giving example of a marathon or Marathon is not a single man or a single woman sport. Right? So similarly cloud journey is a team's sort of, you know, team journey. Yeah. So that's why partners play a big role in that and that's exactly what we are trying to do. >>So you guys get to see a lot of different companies across a lot of different industries. We've, we're living in very interesting times. How do you see the cloud evolving? >>Oh yeah. So, so what we did when we launched Cobalt in 2020, we have now evolved our story, we call it Cobalt 2.0. And essentially what we want to do was to focus on industry clouds. So it's not just about taking a workload and doing it from point A to point B or moving data to cloud or getting out of data centers, but also being very specific to the industry that this specific customer belongs to. Right? So for example, if you go to banking, they would say, we want to better our security posture. If you go to a retailer, they want to basically have smart stores. If we go to a manufacturing customer, they want to have a smart factory. So we want to make sure that there are specific industry blueprints and specific reference architectures that we bring and start delivering outcomes. So we have, we call it something called, >>I know you're hot on business outcomes. Yes, yes. >>So we call it something called the link of life forces. So there are six technologies, cloud, data Edge, iot, 5g, and ai. They will come together to deliver business outcomes. So that's where we are heading with Cobalt 2.0. And that's essentially what we want to do with our customers. >>That's a lot to think about. Yes. And yeah, go for it. >>David. I just say from a partnering perspective, you know, prior to cloud we were talking about transactional type businesses where if you ask a technology company who their partner is, is generally a reseller where they're just basically taking one product and selling it to their, their client. What's happened with cloud now, it's not about the transaction up front, it's about the, the actual, you know, the consumption of the technology and the bringing together all of these to form an outcome. It changes the model dramatically. And, and quite honestly, you know, the global system integrators like emphasis are in a great position cuz we can pull that together to the benefit our of our partners put our own secret sauce around it and take these solutions to market and drive consumption. Cuz that's what the cloud's all about. >>Absolutely. Right. How are you helping customers really treat cloud as a strategic focus? You know, we, we often hear companies talk about we're we're cloud first. Well, not everything belongs in the cloud. So then we hear companies start talking about being cloud smart. Yes. How are you helping? And so we'll go with that. How are you helping enterprises really become cloud smart and where is the partner angle? So we'll start with you and then we'll bring the partner angle in. >>Sure. Oh yeah, big time. I think one of the things that we have been educating our customers is cloud is not about cost takeout. So cloud is about innovation, cloud is about growth. And I'll give two examples. One of one of the beauty products companies, they wanted to set up their shop in us and they said that, you know, we don't have time to basically buy the infrastructure, implement an er p platform and you know, or roll it out, test it, and go into production. We don't have so much time, time to market is very important for us. And they embarked on the cloud journey. So expanding into new market cloud can play a big role. That is one of the ways to expand and, you know, grow your business. Similarly, there is another company that they, they wanted to get into retail banking, right? And they didn't have years to launch a product. So they actually use AWS and it's a joint infos and AWS customer, a pretty big bank. They launched into, they launched retail banking and they did it in less than six months. So I think these are some of the examples of, wow, it's Snap Cloud not being cost takeout, but it's about innovation and growth. So that's what we are trying to tell >>Customers. Big impacts, big impact. >>Absolutely. And that's where the, the Cobalt assets come into play as well. We, you know, as as not mentioned, we have literally thousand of these industries specific, and they're derived in, in a lot of cases in, in, in partnership with the, the companies you see down the, the aisles here and, and aws. And it accelerates the, the, the deployments and ensures a accessible adoption more so than before. You know, we, we have clients that are coming to us now that used to buy, run their own procurement. You know, they, they would have literally, there was one bank that came to us with a over a hundred, >>The amount of work. Yeah. >>A list of a hundred products. Some they bought directly from a, a vendor, some they went through a distributor, something went through a, a seller and such. And they're, they're, now they're looking at this in a completely different way. And they're looking to rationalize those, those technologies, again, look for companies that will contract for a business outcome and leverage the cloud and get to that next era. And it's, it's a, it's a fun time. We're really excited. >>I can imagine you, you're really a part of the transformation process for a lot of these companies. Absolutely. And when we were chatting before we went live, you talked about your passion for business outcomes. Can you give us a couple examples of customers or business outcomes that really get you and the team excited? Same thing to you, David, after. Yeah, >>Well, absolutely. Even our contractual structures are now moving into business outcomes. So we are getting paid by the outcomes that we are delivering, right? So one of the insurance customers that we have, we actually get paid by the number of claims that we process, right? Similarly, there is a healthcare customer where we actually get paid by the number of customers that we cater to from a Medicare and Medicaid standpoint, right? >>Tangible results versus >>Projected forecast. Successful process of >>Claims. That's interesting. Exactly. Yeah. I love reality. Yeah, reality. What a novel idea. Yeah. >>One of the great examples you hear about airplane engines now that the model is you don't buy the engine. You basically pay for the hours that it's used and the maintenance and the downtime so that they, you take the risk away. You know, you put that in the context of a traditional business, you're taking away the risk of owning the individual asset, the maintenance, any, any of the issues, the bug fixes. And again, you're, you're partnering with a company like Emphasis will take on that based upon our knowledge and based upon our vast experience, we can confidently contract in that way that, you know, years ago that wasn't possible. >>It's kind of a sharing economy at scale style. >>Exactly. Absolutely. >>Yeah. Which is really exciting. So we have a new challenge here on the cube this year at ve We are looking for your 32nd Instagram real sizzle sound bite, your hot take your thought leadership on the, the biggest theme or most important thing coming out of this year's show. David, we'll start with you. We've been starting with it on, I'm to go to you. We're making eye contact right now, so you're in the hot seat. >>Well, let's, I I think there's a lot of time given to sustainability on the stage this week, and I think that, you know, every, every CEO that we talk to is bringing that up as a major priority and that's a very important element for us as a company and as a service >>Provider. I mean, you're obviously award-winning and the sustainability department. Exactly. >>Yes. Nice little plug there. You know, and I, I think the other things that have come up, we saw a lot about data analytics this week. You know, I think new offerings from aws, but also new partnerships that we're gonna take advantage of. And, and again, security has been a hot topic. >>Absolutely. And not, what's your hot take? >>Yeah. I think one, one very exciting thing for partners like us is the, the reimagining that is being done by rhu for the partners, right? The AWS marketplace. I think that is a big, big thing that I took out. Of course, sustainability is huge. Like Adam said, the fastest way to become sustainable is to move to cloud, right? So rather than overthinking and over-engineering this whole topic, just take your workloads and move it to cloud and you'll be sustainable. Right. So I think that's the second one. And third is of course cyber security. Zscaler, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike. These are some of the big companies that are at the event here. And we have been partnering with them many more. I'm just calling out three names, but many more. I think cyber security is the next one. So I think these are three on top of my mind. >>Just, just a few things you casually think about. That was great, great responses from both of you and David, such a pleasure to have you both with us. We hope to have you back again. You're doing such exciting things. I'm sure that everything we talked about is gonna be a hot topic for many years to come as, as people navigate the future, as well as continue their business transformations. It is always a joy to sit next to you on stage. Likewise. Thank you. And thank all of you wherever you're tuning in from. For joining us here at AWS Reinvent Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, with Lisa Martin. I'm Savannah Peterson. And for the last time today, this is the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> 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 around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of eight of us Reinvent 2020 Virtual. This is the Cube virtual. I'm your host, John Ferrier. We are the Cube virtual. This year not only were in person but because of the pandemic. We're doing the remote interviews, doing the live coverage over the past couple weeks. We'll be covering it in depth. My next guest is Lynn Martin, vice president of government education. Health care for VM Ware Public Sector Thank you for coming on the Q. As part of the public sector day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's my pleasure to be with you to that >>great to see last time you're on the Cube. We were in person and D. C is part of the Public Sector Summit, which is the reinvent for public sector is what I call it Theresa's big event. Teresa Carlson, who runs a U. S public sector. You guys a friend. You've been working together the partnership between VM where AWS has been so strong going back to 2016. I'll never forget. When I interviewed Pat and Andy, A lot of skeptics were like VM Ware E W s turned out to be great. Move at many levels. You're in the field for VM Ware driving the business. What's up? What's the update? >>So a couple exciting things. The partnership has been going great. Ah, lot of transformation work and co innovation between the two companies from the engineering side. And, as you mentioned, great a t the Pat Andy level on Ben. When you take it down to the field, support our government education, healthcare, customers. Great partnership with Theresa and her team. They've done a fabulous job, really, being at the forefront of the cloud transformation across those markets and our partnership together. No, it's pretty exciting. We have a lot of new product announced. It's coming out around our government. Go to market means jointly. So it's been a busy time with co vid and a lot of opportunity for both companies to really market differentiators for some of the challenges that are unique customers face >>when I want to ask you a little bit more on that piece because I know it's been interesting with the pandemic. You