by moving the healthcare system to the cloud and leveraging artificial intelligence and helping things like oncology departments identify cancer that treat cancer better using technology I think is the next frontier for us I love your description of this as a celebration because really that's one of the things that we do is we celebrate customer success and so when you look at AWS around the world we've got customers that are delivering solutions for citizens to new solutions for healthcare great solutions to education all around the world there's a lot of requests for machine learning out of the tactical edge so we have our you know soldiers forward deployed how they take their imagery and analyze that and not have to wait 24 hours for someone to come back from the main data center and that's I mean that's real life saving game

>> Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everyone we're here live in Washington D.C. for Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman our next guest is Dr. Swaine Chen, Senior Research Scientist of Infectious Disease, the Genome institute of Singapore. And also an assistant professor at The Medicinal National University of Singapore. Great to have you on, I know you've been super busy, you were on stage yesterday, we tried to get you on today, thanks for coming in and kind of bring it in to our two days of coverage here. >> Thank you for having me, I'm very excited to be here. >> So we were in between breaks here and we're talking about some of the work around DNA sequencing but, you know it's super fascinating. I know you've done some work there but, I want to talk first about your presence here at the Public Sector Summit. You were on stage, tell your story 'cause you have an very interesting presentation around some of the cool things you're doing in the cloud, take a minute to explain. >> That's right, so one of the big things that's happening in genomics is the rate of data acquisition is outstripping Moore's Law right? So for a single institute to try to keep up with compute for that, we really can't do it. So that really is the big driver for us to move to cloud, and why we're on AWS. And so then, of course once we can do that once we can sort of have this capacity, there's lots of things that my research is mostly on infection diseases, so one of the things where really you've got, all of a sudden, you've got a huge amount of data you need to process would be a case like an outbreak. And that just happens it happens unexpectedly. So we had one of these that happened that I talked about. And the keynote yesterday was on Group B Streptococcus. This is a totally unexpected disease. And so all of a sudden we had all this data we had to process, and try to figure out what was going on with that outbreak. And unfortunately we're pretty sure that there's going to be other outbreaks coming up in the future as well, and just, being able to be prepared for that. AWS helps us provide some of that capacity, and we're you know, continuously trying to upgrade our analytics for that as well. >> So give me an example of kind of where this kind of hits home for you, where it works. What is doing specifically? Is it changing the timeframe? Is it changing the analysis? Where is the impact for you? >> Yeah so it's all of this right? So it's all the sort of standard things that AWS is providing all of the other companies. So it's cheaper for us to just pay for what we use, especially when we have super spiky work loads. Like in the case of an outbreak right? If all of a sudden we need to sort of take over the cluster internally, well there's going to be a lot of people screaming about that, right? So we can kick that out to the cloud, just pay for what we use, we don't have to sort of requisition all the hardware to do that, so it really helps us along these things. And also gives us the capacity too think about you know as data just comes in more and more, we start to think about, lets just increase our scale. This is somethings that been happening, sort of incessantly in science, incessantly in genomics. So as just an example from my work and my lab we're studying infectious diseases we're studying mostly bacterial genomics. So the genomes of bacteria that cause infections. We've increased our scale 100x in the last four years in terms of the data sets that we're processing. And we see the samples coming in, we're going to do another 10x in the next two years. We just really wouldn't have been able to do that on our current hardware. >> Yeah, Dr. Chen, fascinating space. We love for years there was discussion of well oh how much it costs, to be able to do everything had gone down. But what has been fascinating is you've look, you've talked about that date and outstripping Moore's Law, and not only what you can do but in collaboration with others now, because there's many others around the globe that are doing this. 'Cause talk about that level of data, and how the cloud enables that. >> Yeah so that's actually another great point. So genomics is very strong into open source, especially in the academic community. Whenever we publish a paper, all the genomic data that's in that paper, it gets, uh oh (laughs). Whenever we, whenever we publish-- >> Mall's closing in three minutes. >> Three minutes cloud count. >> Three minutes, okay. Whenever we publish a paper, that data goes up and gets submitted to these public databases. So when I talk about 100x scale, that's really incorporating world wide globally all the data that's present for that species. So as an example, I talked about Group B Streptococcus, another bacteria we study a lot is E. coli, Escherichia coli. So that causes diarrhea, it causes urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections. When we pull down a data set locally, in Singapore, with 100, 200, 300 strains we can now integrate that with a global database of 10,000, 20,000 strains and just gain a global prospective on that. We get higher resolution, and really AWS helps us to pull in from these public databases, and gives the scale to burst out that processing of that many more strains. >> So the DNA piece of your work, does that tie into this at all? I mean obviously you've done a lot of work with the DNA side, was that playing into this as well? >> The? >> The DNA work, you've done in the past? >> Yeah so all of the stuff that we're doing is DNA, basically. So there are other frontiers, that have been explored quite a lot. So looking at RNA and looking at proteins and carbohydrates and lipids, but at the Genome Institute in Singapore, we're very focused on the genetics, and mostly are doing DNA. >> How has the culture changed from academic communities with cloud computing. We're seeing sharing, certainly a key part of data sharing. Can you talk about that dynamic, and what's different now than it was say five to even 10 years ago? >> Huh, I'd say that the academic community has always been pretty open, the academic community right? It's always been a very strong open source compatible kind of community right? So data was always supposed to be submitted to public databases. Didn't always happen, but I think as the data scale goes up and we see the value of the sort of having a global perspective on infectious diseases and looking for the source of an outbreak, the imperative to share data right? That looking at outbreaks like Ebola, where in the past people might try to hold data back because they wanted to publish that. But from a public health point of view, the imperative to share that data immediately is much stronger now that we see the value of having that out there. So I would say that's one of the biggest changes is the imperative is there more. >> I agree I think academic people I talk to, they always want to share, it might be not uploaded fast enough. So time is key. But I got to ask you a personal question, of all the work you've done on, you've seen a lot of outbreaks. This is kind of like scary stuff. Have you had those aha moments, just like mind blowing moments where you go, oh my God we did that because of the cloud? I mean an you point to some examples where it's like that is awesome, that's great stuff. >> Well so we certainly have quite a few examples. I mean outbreaks are just unexpected. Figuring out any of them and being able to impact, or sort of say this is how this transmission is, or this is what the source is. This is how we should try to control this outbreak. I mean all of those are great stories. I would say that , you know, to be honest were still early in our transition to the cloud, and we're kind of running a hybrid environment right now. Like really when we need to burst out, then we'll do that with the cloud. But most of our examples, so far, you know we're still early in this for cloud. >> To the spiky is the key value for you, when the hits pipe out. >> So what excited you about the future of the technology that, do you believe we'll be able to do as we just accelerate, prices go down, access to more information, access to more. What do you think we're going to see in this field the next, you know, one to three years? >> Oh I think on of the biggest changes that's going to happen, is we're going to shift completely how we do, for example in outbreaks right? We're going to shift completely how we do outbreak detection. It's already happening in the U.S. and Europe. We're trying to implement this in Singapore as well. Basically the way we detect outbreaks right now, is we see a rise in the number of cases, you see it at the hospitals, you see a cluster of cases of people getting sick. And what defines a cluster? You kind of need enough of these cases that it sort of statistically goes above your base line. But we actually, when we look at genomic data we can tell, we can find clusters of outbreaks that are buried in the baseline. Because we just have higher resolution. We can see the same bacteria causing infections in groups of people. It might be a small outbreak, it might be self limited. But we can see this stuff happening, and it's buried below the baseline. So this is really what's going to happen, is instead of waiting until, a bunch of people get sick before you know that there's an outbreak. We're going to see that in the baseline or as it's coming up with two, three, five cases. We can save hundreds of infections. And that's one of the things that's super exciting about moving towards the future where sequencing is just going to be a lot cheaper. Sequencing will be faster. Yeah it's a super exciting time. >> And more researching is a flywheel. More researching come over the top. >> Yep, exactly, exactly. >> That's great work, Dr. Swaine Chen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate-- >> No thank you. >> Congratulations, great talk on the keynote yesterday, really appreciate it. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action here as we close down our reporting. They're going to shut us down. theCUBE will go on until they pull the plug, literally. Thanks for watching, I'm John Ferrier, Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante. Amazons Web Services Public Sector Summit, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back everyone it's theCube's exclusive coverage here, day two of the Amazon Web Sources public sector summit. This is the public sector across the globe. This is their reinvent, this is their big event. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and also David Vellante's been here doing interviews. Our next guest is, we got Doug Van Dyke, he's the director of U.S. Federal Civilian and Non Profit Sectors of the group, welcome to theCube, good to see you. >> John, thank you very much for having me. >> So you've been in the federal, kind of game, and public sector for a while. You've known, worked with Theresa, at Microsoft before she came to Reinvent. >> 15 years now. >> How is she doing? >> She's doing great, we saw her on main stage yesterday. Force of nature, love working with her, love working for her. This is, like you were saying, this is our re-invent here in D.C. and 14,000 plus, 15,000 registrations, she's on the top of her game. >> What I'm really impressed with her and your team as well, is the focus on growth, but innovation, right? it's not just about, knock down the numbers and compete. Certainly you're competing against people who are playing all kinds of tricks. You got Oracle out there, you got IBM, we've beaten at the CIA. It's a street battle out there in this area in D.C. You guys are innovative, in that you're doing stuff with non-profits, you got mission driven, you're doing the educate stuff, so it's not just a one trick pony here. Take us through some of the where you guys heads are at now, because you're successful, everyone's watching you, you're not small anymore. What's the story? >> So, I think the differentiator for us is our focus on the customers. You know, we've got a great innovation story at the Department of Veterans Affairs with vets.gov. So five years ago if a veteran went out to get the services that the government was going to provide them, they've have to pick from 200 websites. It just wasn't to navigate through 200 websites. So, the innovation group at Veteran's Affairs, the digital services team, figured out, let's pull this all together under a single portal with vets.gov. It's running on AWS, and now veterans have a single interface into all the services they want. >> Doug, one of the things I've been impressed, my first year coming to this. I've been to many other AWS shows, but you've got all these kind of overlapping communities. Of course, the federal government, plus state and local, education. You've got this civilian agencies, so give us a little bit of flavor about that experience here at the show. What trends your hearing from those customers. >> So what's great for me is I've been here almost six and a half years, and I've seen the evolution. And you know, there were the early customers who were just the pioneers like Tom Soderstrom, from JPL, who was on main stage. And then we saw the next wave where there were programs that needed a course correction, like Center for Medicare Medicaid with Healthcare.gov. Where Amazon Web Services came in, took over, helped them with the MarketPlace, you know, get that going. And now we're doing some great innovative things at CMS, aggregating data from all 50 states, about 75 terabytes, so they can do research on fraud, waste, and abuse that they couldn't do before. So we're helping our customers innovate on the cloud, and in the cloud, and it's been a great opportunity. >> Oh my God, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Soderstrom two years ago. >> Okay. >> Everybody gets real excited when you talk about space. It's easy to talk about innovation there, but you know, talk about innovation throughout the customers, because some people will look at it, and be like, oh come on, government and their bureaucracy, and they're behind. What kind of innovation are you hearing from your customers? >> So there's an exciting with Department of Energy. They, you know there's a limited amount of resources that you have on premise. Well, they're doing research on the large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. And they needed to double the amount of capacity that they had on premise. So, went to the AWS cloud, fired up 50,000 cores, brought the data down, and they could do research on it. And so, we're making things possible that couldn't be done previously. >> What are some of the examples that government entities and organizations are doing to create innovation in the private sector? Cause the private sector's been the leader to the public sector, and know you're seeing people starting to integrate it. I mean, half the people behind us, that are exhibiting here, are from the commercial side doing business in the public sector. And public sector doing, enabling action in the private sector. Talk about that dynamic, cause it's not just public sector. >> Right. >> Can you just share your? >> These public, private. Great example with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. They have a new program called NEXRAD. It's the next generation of doppler radar. They have 160 stations across the world, collecting moisture, air pressure, all of the indicators that help predict the weather. They partner with us at AWS to put this data out, and through our open data program. And then organizations like the Weather Bug can grab that information, government information, and use it to build the application that you have on your I-Phone that predicts the weather. So you know whether to bring an umbrella to work tomorrow. >> So you're enabling the data from, or stuff from the public, for private, entrepreneurial activity? >> Absolutely. >> Talk about the non-profits. What's going on there? Obviously, we heard som stuff on stage with Teresa. The work she's showcasing, a lot of the non-profit. A lot of mission driven entrepreneurships happening. Here in D.C, it's almost a Silicon Valley like dynamic, where stuff that was never funded before is getting funded because they can do Cloud. They can stand it up pretty quickly and get it going. So, you're seeing kind of a resurgence of mission driven entrepreneurships. What is the nonprofit piece of it look now for AWS? How do you talk about that? >> Sure. Well again, one of the areas that I'm really passionate about being here, and being one of the people who helped start our nonprofit vertical inside of AWS, we now have over 12, I'm sorry, 22,000 nonprofits using AWS to keep going. And the mission of our nonprofit vertical is just to make sure that no nonprofit would ever fail for lack of infrastructure. So we partnered with Tech Soup, which is an organization that helps vet and coordinate our Cloud credits. So nonprofits, small nonprofit organizations can go out through Tech Soup, get access to credits, so they don't have to worry about their infrastructure. And you know we.. >> Free credits? >> Those credits, with the Tech Soup membership, they get those, yeah, and using the word credit, it's more like a grant of AWS cloud. >> You guys are enabling almost grants. >> Yes, cloud grants. Not cash grants, but cloud grants. >> Yeah, yeah great. So, how is that converting for you, in your mind? Can you share some examples of some nonprofits that are successful? >> Sure. A great presentation, and I think it was your last interview. A game changer. Where these smaller nonprofits can have a really large impact. And, but then we're also working with some of the larger nonprofits too. The American Heart Association, that built their precision medicine platform to match genotype, phenotype information, so we can further cardiovascular research. They have this great mission statement, they want to reduce cardiovascular disease by 20 percent by 2020. And we're going to help them do that. >> You guys are doing a great job, I got to say. It's been fun to watch, and now, we've been covering you guys for the past two years now, here at the event. A lot more coming on, in D.C. The CIA went in a few years ago. Certainly a shot heard around the cloud. That's been well documented. The Department of Defense looking good off these certain indicators. But, what's going on in the trends in the civilian agencies? Can you take a minute to give an update on that? >> Yeah, so I started earlier saying I've seen the full spectrum. I saw the very beginning, and then I've seen all the way to the end. Where, I think it was three years ago at this event, I talked to Joe Piva, who is the former CIO for the Department of Commerce ITA, the International Trade Association. He had data center contracts coming up for renewal. And he made a really brave decision to cancel those contracts. So he had 18 months to migrate the entire infrastructure for ITA over on to AWS. And you know, there's nothing like an impending date to move. So, we've got agencies that are going all in on AWS, and I think that's just a sign of the times. >> Data centers, I mean anyone who were startup nine years into it, we've never had a data center. I think most startups don't.. >> Born in the cloud. >> Born in the cloud. Thanks so much Dave, for coming on. Appreciate the time. Congratulations on your success. AWS public sector doing great, global public sector. You guys are doing great. Building nations, we had Baharain on as well. Good luck, and the ecosystems looks good. You guys did a good job. So, congratulations. >> John, Stu, thank you very much for having me here today. >> Live coverage here, we are in Washington D.C. For Cube. Coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be back with more. Stay with us, we've got some more interviews after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live, from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you buy Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Washington, DC with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. It's a huge show, it's like the reinvent for public sector and it's really booming. Our theCUBE allumnis on Josh Stella, CEO of Fugue. And Peter O'Donoghue, Vice President of Service Application Services at Unisys. You guys are back for the third time. We first interviewed you guys last year here in that reinvent, as well. Good to you back, thanks for joining us again. >> Thanks for having us back on. >> Thanks yeah, great. >> I love to connect the dots. It's almost like the trajectory. And we were talking yesterday about Cloud and how Amazon and other Cloud players, and Stew brought up a term called having experience. And then we were talking about this economies scale. This is really where people who have done it