guys have had a nice overlay with 80. Invest with Teresa's organization obviously from it from a customer standpoint, Nice fit. Okay. Also, with the pandemic, we're seeing customers certainly doing more modern development. That's a big theme of reinvent also for VM World a few months ago as well. But the operator side of the I t piece is gonna be completely changed. I've been doing some reporting and stories around how not just the modern app site, but the I T portion operating these environments. It's hard in pant with the pandemic, so you start to see that operator meets software meets Cloud kind of world. Can you give your perspective of how that's impacted with the pandemic? Because it seems to have accelerated both i t operations in public sector and modern development of new APS and new surge. So, uh, interesting thoughts. I'd love to get your perspective. >>Yes. So I would say that when you kind of look back at the beginning of 2020 I don't think any of us envisioned quite what we were gonna be facing and what our customers, particularly in public and health care you know have faced. So we have customers jointly that are on the forefront of either providing civil services, national security, education to the students or commercial health care first responders right on the front line around patient care. And what I would say, the observation we had really early on in March was the acceleration of the digital transformation across all of those sectors. So lots of discussions have been taking place, and there were a lot of projects in place that would take a couple of years to probably implement. And I think what occurred with Covic is you really have to accelerate how you were gonna provide those civil services or patient care or education and parts of that digital transformation. I think we're taking for granted. So if you think of, like virtual desktop technology in the education space or, you know, SD when and network capability be of the cloud force for health care providers and things of that nature. So I think the portion played a bigger part in the country, responded to cove it in ensuring that we could do the things we needed to do virtually and quickly and out enabled, you know, speed to market and then infrastructure from companies like VM Ware teamed with an Amazon. We allow the acceleration for that journey. >>You know, the old expression. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Um, education and healthcare in particular really were impacted. They had a pressure points t do differently, things faster e education. We know what's going on there and health care with the pandemic. How how are you managing through this? Because, you know, you had a lot of business in flight prior before the pandemic. Now during and you've got maybe some visibility toe what growth looks like Post pandemic. You still got demand. So how are you managing it with from your perspective, your team? What's it like? How how are you as a leader dealing with this? But it's not like it's slowing down for you. It's increasing in >>demand. Yes, so are our segment was kind of on the forefront within bm where globally, um, we started working with different state, local governments and the federal government ahead of the close downs. You know, in one of the major large metropolitan cities, there were over a billion students that had to be able to be educated virtually and there were challenges around network capability, device capability, all kinds of things. So we've had a lot, a lot of activity and as a company. But you know, my segment, how to really work with corporate to kind of bend, how we do business business process rules as well, to be able to respond quickly and to be agile for our clients and provide different ways to support the needs of those customers. So then they could provide the kind of civil services that the country, you know, counts on them to dio. So I think from the internal perspective, in customer facing, we were able to flex, flex and move very quickly and then internally, within the organization as well. I would say, You know, February to June was almost a blur, were busy on weekend calls and things like that, dealing with all different kinds of situations and the organization as a whole. We were ableto flex and work remotely very quickly. I mean, we just used our own technology and literally upon the shutdown. The only difference is where you were working from, but all the tools, infrastructure and things we had were already in place. So anything from there and then as a leader, the third element, all out is kind of the human element. I think it's it's all an opportunity to connect our teams a little bit. Mawr. You know, you have to put more effort virtually more, all hands because more one on ones and kind of also adapt toe how they're dealing with the different personal things of educating their own Children and their family or caring with elders different types of situations as well. >>It's not business as usual, certainly, but it's, you know, challenging great leadership insight there. Thank you for sharing that. I wanna get back to the cloud impact I did. An interview is part of Amazon's Public Sector Awards program a few months ago or in late spring. Roughly, Um, there was a use case with the center and the Canada government, and the guy was kind of, uh, didn't wanna take sidewall Amazon. I'm not gonna be a spokesperson for Amazon. He ended up when the pandemic hit. He was so big fan of AWS and Cloud connectors example because he was skeptical, but he saw the benefit to speed can you give some examples of customers that you're working with that were getting immediate benefits from cloud in the pandemic. That literally made a big difference in what they did because you're seeing people highlight on, okay, just transmission. But people want to see examples. Can you share some examples where this is where cloud helped? It made a huge difference. And that's an example of what we're talking about here. >>Yes. So I would say, um, um example would be at M. D. Anderson Cancer Institute. Um, they had a need to really expand the connectivity off the facility to segregate patient care and ensure that patients that already, you know, had health issues were segregated from any other co vid patients. And very quickly we saw them scale and extend their data center in record time. I mean, things that traditionally would have taken years were done in months, you know, major accomplishments. In 30 days, a zai mentioned, you know, one of our large cities in the country had to really struggle with off 1.2 billion students in K through 12, many of which count on the school systems for, you know, their meals and things and how you deliver your virtual desktops in that environment. VMC on AWS for horizon is a great example that we saw across many state and local you know, entities in how they transform their education to those clients. Uh, and then the federal government. There's many examples, uh, you know, across some of the larger agencies as well, with BMC on AWS for both horizon and infrastructure as well. As you know, sometimes it wasn't one solution. They might have went a W s native for part vmc on AWS for part. And the combination of that really allows companies to come together in part to get things done very, very quickly. It's >>a great example of the VM Ware cloud on AWS success story. I think what's interesting and how I see you guys really doing well with Amazon. It will get to the partnership in a second. But I wanna call this out because you mentioned that earlier devices the network these air not usually associate with cloud usually clouds. You burst of the cloud clouds. Awesome. All these utility higher level services, Dev Ops Cloud native All goodness, But when you get down to what's going on the pandemic. It's the devices you're using. The desktops. It's the network working at home. How as much as that affected your team and your customers, Can you unpack that a little bit more? >>Yes. So what I would say on that is really when you look atyou out, you know the VMC on AWS offerings and you take it down to an example like the horizon platform horizon allows you with the V m c A W s power behind it to really present your virtual desktop on any device anywhere. And that allowed the education entities to be able to provide those curriculums to the students very quickly and, you know, not really have a big, disconnected downtime on how that was done. So I think you know, you're kind of taking cloud classic infrastructure that you reference and then layering in those unique use cases with the VMC on AWS offerings that then could be applied or telehealth. So you know, lots of examples across the health care industry with telehealth and deploying actually patient care via the M R solutions on BMC on aws is well, so it z really taking core. I t infrastructure layering on a software platform that then allows you to provide all those use cases, whether it be an NYPD or fire departments across the country or education entities or commercial patient care things of that nature as a second layer on top of that cloud infrastructure that you think of normally. >>Well, then I want to congratulate you and the team at VM. Where you guys doing? A great job. Like Teresa Carlson. You guys have a really good focus. Uh, you have a great understanding of how the public sector and commercial dynamics working with cybersecurity, going on all across there. And I just you guys there in space with them. You're doing stuff on the land and the ground station all across the public sector, and and they need faster solutions in the cloud. So congratulations. So I have to ask you, since we're here at reinvent, how is the relationship going? Um, where do you see it evolving? I'll see. We talked about the pressure of education, health care and other areas. I mean, case is gonna be re hall. That's gonna be a complete reinvention. Um, so a lot going on. What's supposed to give us the update. >>So I think that in general, you know the future off the public sector and healthcare space will never go backwards. And the acceleration that we've seen occur over 2020. You're gonna see that accelerate as we move forward. And I think the co innovation between Amazon and B M, where which are both innovative companies coming together to support those markets, I think we have more opportunity ahead of us then behind us. And I think when you look at just the great job Amazon has done in general, I was super excited to see Theresa pick up the health care sector. So we have a whole new space to work together on this year and really lots of exciting, innovative offerings to support both patient care and pharmaceuticals, life science and our payer community across the health care sector, as well as some of the work we've already been doing in the public sector. But given the dynamics in the future outlook of the industry, there's gonna require lots of innovation and different kinds of things to really partner together technically and, you know, aligning our go to market around primarily the customer needs. So I think what's very unique about our partnership in the public and healthcare space is we focus first on the customer needs and the mission of those customers and what they need to achieve. And both companies come to the table with, you know, incredible innovation around solutions to support that market. >>It's a great, great partnership, I gotta say, from a technology standpoint, after Raghu VM Ware when they did this, he's like It's a much deeper It's a real deal is not just the Barney deal is everyone kind of knows the old school, uh, phrases saying It's not really a deal. You guys have really integrated in the field on the customer activities. Strong final question for you You don't mind, um, here it reinvent. You know, people are remote. There's gonna be three weeks, a lot of live coverage. Cube Game day will be doing a lot of support and coverage. But for the audience watching this, what would you say is the most important story people should think about or, um, look at harder. I'm when it comes to cloud collision of public sector and what's gonna happen post pandemic because there's gonna be a new reality. There's gonna be growth strategies that will be in play. Some projects will be doubled down on some may not continue. What's your What's your advice to folks watching? What should they pay attention to this reinvent. >>So I think the number one thing is to really embrace the change going around you. And, you know, I think Amazon will be on the forefront of leading a lot of great innovation in that area. And it's really trying to be open minded about how you take advantage of the things that are coming out and be able to apply that into your infrastructure. So if you look across our customer base, you know there's lots of changes you mentioned. I don't think we'll ever go backwards. And those that will be able to move forward quicker are going to be the ones that embrace the change and really lead and drive that innovation within their organization in reinventing themselves through the kind of technology that a company like Amazon and beyond, where bring to the table >>great insight. Lynn And also there's a lot of great problems to solve and societal benefits a lot of need and you guys doing great work. Thanks for your leadership. And, uh, great conversation. Thank you. >>Thanks very much. >>Okay. Lynn Martin, head of vice president of Global public Sector Uh, government education Healthcare. Lynn Martin, the leader of VM Ware's public sector here in the Cube. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us today for our session on the 2020 Data Drivers Award winners. I'm excited to be here today with you. I'm a lease. Bergeron, vice president, product marketing for snowflake. Thes rewards are intended to recognize companies and individuals for using snowflakes, data cloud to drive innovation and impact in their organizations. Before we start our conversations, I want to quickly congratulate all of our award winners. First in the business awards are data driver of the year is Cisco. Our machine learning master is you Nipper, Our data sharing leader is Rakuten. Our data application of the year is observed and our data for good award goes to door dash for the individual and team awards. We first have the cost. Jane, Chief Digital officer of Paccar. We have a militiamen, director of cybersecurity and data science winning our data science Manager of the Year award at Comcast for a date. A pioneer of the year. We have Faisal KP, who's our senior manager of enterprise data Services at Pizza Hut. And lastly, we have our best data team going to McKesson, led by Jimmy Herff Data and Analytics platform leader Huge congratulations to all of these winners. It was very difficult to pick them amongst amazing set of nominations. So now let's dive into our conversations. We'll start with the data driver of the year. Representing Cisco today is Robbie. I'm a month do director data platform, data and analytics. >>Let me welcome everybody to the wonderful. Within a few years before Cisco used to be a company, you know, in making the decisions partly with the data and partly with the cuts. Because, you know, the data is told in multiple places the trading is not done right and things like that. So we, you know, really understood it. You know what was a challenge in the organism? By then we defined the data strategy on we put in a few plants in place, and it is working very well. But what is more important is basically how we provide the data towards data scientists and the data community in Cisco. I'm making them available in a highly available scalable on the elastic platforms. That's where you know, snowflake came into picture really very well for arrest, along with the other data strategies that we have had in place more importantly, data. Democratization was a key. You know, you along with the simplification, something technologies involved in the past. Our clients need to be worrying, laudable the technologies involved, you know, for example, we used to manage her before we make it. Snowflake Andi Snowflake, in a solve all of these problems for us with the ease on it. Really helping enabling a data data given ordinances in our >>system. In the data sharing leaders category, Rockhampton was our winner. We have mark staying trigger VP of analytics here to share their story. I >>wanna thank Snowflake for the award, and it's an honor to be a today. The ease of use of snowflake has allowed projects to move forward innovation to move forward in a way that it simply couldn't have done on old Duke systems or or or other platforms. And I think the truth the same is true for us on a lot of the similar topics, but also in the data sharing space, data sharing is a part off innovation. Like I think, most of the tech companies we work with certainly are business partners, merchants, but also with a range of other service providers and other technology vendors, um on other companies that we strategically share data with 2 May benefit of their service or thio to allow data modeling or advanced data collaboration or strategic business deals using the data and evaluated with the data on. But I think if you look Greece snowflake, you would see a lot of time and effort money going to just establishing that data connection that often involved substantial investments in technology data pipelines, risk evaluation, hashing, encrypt encryption. Security on what we found with snowflakes sharing functionality is that we can not eliminate those concerns, but that the technology just supports the ability to share data securely easily, quickly in a way that we could never do >>previously. Now we have a really inspiring winner of the data for good award door dash with their Project Dash Initiative here to speak about their work is act shot near Engineering manager >>Thank you sports to snowflake for recognizing us for this initiative. Eso For those of you who don't know, Dash, the logistics technology platform company that connects people with the best in their cities and Project Dash, our flagship social impact program, uses the door dash logistics platform to tackle the challenges like hunger and food waste. It was launched in 2018 on over the first two years in partnership with food recovery organizations, we powered the delivery off over £2 million of surplus food from businesses to hunger relief agencies across the U. S. And Canada. Andi simply do Toko with tremendous need has a much we were ableto power. The delivery often estimated 5.8 million meals to food insecure communities and frontline workers across 48 states on the 3.5 million off. These meals have been delivered since much. We do all of our analysis for our business functions from like product development to skills and social impact in snowflake On the numbers I just provided here actually have come from Snowflake on. We have used it to provide various forms of reporting, tow our government and non profit partners on this snowflake. We can help them understand the impact, analyzed friends and ensure complaints in cases where we are supporting efforts for agencies like FEMA, our USDA onda. Lastly, our team is really excited to be recognized by snowflake for using data for good. It has reminded us to continue doubling down on our commitment to using our product and expertise to partner with communities we operated. Thank you again. >>The winner of the machine Learning Master's word is unit for Energy. Viola Sarcoma Data Innovation leader is here on behalf of unit for >>Hello, everyone, Thanks for having me here. It's really a pleasure. And we were really proud to get this award. It means a lot for you. Nipper. It's huge recognition for our effort since last couple of years assed part of our journey and also a celebration off our success now for you. Newport. It would not be possible to start looking at Advanced Analytics techniques, not having a solid data foundation in place. And that's where we invested a lot in our cloud data platform in the cloud back by snowflake. Having this platform allowed us to employ advanced analytics techniques, combining data from Markit from fundamental data, different other sources of data like weather and extracting new friends, new signals that basically help us to partly or even in some cases fully automate some trading strategy. And we believe this will be really fundamental for for the future off raiding in our company and we will definitely invest in this area in the future. >>Our data application of the year is observed. Observers recognizes the most innovative, data driven application built on Snowflake and representing observed today is their CEO, Jeremy Burton. >>Let me just echo the thanks from the other folks on the coal. I mean snowflakes, separation of storage. Compute. I can't overstate what a really big deal it is. Um, it means that we can ingest in store data. Really? For the price of Amazon s three on board, we're in a category where vendors of historically charged for volume of data ingested. So you can imagine this really represents huge savings. Um, in addition, and maybe on a more technical note, snowflakes, elastic architectures really enables us to direct queries appropriately, based on the complexity of the query. So small queries or simple queries weaken director extra small warehouses and complex queries. We can direct, you know, for Excel. Or I think even a six x l is either there are on its way. The key thing there is that users they're not sitting around waiting for results to appear regardless of the query complexity. So I mean, really? The separation storage compute on the elastic architectures is a really big deal for us. >>Turning to the data Pioneer of the Year Award, I'm excited to be here with Faisal KP, senior manager of Enterprise Data Services from Pizza Hut. >>First of all, thank you, Snowflake, for giving this wonderful person. I think it means a lot for us in terms of validating what we're doing. I think we were one of the earlier adopters of Snowflake. We saw the vision of snowflake, you know, stories. Russell's computer separation on all the goodies, right? Right from back in 2017, I believe what snowflake enabled us is to actually get the scale with very little manpower, which is needed to man the entire system. So on the Super Bowl day, we have, you know, the entire crew literally a boardroom where the right from the CME, most of the CEOs to all the folks will be sitting and watching what is happening in the system. And we have to do a lot of real time analytics during that time. So with snowflake, you know, way used the elasticity of the platform we use, you know, platform you know their solutions, like snow pipe to basically automate the data ingestion coming through various channels, from the commas, from the stores, everything simultaneously. So as soon as the program is done, you know, we can scale scale down to our normal volume, which means we can, you know, way can save a lot. Of course. So definitely it snowflake has been game changer for us in terms of how we provide real time analytics. Our systems are used by thousands off restaurants throughout the country and, you know, by hundreds of franchisees. So the scale is something we have achieved with a lot of ability and success. >>In the category of data science Manager of the Year Award, we have a mission Min, director of cybersecurity and data science at Comcast. >>So thank you for having me and thank you for this wonderful award. So one of the biggest challenges you see in this other security spaces the tremendous amount of data that we have to compute every day to find the gold haystack. So one of the big challenges we overcame with by uniting snowflake was how do we go from like my other counterparts on the panel have said Theo operational overhead of maintaining a large data store and moved to more of results driven and data focused environment. And, you know, part of that journey was really the tremendous leadership. Comcast saying, You know, we want Thio through our day to day lives by relying less on operational work and Maura on answering questions. And so you know, over the last year we've really put Snowflake at the center of our ecosystem, knowing that it's elastic platform and its ability scale infinitely have given us the ability to dream big and use it to drop five cybersecurity. And while it's traditionally used for cybersecurity, we're starting to see the benefits right away and the beauty of the snowflake. Ecos, Miss. We're now able to enable folks that not traditionally have big data skills, but they have standards, sequel skills, and they could still work in the snowflake platform. So, you know, the transition to cloud has been very powerful for us as an organization. But I think the end story, the real takeaways, by moving our secretary operation to the cloud, we're now been able to enable more people and get the results they were looking for. You know, as other people have said fast, people hate to wait. So the scale of snowflake really shines. >>Yeah. Now, let's hear from our data Executive of the year. The Cost. Jane. Chief Digital Officer Packer. >>Thank you very much, Snowflake, for this really incredible recognition and honor of the work we're doing it back. Are we began. The first step in this process was for us to develop an enterprise Great data platform in the cloud capable off managing every aspect of data at scale. This this platform includes snowflake as our analytics data warehouse amongst many other technologies that we used for ingestion of data, data processing, uh, data governance, transactional, uh, needs and others. So this platform, once developed, has really helped us leverage data across the broad pack. Our systems and applications globally very efficiently and is enabling pack are, as a result to enhance every aspect. Selfish business with data. >>Ah, big congratulations again to all of the winners of the 2020 Data Drivers Awards. Thanks so much for joining us for a great conversation. And we hope that you enjoy the rest of the data cloud summit

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everyone, this is Dave Vellante at theCUBE, and we're getting ready for the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. four geographies, eight tracks, more than 40 sessions for this global event. starts on November 17th, where we're tracking the rise of the data cloud. You're going to hear a lot about that. Now, by now, you know the story of Snowflake or, you know what? Maybe you don't. But a new type of cloud-native database was introduced in the middle part of the last decade. And a new set of analytics workloads has emerged, that is powering a transformation within the organizations. And it's doing this by putting data at the core of businesses and organizations. For years, we marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That was the innovation engine of our industry, but now that's changed. It's data, plus machine intelligence, plus cloud. That's the new innovation cocktail for the technology industry and industries overall. And in the Data Cloud Summit, we'll hear from Snowflake executives, founders, technologists, customers, and ecosystems partners. And of course, you're going to hear from interviews on theCUBE. So let's dig in a little bit more. And to help me are two Snowflake experts. Felipe Hoffa is a data cloud advocate and Kent Graziano is a chief technical evangelist, both at Snowflake. Gents, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us on, this is great. >> Thank you. >> So guys, first, I got to congratulate you on getting to this point. You've achieved beyond escape velocity and obviously one of the most important IPOs of the year, but you got a lot of work to do and I know that. Felipe, let me start with you. Data cloud, what's a data cloud and what are we going to learn about it at the Data Cloud Summit? >> Oh, that's an excellent question. And, let me tell you a little bit about our story here. And I really, really, really admire what Kent has done. I joined Snowflake like less than two months ago and for me, it's been a huge learning experience. And I look up to Kent a lot on how we deliver the method here, how do we deliver all of that? So, I would love to hear his answer first. >> Dave: Okay, that's cool. Okay Kent, leader on. (Kent laughing) So we took it. Data cloud, that's a catchy phrase, right? But it vectors into at least two of the components of my innovation cocktail. What are the substantive aspects behind the data cloud? >> I mean, it's a new concept, right? We've been talking about infrastructure clouds and SaaS applications living in the application cloud, so data cloud is the ability to really share all that data that we've been collecting. We've spent what? How many da-- A decade or more with big data now, but have we been able to use it effectively? And that's really where the data cloud is coming in and Snowflake, in making that a more seamless, friendly, easy experience to get access to the data. I've been in data warehousing for nearly 30 years now. And our dream has always been to be able to augment an organization's analytics with data from outside their organization. And that's just been a massive pain in the neck with having to move files around and replicate the data and maybe losing track of where it came from or where it went. And the data cloud is really giving our customers the ability to do that in a much more governed way, a much more seamless way, and really make it push button to give anyone access to the data they need and have the performance to do the analytics in near real-time. It's a total game changer as you already know. And just, it's crazy what we're able to do today compared to what we could do when I started out in my career. >> Well, I'm going to come back to that 'cause I want to tap your historical perspective. But Felipe, let me ask you, so why did you join Snowflake? You're the newbie here, what attracted you? >> And finally, I'm the newbie. I used to work at Google until August. I was there for 10 years, I was a developer advocate there also for data, you might have heard about the BigQuery, I was doing a lot of that. And though as time went by, Snowflake started showing up more and more in my feeds, within my customers, in my community. And it came the time when I felt like-- Wherever you're working, once in a while you think, "I should leave this place, "I should try something new, "I should move my career forward." While at Google, I thought that so many times as anyone will do. And it was only when Snowflake showed up, like where Snowflake is going now, how Snowflake is being received by all the customers, that I saw this opportunity. And I decided that moving to Snowflake would be a step forward for me. And so far I'm pretty happy, like the timing has been incredible, but more than the timing and everything, it's really, really a great place for data. What I love first is data, sharing data, analyzing data and how Snowflake is doing it, its promising phenomena. >> So, Kent, I want to come back to you and I said, tap maybe your historical perspective here. And you said, it's always been a dream that you could do these other things, bring in external data. I would say this, that I would want to push a little bit on this because I have often said that the EDW marketplace really never lived up to its promises of 360 degree views of the customer, in real-time or near real-time analytics. And it really has been, as you kind of described it, a real challenge for a lot of organizations. When Hadoop came in, we had-- We got excited that it was going to actually finally live up to that vision and Hadoop did a lot. And don't get me wrong, I mean, the whole concept of, bring the computer data and lowering the cost and so forth. But it certainly didn't minimize complexity. And it seems like, feels like Snowflake is on the cusp of actually delivering on that promise that we've been talking about for 30 years. I wonder if you could share your perspective as an o-- Are we going to get there this time? >> Yeah. And as far as I can tell working with all of our customers, some of them are there. I mean, they thought through those struggles that you were talking about, that I saw throughout my career. And now with getting on Snowflake they're delivering customer 360, they're integrating weblogs and IOT data with structured data from their ERP systems or CRM systems, their supply chain systems and it really is coming to fruition. I mean, the industry leaders, Bill Inmon and Claudia Imhoff, they've had this vision the whole time, but the technology just wasn't able to support it and the cloud, as we said about the internet, changed everything. And then Benoit and Thierry in their vision in building the system, taking the best concepts from the Hadoop world and the data lake world and the enterprise data warehouse world, and putting it all together into this architecture, that's now Snowflake and the data cloud, solved it. I mean, it's-- The classic benefit of hindsight is 20/20, after years in the industry, they had seen these problems and said like, "How can we solve them? "Does the cloud let us solve these problems?" And the answer was, yes, but it did require writing everything from scratch and starting over with, because the architecture of the cloud just allows you to do things that you just couldn't do before. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought up some of the originators of the data warehouse, because it really wasn't their fault, they were trying to solve a problem. It was the marketers that took it and really kind of made promises that they couldn't keep. But, the reality is when you talk to customers in the sort of the old EDW days, and this is the other thing I want to tap you guys' brains on, it was very challenging. I mean, and one customer one time referred to it as a snake swallowing a basketball. And what he meant by that is, every time there's a change, or Sarbanes-Oxley comes and we have to ingest all this new data. It's like aargh! It's just everything slows down to a grinding halt. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor they would go out and grab a new server as fast as they possibly could, he called it chasing the chips. And it was this endless cycle of pain. And so, the originators of the data warehouse, they didn't have the compute power, they didn't have the cloud. And so-- And of course they didn't have like 30, 40 years of pain to draw upon. But I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about the kinds of things that can be done now that we haven't been able to do here tofore. >> Well, yeah. I remember early on having a conversation with Bill about this idea of near real-time data warehousing and saying, "Is this real? "Is this something really people need?" And at the time, it was a couple of decades ago, he said, "No, to them, they just want to load their data "sooner than once a month." That was the goal. And they-- That was going to be near real-time for them. And, but now I'm seeing it with our customers. It's like, now we can do it. With things like the Kafka technology and Snowpipe in Snowflake, that people are able to get that refresh way faster and have near real-time analytics access to that data in a much more timely manner. And so it really is coming true. And the compute power that's there, as you said, we've now got this compute power in the cloud that we never dreamed of. I mean, you would think of only certain, very large, massive global companies or governments could afford supercomputers. And that's what it would have taken. And now we've got nearly the power of a super computer in our mobile device that we all carry around with us. So being able to harness all of that now in the cloud, is really opening up opportunities to do things with data and access data in a way that, again, really, we just kind of dreamed of before. Its like, we can democratize data when we get to this point. And I think that's where we are, we're at that inflection point, where now it's possible to do it. So the challenge on organizations is going to be how do we do it effectively? How do we do it with agility? And how do we do it in a governed manner? You mentioned Sarbanes-Oxley, GDPR, CCPA, all of those are out there. And so we have all of that as well. And so that's where we're going to get into it, ride us into the governance and being able to do that in a very quick, flexible, extensible manner. And Snowflakes really letting people do it now. >> Well, yeah. And again, we've been talking about Hadoop, and again, for all my fond thoughts of that era, and it's not like Hadoop is gone, but there was a lot of excitement around it, but governance was a huge problem. And it was kind of a bolt on. And now, Felipe I got to ask you, when you think about a company like Google, your former employer, data is at the core of their business. And so many companies, the data is not at the core of their business, something else is, it's a process or a manufacturing facility or whatever it is. And the data is sort of on the outskirts. We often talk about in stovepipes. And so we're now seeing organizations really, put data at the core of their... And it becomes central to their DNA. I'm curious as to your thoughts on that. And also, if you've got a lot of experience with developers, is there a developer angle here in this new data world? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, I love seeing every-- Like throughout my career at Google and my two months here, I'm talking to so many companies, that you never thought before, like these are database companies. But the ones that keep growing, the ones that keep moving to the next stage of their development is because they are focusing on data, they are adopting the processes, They are learning from it. And, me per-- I focus a lot on developers, so I mean, when I started this career as an advocate, first, I was a software engineer. And my work so far, has been... (mumbles) I really love talking to the engineers on the other companies, like... Maybe I'm not the one solving the business problem, but at the end of the day, when these companies have a business problem through out the world, they want to have data. There are other engineers that are scientists like me that are... That want to work for the company and bring the best technology to solve the problems. Yeah, for example, there's so much where data can help. If, as we evolve the systems for the company and also for us for understanding these systems, things like observability. And recently, there was a big company, a big launch on observability, on the company names of Cyberroam, where they are running all of their data warehousing needs and all of their data needs on Snowflake. Just because running these massive systems and being able to see how they're working, generates a lot of data. And then how do you manage it? How do you analyze it? Snowflake is ready there to help and support the two areas. >> It's interesting, my business partner, John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, he said, gosh, I would say the middle of the last decade, maybe even around the time, 2013, when Snowflake was just coming out. He said... He predicted that data would be the new development kit. And, it's really at the center of a lot of the data life cycle, the-- What I call the data pipelines, I know people use that term differently. But, I'm very excited about the Data Cloud Summit and what we're going to learn there. And I get to interview a lot of really cool people. And so I appreciate you guys coming on. But Kent, who should attend the Data Cloud Summit? I mean, what are the-- What should they expect to learn? >> Well, as you said earlier Dave, there's so many tracks and there's really kind of something for everyone. So we've got a track on unlocking the value of the data cloud, which is really going to speak to the business leaders, as to what that vision is, what can we do from an organizational perspective with the data cloud to get them value from the data to move our businesses forward? But we've also got for the technicians, migrating to Snowflake. Training sessions on how to do the migration and modernizing your data lake, data science. How to do analytics with, and data science in Snowflake and in the data cloud. And even down to building apps, for the developers and building data products. So, we've got stuff for developers, we've got stuff for data scientists, we've got stuff for the data architects like myself and the data engineers, on how to build all of this out. And then there's going to be some industry solutions spotlights as well. So we can talk about different verticals, folks in FinTech and in healthcare, there's going to be stuff for them. And then for our data superheroes, we have a hallway track where we're going to get talks from the folks that are in our data superheroes, which is really our community advocacy program. So these are folks that are out there in the trenches using Snowflake, delivering value at their organizations. And they're going to talk down and dirty of how did they make this stuff happen? So there's going to be just really, something for everyone. Fireside chats with our executives, of course, something I'm really looking forward to myself. It's always fun to hear from Frank and Christian and Benoit, about what's the next big thing, what are we doing now? Where are we going with all of this? And then there is going to be some awards. We'll be giving out our Data Driver Awards for our most innovative customers. So there's going to be a lot for everybody to consume and enjoy and learn about this new space of the data cloud. >> Well, thank you for that Kent and I'll second that, and there's going to be a lot for everybody. If you're an existing Snowflake customer, there's going to be plenty of two of one content, where we can get in to the how tos and the best practice. If you're really not that familiar with Snowflake or you're not a customer, there's a lot of one-on-one content going on. If you're an investor and you want to figure out, "Okay, what is this vision? "And can, will this company grow into its massive valuation? "And how are they going to do that?" I think you're going to hear about the data cloud and really try to get a perspective and you can make your own judgment as to whether or not you think that it's going to be as large a market as many people think. So Felipe, I'd love to hear from you what people can expect at the Data Cloud Summit. >> Totally. So I would love to plus one to every one that Kent said, we have a phenomenal schedule that day, the executives will be there. But I really wanted to especially highlight the session I'm preparing with Trevor Noah. I'm sure you must have heard of him. And we are having him at the Data Cloud Summit, and we are going to have a session. We are going to talk about data. We are preparing a session that's all about how people that love data, that people that want to make that actionable, how can they bring storytelling and make it have more impact as he has well learned to do through his life. >> That's awesome. So, yeah, Trevor Noah, we're not just going to totally geek out here. We're going to have some great entertainment as well. So I want you to go to snowflake.com and click on Data Cloud Summit 2020. There's four geos. It starts on November 17th and then runs through the week and then the following week in Japan. So, check that out, we'll see you there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay welcome back already Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios here. Can't believe we just turned the calendar on September the 1st of 2020. What a year, it's cruising by. And one of the big topics obviously is working from home, we're seeing more and more companies telling everybody to expect to work from home through the end of the year or into next year, some are even saying indefinitely. And we've got an expert coming on the show that we're excited to have back. It's Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski. She is the founder and CEO and author of "Virtual Distance and the Virtual Distance Company". Karen, great to see you. >> Great to see you too Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so I wanted to get you back on for a couple reasons. One is we first met at the ACGSV, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley 2018 Awards, about two years ago was summer of 2018. And at that point, you introduced me to the concept and our audience, to the concept of virtual distance, which if I can summarize is basically communicating through devices versus face-to-face, like we're doing here. And the bad things that come from that and challenges and this and the other. Who knew that two years from then we would all be forced and not asked, but forced to basically go to a work-from-home environment and increase the frequency and use of using electronic devices to communicate not only for work, but also for social stuff, for school, for everything, so, oh my goodness, you happen to be in the right place at the right time for not necessarily the greatest of reasons, but wow, I mean, how amazing this transformation that we've all been forced to since the middle of March. First off, get your thoughts on that and then we'll dive into what people should be thinking about, what people should be doing about it and how they can, I want to say make the most, but it does kind of make the most of, not necessarily the greatest situation. >> Yeah, well, I could have never imagined when we were sitting out at that round table outside the room where we had dinner that we'd be here two years later, right, talking about virtual distances, you said in the context of everyone having to be isolated from each other and working from home. Obviously, like everyone on the planet, I think I would never have wanted to see this happen. But I feel fortunate in a way to have put this out there many years ago because today it's serving a lot of different organizations, corporations, schools, even government organizations to have a very steady framework that's based on 15 years of data, to understand how to make the best, as you said, of this situation and to reduce some of the negative consequences of virtual distance and actually use the framework as a way to get to know people better and really see them more as human beings in a way that helps them through not just their work life, but also through the family challenges that they're having with every kid now, sort of going back to school, many of them online, there's a lot of virtual distance that can crop up even in the house. But I guess I just, I'm glad that I discovered virtual distance, and that it's useful in this time. >> Right, right. So let's jump into it. And actually I want to skip to the end of the book before we get into the beginning of the book because you talked about leadership and when this thing first hit, we had a number of leaders from the community, talking about leading through trying times. And most great leaders know that their primary job is really communication, right? Communication to their teams, communication to their