over time, have got their requisite, experience, scar tissue, and learnings. Some jump to try to deliver everything at once. You guys have been together for a while working together. What's the update on the trajectory as you guys go Cloud first? What's the status, what's goin' on? >> You guys made an announcement this week right? >> Sure, yeah, yeah. So, yeah we at Unisys are super excited to announce our new Cloud offering called Cloud Forte. And your point about takin' the lessons from experience and really embedding those into a capability, that's really what Cloud Forte is about. I think, ya know, at a very high level Cloud Forte it's got two major kind of sets of capabilities. One is like subscription services, which is around management and governance of AWS. And actually we've designed it to solve like really tricky problems, that our public sector and frankly our commercial clients are really struggling with. And the second set of services are really professional services, that allow for any need to facilitate and catalyze adoption at scale. And actually they go head on addressing some of the trickiest problems in that space, as well. >> Well, take a minute and just explain, what does the product do? What's the value proposition of this new service? >> Okay. Well, at the management and governance tier, let me tell you what the problems that it solves. I can go into all the minutiae, but I think we could be here a while right? It solves some big problems. Problem one that it solves is, commercially, public sector, and actually federal wise organizations have a tough time managing the finances of AWS Cloud consumption. Actually having the transparency and visibility, and being able to comply with the Antideficiency Act, being able to manage funding, and also being able to tie it back to contracts and contract line owners sounds trivial enough, but it's really a thorn in the side of a lot of folks really trnna adopt Cloud. I would say the second element is what we're calling our command bundle. And the command bundle really kind of, it deliberately kind of solves the... It feels the gap of the shared responsibility model. I think we all here are deeply aware of what that means. But, that's really kind of the air gap, if you will, between while AWS it supports out of the box, and quite frankly what customers need to support. So, things like, classic things like service catalog management, patch management, back up and recovery, IT operations, incident management, asset management. All those things. We've built and we've constructed basically in a flexible framework. A light weight framework that allows folks to do, to go fast. But also has that enterprise level of governance that people people expect to see from the cloud. One of the key elements of our command bundle is what Josh's organization provides, is the Fugue policy engine. So, we find that in order to provide Cloud, it's really important to be able to have those guardrails. To provide basically a nanny like supervisor to make sure that what's deployed is compliant. And actually what's deployed and what's running in production, stays compliant with security policy. So, that's really what command is all about. >> Josh, how about what's under the hood? We've had a lot of conversation on policy and automation. It's third year in on our conversations. What's going on under the hood, what's happening with the things that you guys are doing with Unisys? >> Yeah, so when we last talked they hadn't announced this yet, so we couldn't quite explain what we're working on together. But, we're working with Unisys and other organizations to provide that full automation of the entire infrastructure layer. And it's just fire and forget infrastructure on Cloud. So, one of the things we're seeing consistently is people are really starting to struggle. The markets really maturing around the need to fully automate remediation of problems, detection and remediation. Where the old model of use a monitoring solution, throws a ticket over the wall, search for the pilot tickets. You might have hours, days, weeks, where you're exposed and your data leaks. And Fugue fixes that in under a minute. So, that's what we've been workin' on together and we love the partnership because Unisys has experience in the engagement on the federal side of the market. And Fugue is baked in to just provide all that goodness. >> What's the impact of that? Because you compared kind of the old way to the new way you guys are doing. Just kind of give some categorical or anecdotal color behind what the impact is from that. What does it do, save people's lives, saves time, money. What's the impact? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya the impact and I'll describe a use case. So, we're working with another customer and they came to us and said, in our hosted environments on AWS we have over 500 events a day, where configuration has drifted. And every one of those we have to investigate. We have to come up with a plan. Then we have to execute the plan. Then we have to write a report on how it will never happen again, 500 a day. So, with Fugue, every one of those just is automatically fixed and reported within about 30 seconds to a minute. So, the impact of this is a team of three completely overwhelmed folks, who were looking to hire 10 people to try to, as their Cloud presence group, they just had to staff a larger and larger Cloud services desk. Actually the three people that they have are now on to doing other work. Because it's just automated. >> So, Peter help connect the dots for us, for your customers on the federal side because we know there's been push back. Sometimes customer, oh automation sounds great, but ah wait, on the government side I've got regulations, I've got processes, I've got hurdles that we might need to do. So, how do we get beyond those? >> Well, I think that's a great question. I would say that, so as I was talking about the Cloud Forte offering that, there's a set of offerings in the professional services domain too. We actually have our accelerated bundle, right? And actually one of the things that we, we really believe as important as folks to adopt Cloud is, in order to leverage Cloud most effectively, you really need a mind shift. So, we have like two of the legs of our offerings went around the order of chain management. And kind of making that major transformation for human capital. And actually what really good looks like is folks who actually think Cloud natively, right? So, we find the most successful clients are folks who've kind of made that leap. The other kind of dimension is is around process and process change. And we see ITIL has been super affective and has been kind of a stone wall of enterprise IT for a long time. But, we see that as folks move to the Cloud one of the strong recommendations we make and we have process offerings, is how do we renew... My management in governance process is to actually embrace more DevOps thinking, embrace more of everything as code thinking, including policy. Because what we find is, as I think you're hinting at right, is as folks move to the Cloud you can kind of have like almost a goldilocks scenario. Where, like on one hand I've taken the really heavy weight processes and tools from my data center into my thinking, and I've got now kind of a Porsche 911, but I've put donut wheels on it and I can't move very quickly, and I'm kind of frustrated with it, right? On the other extreme, I've got like the SharePoint era of 2005, 2006 where it is the wild west. It's pandemonium, and God only knows what's goin' on right there. So, what we're trynna do is is really looking for effective enterprise and having transparent governance, making sure that the great lessons learned of before are there. But, we have like a light weight extensible frame work that we have the nanny guardrails on it, so we can understand where this policy drifts. >> And the beauty of this is ya know the APIs giveth and the APIs taketh away. The APIs are why we can go so fast, but it's also why it's really easy to hurt yourself. That's what Fugue is there for. We let you go just as fast, and when can show that all those processes, like in ITIL having a CMDB, that's a side affect of running Fugue. You can query Fugue and you've got your configuration data. >> How you made them go fast, I get that. But how do you protect from breaking, what's the other half? >> Yeah, sure, so the Fugue approach, and Unisys are doing some other things on top of this. But, the Fugue approach is you cannot deploy something unless it is both correct and meets policy and compliance. >> That's the guardrails you're talking about. >> That's the guardrails. And unlike anything else, Fugue tells you exactly how you got it wrong, why, and how to fix it. So, it's not just a big no, at the end of the process. It's hey, on 147 you're not allowed to have unencrypted volumes so change that. Then once the infrastructure is provision, so it must be correct up front, once it's provisioned Fugue will never let it drift again. Again, within 30 seconds to a minute we've seen it needs changed, and we've fixed it. And what that means is... >> Intelligence. >> It is. >> You bring intelligence do it, ya fix it, again this the, this is why I love the automation whole Cloud thing. The non believers don't understand the value of this. I call them the Cloud non believers because this is just game changing. You mentioned the point about the efficiency of people not having to bulk up manual labor to lock down and just open up so many security holes. Peter, I've got to ask you, I hate to put you on the spot here, what's it like now working with Fugue? You guys have done a lot of work together. What's the outcomes? Tell us about the experience. And what is it about their solution that really helps you out? >> Okay, sure. Well, I mean I think the most obvious ya know, response there is is the fact that we've baked it in, and it's part of the solution, it's one of the core tenants, and components within our command bundle. That in itself is a major part of our strategy. What we find in our customers, ya know we do find clients actually kind of range in where they are in terms of their Cloud adoption. And we're also finding with our Cloud Forte bundle folks actually will adopt different parts of it at different times. But, actually we do find clients are very interested... Actually, I think our best clients are folks who actually have been been playing with CI/CD and they've been playing with Cloud. But, they've actually kind of started to see that the sprawl affect is actually starting to happen. And they're looking to have speed, but also security at the same time. We find that the integration of Fugue, and that just, that kind of, that insane Cloud native thinking, and this kind of like ability to speak AWS natively as