constituents, communication to their customers. COVID has really changed the communication challenges and increase them dramatically and most of the stuff we're hearing is that leaders need to communicate more frequently and in more variety, both in terms of topics as well as communication forms. How does that kind of jive with your studies on virtual distance and leadership, given the fact that there aren't a lot of other options in terms of face-to-face or a little bit more intimate things? They have to use these electronic means. So what tips do you have for leaders, as they suddenly were told everybody's working from home starting like tomorrow? >> Yeah, well, it's funny that you asked me that because we learned early on when I started looking at this phenomenon in the early 2000s. We learned early on that it actually takes a lot more work and time to lead virtually than it does in more traditional environments. And the reason is because a leader really has to bring forward a lot of context that tends to go underground or become invisible about other people when we're working virtually. So the leader already was under a lot of pressure if you will, to communicate much more than they had been in more traditional settings because a lot of the information and knowledge and intelligence if you will, about the company was available in the context of the environment and other people. So leaders were already on track to having to communicate much more in order to make make remote work and virtual work work. Well, which of course it can. >> Right. >> But what happened was, we found that when suddenly a light switch is turned off, leaders needed to communicate even more. And that is kind of standard crisis management leadership. We talked a little bit about that in the past, right? So we can look at the situation we're in as not just an acute crisis that came to bear in early January and then sort of everything locking down in March. But we can kind of look at this as a long-term leadership crisis management strategy on top of just over communicating to do better in virtual space. And in a crisis management situation you definitely want to have even more communication, but it's also an opportunity actually to develop other leaders behind you on teams that can also communicate as well, to share that responsibility, to share that leadership commitment to a lot of communication during times like this, that actually works really well. >> Right, 'cause one of the things you talked about that's super, super important, more important actually than physical distance or the virtual distance is what you called the affinity distance, and I think it ties back to another point in the book in terms of clarity of communication from the leadership. What are the goals, what is the vision? And reinforcing that at a rate and frequency much higher than they've ever done before to build that affinity so people can continue to feel like they're part of something beyond more just the tasks and the roles and the assignments that I have to do every day. >> Yeah, that's exactly right, Jeff. So again, we found early on. And it was a surprise to us at first, but then became kind of obvious that people tend to think that the real challenge with virtual work is physical distance, right, sort of the space between us in terms of a geography or a geographic separation. And what we learned early on through the statistics, as well as sort of common sense was that actually physical distance had the least impact on corporate outcomes than any of the other three factors. So the affinity distance piece is really all about, how do I gain an affinity for someone when I really don't know that much about them. And I don't know much about their context in the moment that we're talking, and I also just know less about them in general when we're virtual. >> Right. >> So affinity distance is much more important than the physical separation because it's what holds us together and allows us to build very, very deep relationships which we can count on and trust no matter what the situation is. And yeah, doing that in these times is very important. >> So it's funny, right? 'Cause so much of the problems that we have with communications are in the subtle feedback mechanisms that aren't necessarily in the overt communication and as you said, those can be lost in a lot of channels. What's kind of (chuckles) interesting that's going on with COVID is we're actually seeing a side of people that we never did see in the physical space, right. Now we're literally being invited into everyone's home. I mean, I'm in your home office, I can see your books on your bookshelf and people are bringing people into their home which they may not have done before or been comfortable. Not only that, but the spouse is there, he or she is working from home. The kids are there, they're doing their school from home, the occasional dog or pet or other thing kind of jumping through the screen. So it's this weird kind of juxtaposition. On one hand you've lost a whole lot of kind of subtle communication reinforcers. On the other hand, you're getting kind of a whole new kind of the human side aspect in terms of who these people are and what they're all about, that you never necessarily had before. So I think the blending of the whole self is probably been elevated, even though the communication challenges without having kind of all these subtle feedback loops that we really rely on, are gone. So when you think about communication and communication methods based on communication messages and what you're trying to do, how do you tell people to think about that? What types of communications should be done in which ways to make them the most effective and avoid some of the real problems that come from the wrong type of communication on the wrong type of channel? >> Yeah, so first of all, you make some great points. Because it really is when we invite people into our home via these kind of video links, people see a different side of us, a contextualized side to us that they normally wouldn't see. And that opens the door, as you said, to having other communications. I think before I get directly to your question, one thing that strikes me about what you say is that this is truly a shared experience, right? So all of us are being impacted by COVID-19, the economics of the situation, the childcare issues that are raised by the situation, the community issues that we all have in our towns or cities. And we're sharing that experience, which is a great jumping off point in terms of communications because we actually have a very similar context from which were working. In terms of which communications to use when. This is a really important question, I had a person from a very, very large tech company that people use every day to go look for things on the Internet, call me and tell me at one point early, sort of early on in the pandemic that some of his people were starting to beg him to turn off the video screens. (chuckles) And just use audio because sometimes when we're overwhelmed with a crisis the video can be helpful, but it can also sort of be overwhelming. So it's important to understand sort of when to discern, when to use audio and when to use visual, when to use email and when to use tax. And the basic tips here is that email has really never been good to explain ourselves to other people. It's been great to set up lunch dates or an appointment and things like that. So email should be used pretty sparingly. Audio is really great if we don't have video, but we also just kind of need a rest from video. And we also need to really focus on a person's voice very, very intensely. So if we're trying to solve a really critical problem that's a little bit conceptual, sometimes audio can can be more helpful. Video is obviously great because it gives us all this context and it allows people to see into our home and hear our cats kind of screaming at each other which is happening right now in my house. But it also lets us see each other's expressions and a little bit of the facial communication that we need in order to know if people are okay with what we're saying, if they're quizzical and looking like they kind of don't understand et cetera, The overarching goal of communications in a situation like this, that I talk a lot about in the book, is to mix up modes of communication as much as you can think about that, right? Because we get context as I've just explained in different ways through different modes. And so if we mix it up, if I say well, I've talked to Jeff a lot over video maybe I'll just give him a call today. Or I've been using a lot of email to talk to one of my colleagues in Norway, maybe I should really try to set up a video call that is very helpful because it gives us dimensionality to someone's personality as well as their context. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I think most people are always saying turn on the video, turn on the video, we want to see everybody's face but as this thing continues to go and go and go and it's going to go for the foreseeable future, and people are going to get fatigue, right, people are getting Zoom fatigue. That's a really interesting and simple way to I think, kind of lessen the stress a little bit by telling people, let's just turn the video off. We don't necessarily need to see each other, we know what we look like. And if you feel some reason to turn it on, you can turn it on, but having that as an option, I think that's a really insightful. And the other thing I want to focus on is it's not all negative, right? I mean, there's a lot of studies about the open office plan, which didn't necessarily work so well, and we've had conversations with a lot of people that say, just because you throw everybody in a room together doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to communicate more and there aren't necessarily the water cooler chatter that you're kind of hoping for. And in fact, you have a bunch of stats in the book here about remote workers having actually a lot of success. They have less trouble with technology, they can cope best with multiple projects. There's so many less interruptions, (chuckles) assuming the rest of the family has a place to work. But you don't get kind of the work interruptions that you would in terms of actually getting projects done. So, it's not all bad. And I think there's a lot of things that we can help people think about to really take advantage or make the most of the opportunity, to take advantage is probably the wrong word. So, vary communications, frequency in communications is certainly a good one. What are other ways that people kind of build trust? 'Cause you talk a lot about trust and feeling part of something bigger and not letting the individual tasks and the little day-to-day things that we do get in the way of still feeling like you belong to something that's important, that you care about, with your teammates that you want to move forward. >> Yeah, so the it's a great question, and again I think, obviously, amongst sort of the darkness there's always sort of opportunities to see some light. And I think one of the ways that we can see light through working this way at this time is to expand our understanding of the people that we're working with, right? And we can do that in a framework, it doesn't have to be haphazard. So when we look at affinity, what we really want to do is to bring forward the way people feel about their value systems, what's important to them about work in sort of pre-COVID or BC, right before COVID, but also what's important to them about their family life or about the situation that's happening, that's interacting with and integrating with their work life. So asking those questions in ways that are not guised, but sort of directly asking them things about what they value? How they feel that they're interdependent on other people? Why other people are important to them in their work, as well as just in their day-to-day lives? Those are the kinds of opportunities for questions around things that are not work related, are not party Friday, which are also kind of fun things right? But that get more to the core of who a person is, that whole person that you were talking about. And that allows us to see so much more deeply, ironically, into that human being. And when you talk about purpose, and really wanting to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves, those kinds of insights that build affinity help us help other people. So, we tend to focus on task orientation and goals and deliverables and all that which is absolutely critical for business continuity, and to get through the day and focus our attention. But actually what makes people feel really good about their day as a person is often how they can help other people. And so if we draw this closer affinity, we can actually figure out ways to help other people. And that just lifts everybody up and makes the work product actually even better. >> Right, right, I've always ascribed to the theory that right, if you spend your work helping other people do their work better, easier, get roadblocks out of the way, whatever, be an enabler, then you're getting this multiplier effect because I'm doing my work and I'm helping somebody else be more efficient. And it's a very different way to kind of think about work in terms of helping everybody be more effective, more efficient, and as you said, you get this great multiplier effect, but I want to shift gears a little bit. And this sentence, just jumped out of your book. I'm actually going to read from it, that despite the fact that many leadership challenges are new, we continue to over rely on management thinking and solutions that are fundamentally designed around outdated assumptions. I mean, to me this is such a huge thing. We had Martin Mikason at the beginning of this process and his great line, and he's managed remote companies for years and multiple companies. And he said, it's so easy to fake it in the office, right? It's so easy to look busy. (Karen chuckles) Whereas when you're working from home, the only thing you have to show is your output. And that's what you're graded on, your output. And yet when this thing first hit, we saw all types of new products coming out that are basically spyware for the employees, how often are you sitting in front of your computer? How often are you on a Zoom call? How often are you, doing these things? And it's striking to me that it's such an outdated way to measure activity, versus a way to measure outcome and output and what are you trying to do? I mean, it just drives me crazy to hear those things, I just love to get your take that people still are mixed up about what they're supposed to be measuring and what the purpose of the whole task is, which is to get output done not just to be busy and sit in Zoom calls all day. >> It's so true. So there's sort of two prongs to that question. And two very important things to look at. So one is how do we measure productivity, right among knowledge workers, which has been the topic of a lot of conversation. And the other thing is, what have leadership models been built off of in the past, right? If you just take the first thing first. Productivity today, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, you will still see productivity defined as how many widgets can I produce in an hour. That's still today, how we measure productivity, even though (chuckles) all of our output or most of our output, right, is coming from our knowledge, our thinking, our problem solving. (clears throat) So the notion of productivity feels very heavy handed to a lot of people, because it's still rooted literally economics wise in this notion of x widgets per hour, which just doesn't fit. And that comes through the second point, which is our leadership models, right? So I talked in the book and I've been talking about this for many years, because it just jumped out at me when I started to do this research, is that if you look at most leadership models today, any one of them, pick whatever one you like, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, situational leadership or whatever it might be. Those leadership models were built mainly in the 1950s. And some of them came later in the 80s. We have a few new ones, (clears throat) excuse me that have come after the internet, but not too many. And fundamentally, if you look at the communication mode of leaders in the 50s, and the 80s, it was face-to-face or phone. I mean, just by definition, was in person or via phone. But that assumption doesn't hold true anymore and hasn't held true for a good 15 years. And yet, in every business school today, we still use those leadership models as sort of our first run at how to lead. It's not that they're not useful and helpful and don't have extremely good words of advice for leaders. But the main thing leaders do is communicate. So if the fundamental channel over which leaders are communicating has completely changed, it seems natural that we should be looking for new leadership models (chuckles) that fit our times a little bit better. Taking pieces of the best of those leadership models, but really turning them on their head and saying, what's really a better approach when fundamentally our communication mode itself, it has completely changed. >> Right right. >> And that's what we do as leaders. >> And I do just want to say a word. We're talking about working from home and knowledge workers and unfortunately, there's a whole lot of people going through COVID right now that don't have that option, right. If you're in the travel industry, if you're in the hospitality industry, if you're in a lot of services industries, if you are a plumber, you can't go virtual as a plumber, unfortunately. So just to acknowledge that, what we're talking about applies to a lot of people, but certainly not everyone and everyone doesn't have these options. So I just wanted to mention that but before we wrap, Karen, the thing that struck me, as you're talking about kind of the 50s and the organizational structure, was it was really command and control and just top down hierarchies that dictated what people did. And then you as you said, your job was to put so many widgets on the widget receiver per hour, and that's what you were graded on. Where in knowledge workers, it's a very different thing. And in fact, you shouldn't tell people how to do things, you should tell people what the objectives are, and then see what they come up with. And hopefully, they'll come up with lots of different ways to achieve the objective, most of which that management has never thought of, they're not down in the weeds, and you get all kinds of interesting and diversity of opinion and different approaches. And kind of a DevOps mentality where you try lots of things and you'll find new ways to get it done. So I want to close out on this final kind of communication piece for leadership. And this is the why. I think back in the 50s, I don't know that the why we was that important. Or maybe it was and I'm not giving it enough credit. But today the why is so important. That is such a big piece of why do I come to work every day? And why am I important to work with my colleagues and move this mission forward. And so whenever you can just share, how important the why is today, and then how important the why is in trying to build a culture and hold people together when they are now by rule distributed all over the place. Talk a little bit about the why. >> Yeah, I love that question, Jeff. Because in the book, I talk a lot about Taylorism. And Taylor was the founder of like bureaucratic management and leadership and he actually despised the worker. (chuckles) There's actually a little piece in the book where he's testifying to Congress and saying that the man who handles pig iron, a type of steel, wasn't intelligent enough to understand what pig iron really was, he got a lot of flak for that. (chuckles) So as we've evolved, right, and as we've grown as organizations into knowledge workers, and I think your point about not everyone is a quote unquote, knowledge worker, is really, really important. The bottom line is, we're trying to measure our output and the value of our work by these older standards. And so people are struggling a little bit with that sort of disconnect, and looking for why, what purpose do they have? What is their bigger purpose? How are they connected to the organization in new ways? And there's actually an excellent analogy in the Navy. Is has its traditions in the Navy, called Commander's Intent which I talk about. So if you think of ships that used to sail, right out to sea, and they had lots of goals about either taking over a certain country or whatever it was they were doing, they couldn't be together, right. So we've been working remotely for a very long time. So the commander would gather all of his lieutenants, and basically tell them what his or, there were no hers at that time, but what his intentions were. And the lieutenants, the captains of the other ships, would go out to each ship, and they wouldn't follow a blueprint tactical plan they would just have the Commander's Intent as their guide. And then they were free actually, to use whatever strategies and tactics that they thought of and that worked in their context in order to fulfill the Commander's Intent, but they weren't given a blueprint. Their goal was really to use their own smarts, their own critical thinking in order to carry forward that intent. And I think that idea is very powerful today because I think if leaders can focus on helping their workers, their employees, their ecosystem partners, supply chain partners, whatever it may be, understand what the intent of the company is, and show that they trust the employees or the partner to deliver on that intent, with whatever means and creativity and imagination, guided by the intent, can be used and selected from on their day-to-day lives, people will feel so much more empowered and still get to the same outcome or actually better, than if they're told do A, B, C and D. So this idea of leader intent, I think would serve companies really well during this time, and if I could just add one other quick thing. There's another idea that comes out of sort of the military that I used and doing some work with leadership crisis management after 9-11. Around this notion of net-centricity. Net-centricity is sort of allowing people on the ground to sort of form their own networks and push information up to leadership so that they can make certain decisions and then push those decisions down with an intention back to the ground, so that this network can operate with some freedom and flexibility. And I think corporations can put net-centricity actually into place in a structured way and they'll find themselves with a lot more flexibility, higher levels of business continuity and effectiveness, and perhaps, most importantly, giving a sense of more meaningfulness and purpose and powerfulness, or self actualization back to the worker. >> Right, right, as you're speaking the word I just can't get out of my head is trust, right? It's so much about trust. And then giving people the power, enabling people the power that you trust to go do the jobs that you've hired them to do. And then to the other point that we talked about, then as a leader, help them remove roadblocks. Give them the tools, do the things that you can do to help them do their job better, versus to your point, being super prescriptive on the road actions that you wish that they would do, and then managing to the completion of the road, actions