a native language is really important differentially, when we bring a joint solution to our client. >> How many of the scale pieces created? Josh I want to give you that final word on your, give us an update on your business. What's goin' on? What's the value possession look like now? Obviously, automation we're believers, we just talked about that. But, where's it go next? What's up with Fugue? >> Sure, so what's up for Fugue, all kinds of things over the next quarter or two that we'll be releasing. That I can't quite talk about yet, or my product lead will kill me. But, one of the things we've put a ton of work into is around pre-building libraries of policy for our customers. So, Nist 800-53 for federal we've implemented a lot as policy now. PCI, HIPPA, all kinds of standards, so that when they purchase Fugue they just get these out of the box. It's amazing to watch somebody who's been on Cloud for a little while bring up the Fugue compose or a visualization engine, go discover all their infrastructure, and then do import HIPPA, and find all the little red dots of where they're actually, have been running wrong, fix it all in less than an hour, and not worry about it again. So, we're doing a lot of business in federal. We're doing a lot of business with partners. And we're also doing a lot of business in commercial now, mostly on the larger enterprise side. The value prop is really around that controlling sprawl over time and automated remediation. There's lots of kinds of automation that are partial, unless the system like Fugue does can fix everything, if there are any gaps in that, you're back to manual world. So, it's a kind of binary scenario, so yeah. >> You kind of never give it up, unless you can fully let go of it. >> That's right, that's right. >> Awesome, well congratulations on the part, you want to... >> Can I pull string on that though, I mean I think this another great concrete example of why we like working with you guys. It's part of our business obviously, I would say one of the major blockers getting folks to the Cloud is what do we do with ATOs that folks already have? And how do I bring those security credidations into the Cloud? So, if you think of you know where I think the industry is going to go next, is automation frameworks that allow me to quickly figure out what I inherit, what controls or balance I need to address as I move to the Cloud. But, the fact that Fugue is looking at natively kind of having as a primary citizen of their policies, this idea of those Nist controls, that's going to help provide transparency and visibility. So, that's actually going to be key part of being able to shorten the time to get to an ATO. >> Well, that certainly accelerates the discovery piece. >> Absolutely. >> Then ya kind of understand what ya have first and then you attack it with automation. >> Exactly. >> And everything seems more efficient, that's the goal right? >> Yeah, so this is why you know the true believer there's concrete reality there. Which is I can demonstrate, but I can demonstrate in real time that I'm complying all the time. I mean we've never really had that before, right? >> Yes. I mean again, this wave is coming. And love the commentary again. Public sector is very interesting, it's just being disrupted heavily and at a highly accelerated rate. You guys are doing a great job. Good to see ya Josh, Peter great to see you. CUBE coverage here in Washington, DC. Bringing all the action expected from us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us, we'll be right back with more after this short break. 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>> (upbeat electronic music) >> Live, from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capital, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. Taylor Carol is here. He's the co-founder of the GameChanger charity and ZOTT. Taylor, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Keynote yesterday got rave reviews. Let me just set this up. So, ZOTT is a content platform that creates virtual experiences for children, giving them an outlet for creativity, intellectual engagement, a lot more. We're going to talk about that. And then GameChanger is the non-profit and it's a majority share holder of the for-profit organization. So, that's an interesting business model. >> Thank you. >> Explain, please. >> Absolutely, we started GameChanger roughly twelve years ago, when I, at 11, was diagnosed terminal, with a rare form of cancer, given roughly two weeks left to live, thankfully a long two weeks, totally healthy now. But-- >> Congratulations, that's awesome. >> Hey, thank you so much. >> Good to have you with us. >> Glad to be here. But, from those five years I spent in hospital, combined with the 20,000 hospital rooms my dad and I have visited on behalf of GameChanger charity we saw how much need there was in the patient care space and the patient engagement space. And those insights led to first found GameChanger charity, now a nearly 12 year old 501(c)(3), an international non-profit. Started an endeavor in our garage. This year, we've taken in over 20 million dollars in donations, 93 cents on every dollar going to the cause. And GameChanger really focuses in on leveraging gaming, technology, and innovation to support patient's rights to play, learn and socialize. And we do that through virtual reality, through augmented reality, through custom gaming solutions, through character based scholarships, to support post-hospital dreams. And then with GameChanger days, where we go in and we bring in bundles of toys for the patients and a catered meal for staff, to sit down to talk with them and to learn about the bespoke gaming and tech solutions we can make to support each individual hospital's needs. So that's GameChanger. And then from that insight, from all that time in the hospital, something we really saw was that the strict patient engagement. How patients watch TV or get clinical health content was so broken. It's one TV mounted on the wall with 20 channels of basic cable. We saw it could be so much better. So, we made ZOTT, which is a device agnostic, cloud-based content distribution system. So, now, through ZOTT, from participating hospitals, any patient, any family member can get their own content, their own experiences, from any device, a laptop, a tablet, a phone, everywhere in the hospital. So, linear TV, gaming, clinical health content, even custom live-streams exclusively for the patients. And ZOTT is owned in entirety by GameChanger charity. >> That's awesome. >> So anything good that happens to ZOTT, goes back to support the GameChanger cause. >> So, completely changing the experience for the patient, from first-hand. What's been some of the outcomes, just in, either anecdotally, or I don't know if you have any kind of measurements. You're changing the world, but if you could share with us how, and any examples, would be great. >> Thank you for saying that. One of the most profound things we've seen at GameChanger charity and at ZOTT is how deleterious boredom is for the patient experience. Understandably, individuals are locked in a boring, white room for a day, a week, a month, years at times. >> Craving visitors, anything. >> Any form of interaction or social engagement. And you know something we've seen, is that boredom often magnifies pain and anxiety, isolation, over use of pain medication. And understanding that issue, that pain, something we've been able to do is incorporate custom VR rigs, custom VR experiences, for distraction therapy. So that's where we'll go in, meet with patients, and bring the care providers VR sets so when a patient is getting ready for a surgery, they can put on a VR rig, try a tranquil experience, and we've seen pain scores go down by as much as six points on a 10 point pain scale, as a result of such distraction therapy. >> That's fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> It's fascinating, we're really powerful the discussion we had in the keynote. So, making this happen, there's some technology behind this. Maybe walk us through a little bit, what's the connection with the cloud discussion. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Something we've seen in growing from a garage endeavor, to now an international organization that supports 11 countries, 20 million dollars in revenue this year, is the importance of scalability and being able to, one, help as many patients as possible, while still focusing on the individual and never losing sight of the fact that each patient we work with is an individual life and truly a family, impacted by acute or prolonged illnesses. So, what the cloud has really allowed us to do is to magnify our efforts and to take it from, say, five hospitals to now over 100. And, one example of that would be in how we use AWS's Sumerian. So, that is a cloud-based VR experience. And rather than needing to download really content-heavy VR experiences on say a gaming computer, in order to facilitate these experiences, now care providers can interact with them through the cloud. And go beyond that, they can actually customize a VR experiences for the needs of each patient. So, let's say there's a patient who needs to get a tour through their new hospital ward. Thanks to creating templates on Amazon Sumerian, GameChanger creating them, these care specialists now can go in and customize the script that that AR or VR host will speak to include the patient's name or to say I know this is a big change from California, or from Colorado or wherever they hail from. Really making that otherwise generic hospital integration experience feels so bespoke, so personalized to the individual. >> And if I remember right, one of the things you can do is actually, get them engaged with their care. Like, here's the surgery, going to take you inside what's going to be, and I've heard studies of this, you understand, what's going to be doing and can focus on it, kind of the power of understanding and thinking on it can actually improve the results that you get out of it. >> You are so right. That has been one of the most profound things for me personally. When I was sick, I was in the hospital for five years, and for roughly six months of those five years, I was in an isolation unit, where the only person that could come in was my doctor, my nurse in a hazmat suit. And, during that time, I was scared. I was an 11 year old boy, didn't understand what was happening. And I felt an utter loss of agency. An utter loss of empowerment regarding my illness and more importantly my healing. So, what we're able to do now with Sumerian, is we created a collaborative learning experience between CS Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Children's Hospital, Colorado in Denver. So, experts 1200 miles apart, were able to collaborate in real time, through the cloud, through Amazon Sumerian, to make a VR experience where patients about to receive aortic valve replacements could actually go through human hearts in virtual reality and simulate the surgery they would soon be receiving leading to this huge spike in empowerment and identity and ownership over their healing. >> That's amazing. I mean, I remember, I've only had surgery once, I've been really lucky, >> Yeah. >> But when the surgeon explained to me how it worked and just opened up my mind, and made me so much more comfortable when I understood that, being able to visualize that has to be a complete game changer. Taylor, what does the hospital have to do? Take us through their infrastructure needs, or how do hospitals get on-boarded? >> That's a fantastic question. An anecdote or a saying that we always hold on to near and dear to our heart, at GameChanger and at ZOTT, is that when you know one hospital you know one hospital. (laughter) And we mean that in the sense that every hospital is it's own behemoth, it's own ecosystem that has spent the past one, five, ten, 50 years building what is now an incredibly outdated technology stack. So, purely from the patient engagement side, let's say looking at ZOTT, traditional engagement, just to get that TV on the wall, and to get the cable going and the basic clinical health information there's a satellite on the roof, there are server racks in the basement, there's a TV with a computer mounted on the back, there's a laptop in the waiting room. It's just everything is so cumbersome, so outdated. And what we've been able to do is take this really thin client-based cloud approach where we're able to create a bespoke cloud solution that totally bypasses all of that heavy technology stack. Equally, because Amazon and AWS services are so modifiable and you can really pick and choose what you need from the suite, we've been able to go in and instead of have the hospital change to us, we've been able to modify to the hospital, to fit into their ecosystem rather than bring in a bull dozer and try and change everything that they have. >> Awesome. So you can utilizing their existing infrastructure, and bring in a light-weight both cloud and thin-client infrastructure and be up and running. >> Absolutely. A metric that we have to speak to the groundbreaking nature of what we're able to do now is typical patient engagement systems can take up to 18 months to install. Cost millions of dollars, be incredibly cumbersome, and expensive in terms of hours it takes to maintain the hardware. ZOTT, our technology, when we bring it in, goes live in hospitals in as little as 15 minutes. >> And not millions and millions of dollars? >> (laughs) Exponentially less. >> Okay, so the hospital has to buy into it, they really don't have to bring in any new infrastructure. You guys kind of turn-key that for them. So really need a champion inside the hospital. And a go. >> Absolutely, absolutely. A mindfulness we really maintain is where in the hospital is that each hospital decision maker's priority is to safeguard the individual patient and their families. We understand that there's sensitivity, there's a lot of security requirements. And one of the beauties of working with AWS, as you all know is, is AWS is HIPAA compliant. And, in working with AWS, we've been able to add an extra degree of security and safeguarding for any information we collect, any experience we work with the hospitals, so that everyone is safe. That all decision makers feel like their needs and requirements are being satisfied and safeguarded. >> So does that mean the kids can't play Fortnite? >> Fortnite (laughs). Neither Fortnite nor PUBG's (laughs). >> Well, because if they're playing Fortnite, you'd never get 'em home. >> (laughs) >> Same with PUBG. >> One thing that is pretty fun is through ZOTT and through GameChanger, all of our relationships with all of the big game developers around the world, is we may not have PUBG, but we do have Steam integration, and through our game developers, we have over a million dollars worth of Steam codes continually replenished, so patients and their siblings can download a 20, 30, 40, 50 dollar game, keep it on their laptop, on their tablet, take it with them when they leave. As a gift for their strength while they were in the hospital. >> Amazing. Taylor, thanks so much for the contribution you're making to the children and to the world. Really a phenomenal story. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you both so much for letting us be here and sharing our story. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from AWS Public Sector Summit. Stay right there. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the District, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. We saw Teresa Carlson yesterday, a lot of keynotes, we saw the CIA. Todd Osbourne is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances of New Relic, a company that's been smokin' hot, six billion dollar market cap, and really is takin' the world by storm. He's joined by Scott Drossos, who's the president of Infiniti, who is a public sector consultancy. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Thank you. >> So Todd, you heard me, I mean really, everybody's talkin' about New Relic, stocks been smoking, I read an article recently, "it's got to cool off, it's too hot." So why so hot, what's goin' on, why the appeal of New Relic? >> Well as our CEO Lew Cirne has been on a couple of times talking to you about, every business is becoming a software business in the public sector, which we're here representing at the Amazon public sector event. It's the same thing with agencies and all the digital experiences that are happening across all the government and whether it's education, higher ed, healthcare, any of the DOD or other agencies, there's always some sort of digital experience that folks are having with the citizens that all the agencies and organizations are tryin' to support, and New Relic's right there, right there at the forefront of every one of those digital experiences. Everyone's running software that's modern software, or shifting to that with modern software running microservices, running containers, shifting to the cloud, and anyone deploying that type of software needs to have New Relic as part of their engagement to monitor what's happening at the citizen or the customer level, what's going on in the back end, on through the infrastructure. And New Relic, whether it's a large enterprise that we're out there, like Dunkin' Donuts or Dominos, monitoring their applications and their eCommerce sites, or it's an agency in the public sector space, you got to have New Relic as part of those engagements. >> So Scott, when AWS services first came out, 2006 timeframe, we looked at it, we said okay, this is the future, but as much as it potentially simplifies lives, it brings a lot of new complexities. So you know, Stu and I used to talk about, look, the AWS is awesome, we're big fans, but the ecosystem has to grow. Consultancies have to come out of the woodworks, and help customers really, adopt. So that's really exactly what's happened. I presume that's how Infiniti got started, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company, and what your value is. >> Sure, thanks Dave, so Infiniti is a 15 year old company. We're originally founded in public sector IT consulting, and we realized several years ago that the world was changing and that we needed to make the shift from IT consulting to cloud services. And so we dove in headfirst with AWS, and we really tried to move to the top of the curve very quickly, and so we were a little bit ahead of our market in public sector, being a public sector focused organization, but we felt it was important to get ahead of the market because now the market really is smokin' hot. But we thought it was important that if we're going to move into the cloud, we wanted to move to the top of the curve, and deal with things like DevOps, migrations, even machine learning, predictive analytics, so we kind of pride ourselves on having some of the largest public sector contracts in the US, even though we're, right now, predominantly California based, California focused. >> And what's your head count? >> We're about a hundred people. >> I mean this is the thing, we're seeing this trend toward a lot of, you know, smaller specialists, are really doing super. Why is that, or how are you able to differentiate from these big global SIs that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, vertical expertise, why are you guys winning? >> Well, first of all, I think we're able to be nimble and shift our focus pretty quickly to serve our market, to serve our customers, I think more successfully. But one of the thing's that's changed when the cloud arrived, is the cloud really let smaller organizations like us, act like big organizations, so we didn't need to go deploy millions of dollars of capital to go set up a massive data center, we can build an environment on the fly, as you know, in the cloud, and we can have access to world-class platform tools like New Relic, and we can help a customer, a large customer, perform just as well as if we were a large multi-billion dollar services organization. >> Todd, one of the interesting things to talk to customers about is their journey, and where are they, and the cloud migration and how do they do this, reinvent? A year ago or two I heard there were like seven or nine ARS to get there, anything from the full refactoring and building cool new stuff with server lists and things like that, to just the re-platforming. Lift and shift, is that a good thing, isn't that? Walk us through how New Relic with Infiniti, how are you involved in some of those migrations? There's no typical customer, but give us some examples. >> Yeah absolutely, so Infiniti, just like many of the integrators that we work with are all delivering services generally in a couple different areas. One is typically a cloud adoption, or cloud migration practice. So working with Amazon, how do we get more and more of customer's workloads shifted to the cloud? Usually those projects are also going on with something in the refactoring world or application space. Usually they're also developing or shifting to some sort of DevOps practice, and that's also part of our sweet spot, what's happening in the application there, whether it's on the cloud yet or not, we're going to provide that visibility to that. And then the third piece is, there's usually something else happening with that, as I was mentioning before, the customer experience or the citizen experience, so what's the browser impact, what's the user experience on that, what's the, if it's on a mobile app, what's the user experience on there? So while Infiniti's delivering all those services for the clients, New Relic's part of all