versus the accomplishment of the bigger task. It seems so simple, it's so hard for so many people to grok. It just, it still just amazes me that so many folks are unfortunately still stuck in that old paradigm. But you can't anymore 'cause everybody's (chuckles) working from home, so you better get with the program. >> (clears throat) Yeah, I'm sorry, I have a little frog in my throat. But you can. And just to add to what you're saying. I think the best thing that leaders can do is also expand their understanding of the worker as no longer just coming to work in some kind of bubble. They're coming to work with all kinds of personal situations. And I've had clients who have sort of tried to get away from that and keep the worker in a bubble. And I think, to be successful as we get through this sort of long-term leadership crisis, I think it's important to lean in to the chaos. Lean into the complexities that COVID, the pandemic, the economic situation bring and see the corporation and their role as leaders as trying to help that whole person with the complexities of their life, as opposed to trying to divorce them from their life, because that has not worked. And what works best, and I've seen this over and over again, is that companies that lean into the crisis, embrace it, and really try to help that whole employee who's coming to work in their house, really, really works very well. >> Yeah, it's going to be interesting as we come out of the summer and go back into the fall, which is the traditional season of kids going back to school and everybody kind of going back to work, and in our world conferences, and it's kind of the ramp up of a busy activity until we get kind of to the Christmas season again coming off of summer, now knowing that isn't a temporary situation, this isn't going away anytime soon. I mean, we used to talk about the new normal in March or April and May. Well now talking about the new normal in September, October, November and into 2021 is a whole different deal. So to your point, I think that's a great tip, lean in, do the best you can, learn from the experts. You don't need to do it by yourself. There's lots of documentation out there. Darren Murph has stuff up from GitHub. Or excuse me GitLab. There's lot of good information. So you do have to kind of buy into it and embrace it, 'cause it's not it's not going away. So these are great tips Karen and I give you this, the last word before we sign off. Of all the work you've done, all the clients you've worked with, a couple of two or three really good nuggets that are really simple things that everybody should be thinking about and doing today. >> I think, there's the Waldorf Schools out by you on the west coast, right, have a motto that they use for education. And it it says in through the heart out through the mind. And I think more than ever, leadership and business can borrow that idea. I think we have to sort of look at things in through the heart. And then, distribute our directions and our leadership out through the mind. At the end of the day (chuckles) we're all human beings that are all struggling in this shared experience, something that has literally never happened on planet earth with 8 billion people, connected through technology with a global pandemic. And so if we kind of can make a shift and think about taking things in through the heart and then delivering out through the mind. I think that a lot of people will feel that compassion. And that will translate into the kind of trust that we're trying to build between all of us to get through it together. And I think when we do that, I have a lot of confidence in the human spirit that we will get through it. People will be able to look back and say, yes, this was very difficult and horrific on many levels, but at the end of the day, maybe there's a little bit of a renaissance in how we sort of look at each other and treat each other with compassion and some love and joy, even in the worst of times. I think that translates over any communication medium (chuckles) including the one we're using today. >> Well, Karen, thank you for the time and thank you for closing this with a little bit of light. Congrats again on the book, "The Power of Virtual Distance", I'm sure it's available everywhere. And again, great to see you. >> Thank you so much Jeff, you too. >> All right. >> Take care. >> She's Karen, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soothing music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the chief operating officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award and joining him one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who is a assistant developer with the United States, Small Business Administration, and of course the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu? >> Hey Stu; Thank you. >> All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, but maybe just give us a sketch if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. >> Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, Four Points is a value added technology reseller focused on the federal government and we've been working with federal customer since 2002. We're a service disabled veteran owned small business, and we've been in a Amazon partner since 2012. >> Wonderful; Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020, if you could tell us a little bit about your role in your organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. >> Sure; so I worked for the chief information officer and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. >> Wonderful; Joel, maybe a connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which I understand was predated the COVID incidents. >> Sure; we've been with SBA for several years now. And SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity, from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or use third party contractors for. So, Four Points came in as a true value added reseller of cloud to SBA providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professionals services. >> All right; so Ryan bring us in a little bit, the project that we're talking about here, what was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flush out a little bit, what you're doing there? >> Yeah, so most recently Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community oriented lenders to submit Paycheck Protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like big banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock and Four Points was there for us. We got new accounts set up. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but has done an incredible amount of work and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points. So we're really excited about that. >> Yeah, If I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money move through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. >> Yeah, that's so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today. And so we're very comfortable with AWS service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that, it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, dynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did. We never even actually saw a performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective as the program manager. >> well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime. Those are really the promise the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of teeing out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together, and, the various pieces underneath. >> Yes Stu, it's interesting. Four Points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200+ services that AWS has. They also have a direct access to billing and usage information that lets them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone. And they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using of variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live very, very robust, really large environment. >> Yeah, right, and I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with the serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud native technology. You know, the concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, you know, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written and now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need, means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, sba.gov is now serving a a hundred or a thousand times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, but we're doing a hundred or a thousand times more work. That's a win, that's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. >> Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SBA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SBA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think there were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well also. >> Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain instant size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native, like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances, so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year. So they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expire. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out and they have enabled us to do things like, be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up to all because it's been such a key thing over this last year. >> Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years, is that the role between developers and that, that finance piece. So, Ryan, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? is it Four Points? You know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at Reinvent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how, how does that communication and decision making happen? >> That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how Four Points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like Four Points instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider is that Four Points provides us a service where every quarter they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion, and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, "Hey, this is what we think" has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have, when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them, because they're the vendor >> From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give to your peers out there, and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things, either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations. >> So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration, that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like Four Points, and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that a third party entity that can come in and, call bowl and also call Yahtzee. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project. And it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is, we going to change how we do business project, and we going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. >> All right; and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about Four Points and congratulations again, the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. >> Great, thanks Stu, we're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud. And it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such, such payoff for the whole country. >> All right, Well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates, such an important project this year. Thanks so much. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks >> Stay with us for more covered from the AWS Public Sector Partner awards. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.