those services, so our whole model that we're tryin' to do with all of our partners is embed ourselves into all of those services, such that we can help Infiniti be more successful, deliver those projects on time, and really resolve any issues that may come up during those migration issues. >> Scott, I'd love to hear especially, I know I hear DevOps talked about a lot in New Relic's customers, is it pervasive around the agencies that you work with and please do add some color there too. >> So in the public sector, it's a range of readiness, but we're seeing a real wave building, we believe. We worked with New Relic on a very large DevOps, SysOps, very complex cloud services engagement, largest higher education cloud services engagement in the US, and in that case, just like Todd was referencing, when we implemented the migration of the legacy platform to the cloud, first of all we had to do, make choices around refactory, host, rearchitect and so forth, but then when we're managing that environment, and there's millions of users hitting that environment, we need to be able to make sure that we can monitor the application to make sure the application's performing well, and if there's an issue, we want to see the line of code that's causing the problem as quickly as possible so we can keep the environment up all the time. Even though public sector may not be driven by the same financials as say, commercial, they still expect to be up all the time. They still want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud and so New Relic allows us to do that, but then, as we're looking at the users interface with the application environment, New Relic's browser and mobile, they let us monitor how that experience is going, and we can proactively get at the performance issues there that the application may not tell us, if there's an issue there. And then, we can do things like test middleware with synthetics and make sure that the whole environment's working, and then obviously on the infrastructure side, it lets us make sure that we're optimizing the environment for our clients. One of the cool thing is, when you in the past, you'd set up an EC2 instance, you may not see that you don't need as much CPU as you're using, and so you can size that appropriately, and allow your environment to still run at a high performance, 100% up time, but give them the cost efficiencies at the same time. So we use New Relic across board to help support the entire environment. >> I wonder if we could talk about the marketplace a little bit, generally and then specifically, the public sector? So Scott, I presume you're obviously public sector focused, but are you exclusive to AWS, no, you probably do some other stuff, is that right, is that fair? >> Well we are both AWS and Azure Gold, in terms of partner, but we do more of our work in AWS for sure. >> Okay, so we'll come back to that. And New Relic, of course you're a software company, so you want everybody to love your software, so if there's a cloud that a customer wants to use, you want your software to be on that cloud, fair enough? >> Sure, and also on PRIM, I mean a lot of our... >> On PRIM too. >> A lot of our applications we monitor are still on PRIM, and there's a tremendous amount of value there regardless of... >> I would just add, Infiniti is a trusted advisor, we like to see ourselves as a trusted advisor, so we do feel like we have to be multi-cloud and have an objective perspective. >> And New Relic is presumably the same way, I mean let the customers decide, so, and it's a hybrid world, folks, despite what Amazon wants, it's a hybrid world, and they even recognize that. My question is, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about Amazon as an infrastructure service provider and their lead or relative lead on the competition. It's our sense that there's still a lead there, what's your sense? >> Well AWS is still the leading cloud services provider in the marketplace. They lead in innovation, they lead in disruption, they lead in market share, they lead in so many metrics, and because they have that lead, and that's where we started, we've benefited from that, and we've invested heavily, and in the same way, we see New Relic, when we made a choice around who we were going to pick as a platform to support our customers, we wanted something that was cloud-born, didn't come out of on-premise and get sort of bootstrapped into the cloud, and we wanted something that was a complete platform. So New Relic was really a clear choice for us. It was not a, we looked at the entire market when we made that choice. >> So the narrative in the market used to be, oh, security in the cloud, now we hear the CIA say hey, security on the worst day in Amazon's cloud is way better than I ever saw with client server. It was a pretty powerful statement, so let's assume security, people are relatively comfortable with security these days, even though I'm sure there's still some issues with regard to corporate edicts, and flexibility, and audits, let's put that aside. SLAs is another big one. People often criticize the public cloud SLAs, and cost, oh it's so expensive, I can do it cheaper on PRIM. Are those myths, are those realities, is it a it depends? What's your sense? >> I mean they're all, they're all factors that all of our customers are looking into. I would say what we're hearing a lot about right now, is how do we help provide more visibility to everything that's happening, so if you've got a developer now that has the ability to write code, put it on any cloud they want, spin up containers, spin down containers, go try out server-less base of architectures, they've got a lot of flexibility to do what they want. Government agencies, as well as customers, one of the things they're looking for is what's actually happening? Who's doing what? The governance piece is a big piece and I think New Relic plays right into that in terms of helping control all that. One of the things that we're, is one of our sweet spots, is as you move to DevOps and a truly microservices architecture, one of the whole values of that is speed, keeping up with how fast the whole market is moving, and customers and agencies, what they want out of that, is to deploy applications where they're releasing multiple times a day. You have to have visibility into everything you're doing across the stack to be successful in that, and that's really New Relic's sweet spot in terms of doing that. So providing that visibility, instrumenting the applications in the infrastructure before, and then helping provide visibility to things like governance, things that other, not necessarily our sweet spot, but other companies in the industry are doing things throughout the DevOps life cycle in the governance realm, things like that. So we're part of that ecosystem that's helping Amazon and the other cloud providers be very successful, helping customers and agencies be very successful deploying modern applications. >> It's all about that visibility. >> Scott, one of the things, when we look at any rollout of new technology or migration, once it's up and running, then what, so wondering how your firm's involved in, you know, is there re-training, is there things go on, once this is in place, now what? >> Well Infiniti, what we found in public sector is that everybody wants to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and the benefits, and most public sector isn't going to reduce cost, they're just going to want to re-use cost more wisely. So some of the confusion around cost savings is that they're getting way more for their dollar in the future state, and the choices you have to make around how fast you want to get to the cloud, and what you want to get out of the cloud when you're there, those all effect the equation in terms of what you're actually outcomes are immediately and in the long term. So we often see that in public sector, some of the legacy applications, they may not naturally or easily move all at once, and so you have to make a choice, are you going to do some refactory and architecting before you get it there, are you going to get in the cloud now, and then do it afterwards. Either way, there's benefits, but you have to make choices about what, how you want to approach it. >> Yeah, when you talk about, after I've rolled this in, I've heard from some customers, they're like, after I've gotten a cloud, I love it, but I had to dedicate an engineer for financial architecting because there's all of these things we need to do. Are we still in that state? And once again, do you help with some of the training as to, okay, or is it plugging them into the Amazon ecosystem and how do they get certified and ready to use all of this. >> So Infiniti works with clients differently, we work with some in a more episodic, lighter capacity, and we work with some in a wholistic capacity where we are that engine for them, where we provide them the complete cloud services team to do everything from migrations, architecture, DevOps, SysOps, SecOps, machine learning and all the way through. And so when we're providing those services, we're doing those kind of things, we're making sure that the next improvement is worked into the architecture. Last year, the customer I was referencing earlier, we did just under a hundred releases, so that's a hundred releases that we're using the New Relic platform and our architectural solution, our solution architects, rather, to make sure that it's faultless, that the process is efficient, it's effective, it's secure, and that we're driving efficiencies wherever possible. So it really depends on what the customer wants. If the customer wants to hone the environment, they may have to go a little slower to account for their learning, their learning curve, and we'll help them, if that's what they want, but if they want to go faster, and they want to take advantage of our expertise, we make that available, and we're happy to do that. >> We had the former CTO of the NSA on yesterday, who now works for Accenture, and we were asking about sort of, federal versus commercial, are we sort of still taking, learning lessons from commercial and bringing it to federal, or is it because federal has so much interesting technology around analytics, does it go the other way, and he said, "it's funny, when you're on the inside, you think all the innovation is goin' on outside, now that I'm on the outside I say wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in federal." We heard Teresa yesterday talk about Aurora, she talked about the VM wear partnership, so things that were announced a while ago and actually being adopted in commercial coming in to federal. So how does it work? Is it more of a two-way than it used to be 20 years ago and I wonder if you could comment? >> Yeah, from Infiniti's perspective, absolutely. We work with clients to understand the problems and where they want to get to, and then we innovate with them. You're pretty dependent on the subject matter expertise of the organization. I think our customers like that, they like that they're part of the solution, but then they need the expertise that we bring to create the next generation solution. We just created something in the higher ed space called, a college called Architecture Builder, and it was after teaming with a specific college, and working in that space for a long time, but we wanted to create a way for colleges to rapidly implement a complete architecture integrated with all the different things, including New Relic, quickly and successfully, and that was done in partnership with them, so we did the work, but we couldn't have done it without them. >> Todd, New Relic obviously, you're a believer, you drink the Koolaid every day. Why New Relic relative to the competition? How do you guys differentiate? Pitch me. >> So it's really all about being successful in that modern software space, again, as I've mentioned, and so New Relic is the only SAS only platform, so we're not going to put anything on PRIM. We've got ourselves one of the biggest and best DevOps team that develops our software, we roll code everyday, and our customers get the benefit of us being a pure SAS platform. Part of that is scalability. What we can do at scale is unbelievable. There was a customer that was just talked about on the news today that I can't mention, but they just went from basically zero to $100 million on an application just in the past 90 days. It's one of our customers and we've scaled, we have no problem scaling with customers that are doing things like that, and again, the full platform value that we have now, looking at everything from the front end on the browser and mobile applications, through the application, which is core to us, it's where we provide that code-level visibility, the ability to trace across all the different microservices that are happening, connected back to that infrastructure. That full platform now provides such tremendous value up and down the stack, but not only to the technology leaders but also to those folks that are business leaders, chief marketing officers, heads of practices at the consultants we work with, all these folks are all getting value out of New Relic. >> What would that customer who should not be named say about the value contribution of New Relic to that scale? >> The value's unbelievable. That's a commercial customer, but their business is taking off like so many of our customer's businesses are at an unbelievable scale. They can't be hamstrung by having to do a server upgrade, or having to go back, working with a release of code from a couple weeks ago, they have to be as fast as possible 'cause their business is moving so fast, their agencies are moving so fast, they need a provider that's going to provide that visibility to that at the speed with which they're moving. >> Awesome so, you got one more? >> No, we've got to run. >> Yeah, we've got to go. So this is the last question, so impressions of AWS Public Sector Summit? I presume you guys, like we did, had to register yesterday. There were some logistic issues, but other than that, maybe you could give us your last word on the summit? >> Well Infiniti is very committed to public sector, so we really enjoy coming to the Public Sector Summit. It's great to connect with our partners, like New Relic and others, and it's great to see the latest innovations coming out from AWS. >> Yeah and I've been to, I don't know, 10 or so summits around the world so far this year. It is unbelievable the excitement and the amount of people that are now excited about what's happening in the clouded option world, and Amazon's piece in that, and what's happening here in D.C. this week is no exception. >> I would second that. It's been a while since I've been at summits. Stu, you go all the time, and they are just exploding and growing, and this is one of the best that's out there. So thanks guys, for comin' on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest after this short break. John Furrier's here, you're watchin' theCUBE live, from AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to to the home of the Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host John Furrier. Welcome to the program. Bret Dennis who's the head of product management with Helio campus. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Go caps, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Really bringing that [Inaudible] of having won the cup, lots of celebration, and there's a lot of energy here at this show. So we're heading into day two, what's your ... How do you feel about the show so far? >> It's good, it's been good. I did the Edstart program earlier in the week, and we did a sales pitch competition for startup Edtechs, so it's been really exciting, lot's of fun things going on. >> We've loved talking to startups here on theCUBE. I've talked to a number of companies, cyber-security, it's like, "Oh, okay, wait, which agency did you come out of." because of the NSA and the like. You have a similar story coming out of the University of Maryland >> Right. >> Give us a little bit of background on Helio campus. >> So we were spun out in 2016 from the University college. The Maryland board of regents had recognized the value that we'd brought to the University, over about six years of development in terms of the technology platform and the services we were bringing to the University and decided this would be really useful to other Universities, so let's spin it out into a company and go to market, and that's what we've been doing for the last two years. So it's been very exciting. >> Tell me about the product? What does it do? I mean obviously you guys incubate it in the college, so there's equity arrangements, you got a grant. Tell the story about the funding and then now, as you expand, what's that plan look like and how does Amazon fit into the whole mess? >> So we had an initial grant from the board of regions from the state of Maryland, and the idea was to assist colleges and Universities, to help them ask and answer their most pressing questions, but using data, and in order to effectively do that we wanted to bring a full solution that included platform technology as well as a services approach. So we're using Amazon Web Services and the Redshift database and platform to collect data from Universities, and then we have a services team that works with Tableau dashboards to not only help visualize data in meaningful ways, but also to explore how different data sets can be cross-seeded together across the student life cycle. >> Whose the user for you guys? Obviously big data analyst is awesome, we're seeing that clearly as one of those things where it's completely changing businesses >> Sure. And getting these kinds of insights that are actionable and different. Sometimes new questions can be answered. Who's the buyer, who's the user, how is that working? >> So institutional research is a key stakeholder for us. They are traditionally seen as the data owners of Universities and colleges, do most of the research, do most of the numbers crunching, but our idea is that we want to really democratize access to data to enrollment managers, to admissions managers, even to financial managers that want to have their own power to explore and interrogate the data, but do it in such a way that's a very intuitive process, so they don't have to be SQL query writers or really hardcore database developers. We're trying to get to those functional types of users to give the access to data >> So business users basically who don't have to be a data scientist to know Python and wrangle data, you're thinking about more of like turning them into analysts on the fly. >> We want them to be able to ask and answer their own questions without needing the technical skills. Now that's precisely why we bring the services in, so if they decide I really want to use a predictive, algorithmic approach to forecasting, or to admissions modeling, and we have data scientists available to provide that services level on top of the platform. >> Wondering if you might be able to give us an example, either generically, or if you can mention a specific company, just to help illustrate how they're transforming the use of data. >> So we work with the system at the system level for the University of North Carolina. So they had a need where they had done a lot of work on building up base data extracts of their own, but they needed a way to get that data out to campuses in a more effective way using rich visualizations. So we won an RFP with them and were able to help them, not only at the system level, but also at the campuses to make sure that the campuses and the board of regents and the board of governors are getting the data that they need, to again, understand what are my patterns and trends for success. What are specific student populations that we want to help, and we want to use data to help get to those insights. So that's been a real success story for us. >> Talk about the public sector impact of Amazon, obviously Amazon's well known in the startup community, you can spin up a server, that kind of changed the whole provisioning of a data center, now they got large enterprises doing all kinds of stuff, taking databases from big Oracle systems. But public sector, certainly education, we've seen community colleges, all the way up to premier institutions like the University of Maryland, this is now a game changer. So how are you seeing that evolve in other universities? What are your peers doing? What's their mindset? Where are they on the progress bar using cloud, if you will, cloud native, are they thinking microservices, are they thinking about [Inaudible], are they thinking about containers, where are they on the evolution? >> Yeah it is a game changer, and it is because scalability and security are probably two themes that I would bring up. So regardless of the amount of data that you want to use as part of the analysis, there's no limit in terms of using AWS and performance, from a performance perspective, if we want to bring in a new data set, test it, see if there is correlation, see if it's useful in helping answer their key questions, we can do that. But also it goes with out saying, the security, so we don't really have to do a lot of selling in terms of the security of AWS because the level of approvals and the level of certifications at AWS far exceeds beyond what any University could get on their own, or what any vendor individually could do on their own. So that's a natural benefit that comes with a platform. >> What other features or services in AWS are important for what you build, obviously, scalability, security, kind of a given when you talk about AWS. >> The Redshift platform has been really useful to us. The way that we architect our model is that we use Tableau on the front-end for BI, but also any user could have access at the database level and go into Redshift, now we supply security models so that only authorized users can get to that. So it's very helpful to have the security model on top of it, but the Redshift data structure really enables us to provide that experience at any level depending on what the need is of each user. So not many functional users would be going to that level, but Redshift really enables us to have the technical users and the traditional SQL query writers, and the ones that are doing the cross-seeding of the data to have access at that level. >> It's interesting you have a services model built in because it kind of makes sense because one of the benefits of the cloud, obviously, is speed. You get performance, just raw performance, but also speed to value, so you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting to kind of understand where the value points are. So how does that change the services speed because Amazon's constantly introducing new services, how are you seeing that evolve? Because you can do some heavy lifting, okay here's a data set, is that the way the services are? How is the services changing with cloud? >> So our services model is really to hire individuals from Universities that have the subject matter expertise. So we have x directors of institutional research, x admission officers, so from our perspective we want to leave the technical, the platform, the architecture, the security services to the experts in that realm, that's not what our Universities are asking us for. They want to know how can you bring us subject matter expertise in the functional areas where we're struggling, we want to not have to worry about the technical piece at all. So I think that's where, from a cloud perspective, we're able to rely on the expertise at AWS and Amazon where, again, we're not having to worry about that and we can focus squarely on what the institutional needs are. >> So you're more efficient? >> I think so, yeah. >> You don't spend your time doing a lot wrangling of tech, standing up anything, just pretty much turnkey on the cloud side, focused on getting the users up and running with the tools that you guys have. >> Exactly, and we've had instenses where institutions have asked, "Oh, we want to do this research project, we need additional space." We can turn that up instantly through the value of the services provided through Amazon, which if we were to do that on our own it would be very expensive and a manual process. >> You can actually deliver services that values to the customer. I got to ask you a question, now looking forward, where's the head room? If you look at your business and how it's evolving, what's the head room that you see coming down the road that you're going towards, that you're going to bring to you customer base. >> Right, so with evolving technologies that we all know the buzzwords about, AI and machine learning, sort of taking the data science to the next level. I think that's what eventually we'll be asked to do, is to look at, "Well how can these be brought into education in a meaningful way? How can they provide us insight in ways that we're not doing today, again, more efficiently. We also value time or accelerating time to value, so again, I think right now we're moving data around and we're shifting data, and sometimes it can take a bit of time to do that. I think in the future we'll be able to turn up customers and start delivering that time to value in a much more accelerated way. >> So you said you attended some startup activity here at the show >> Yes. and also seen quite a few Universities here, so it sounds like you're learning to help build your business as well as from the customer standpoint, why don't you give us a little bit of insight as to the value that you get out of a show like this. >> Absolutely. So when the Universities attend we have meetings and we get an understandings of where they are now, what kinds of questions are they having, that's really what we want to get to, analytics is really nothing unless you understand what problem are you trying to solve. So being able to have those meaningful conversations in this type of environment is very helpful to us to understand, again, where are you now, what is your vision for where you want to go, how can we meet that at their point of need. >> What's the low-hanging fruit for these Universities use case wise? What are they using you guys for the most, if you had to look at the patterns? >> It can be arranged, so it can be I am not able to provide my stakeholders meaningful visualizations and insights and have them use data in a more meaningful way. So instead of giving you a table of lines and numbers, I can give you something that's actually actionable. That's really where we start at the dashboard level, the more advanced institutions, and everyone we work with has smart people on their teams but they may have other projects, they may not have time, they may not have the ability to hire expensive data scientists. So from that perspective on the advanced analytic side we can help with that advanced piece with our services team. >> They can get up to speed faster. Sometimes these projects can take months to stand up. >> It is, it's the acceleration that's huge. >> Great, what's the show vibe here? If you had to describe it for the folks that didn't make it. >> Yeah. >> What's the show about this year in your mind? What's the main big story here this year? >> It' a lot like last year for me, it is understanding, and I look at it from a data perspective of course, and it really is all about new technologies, and new vendors, and how we can understand, again, how these technologies can not only make us more efficient from a time perspective and cost perspective, but again, how can we more meaningfully answer the important questions that we have. >> Alright final question. Because you're a startup kind of within a cool environment at the University, which has got a lot of resources and access to some real use case data, what's the biggest thing you've learned over the past few years? Looking at the cloud, you're right in the middle of it, cloud native is super hot, there's people born in the cloud, people migrating the cloud, all kind of different levels of cloudifying businesses, some PurePlay cloud. What is the things that you learn the most? Looking back and saying, "Okay, these are the top three things that we learned." >> So I've worked for a foreign institution as well as for a number of different vendors in this space and I think the theme that I see is I want to go buy technology, "Oh I heard I need predictive analytics, Oh I heard that I need to have machine learning", well that's great that you know that, but have you really refined what your challenges and what you're trying to solve, and that goes for any technology whether it's cloud or a new server or a new application, really need to understand what is that core challenge and that's where we always start. Like any good product manager as we spoke about earlier, you've got to start with what problem you're trying to solve and then apply your solution in a meaningful way. So I think that would be my answer for that. >> Bret, thank for coming on theCUBE, thanks for sharing your story >> Thank you. Appreciate it, alright >> It was a pleasure. >> Bret Dennis here, spin out from University of Maryland, great startup doing big data analyst, obviously the clouds perfect for that and obviously creating more value. It's theCUBE bringing you the action here live in Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (light electronic music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to our nation's capital. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host Dave Vallante. Happy to welcome to the program Matt Olsen, who is the co-founder, president, and chief revenue officer of IronNet cybersecurity, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, great to be here, Stu. Thanks. >> So, obviously, public sector, we've been talking a lot about the cyber, as it were. As a co-founder, always one of the first, give us the why of the company. Why was it founded and a little bit of background. >> Sure, you know, we were founded, I guess out of some frustration. A number of us, including our CEO, Keith Alexander, who was formerly the director of NSA, we came out of the government. And the frustration was, that what we saw happening to companies, big companies, small companies, and the government was getting hit with cyber attacks, you know, consistently and increasingly sophisticated and disruptive, even destructive cyber attacks. So we left the government around the same time, a number of us, and we decided, can we start a company to really take on these threats? What can we do to develop a technology based on the threat landscape that really takes cyber security to the next level? So our mission has always been to protect companies and governments from these types of attacks that are hitting us all the time. >> Yeah, so there's no shortage of security experts inside the government, especially NSA. Actually, I remember Dave and I had talked to, there was a little company called Squirrel that came out of the NSA a little bit later. Oh, what do you know? AWS acquired them last year. So bring us insight a little bit, you know, what's the offering that IronNet has? How do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace? >> Sure, and you're absolutely right. There is a lot of expertise in places like NSA, where I formally worked and a bunch of us formally worked. The offering basically is, network traffic analytics. So we look at the network traffic inside large companies and, right down to the PCAP, so we're looking at the actual network traffic and running analytics. And what that means is not signature-based, but behavioral analytics. Looking for those indicators of malicious activity that we then can alert the SOC operators in these companies that this is something they need to pay attention to right away. Of course the problem always with this area is false positives. You know, how do you make sure that the alerts you're giving to these operators really mean something? So we've done a lot of work to draw down those false positives so that we're giving them alerts that are actionable and meaningful in the context of, you know, a very difficult threat landscape. So that's the basic offering. >> So what's underneath the covers? I mean, what's the secret sauce? Are you using machine intelligence? Share with us. >> Yeah, sure, I think the secret sauce is really a combination of two things. It's analytics algorithms that our data scientists develop. We've got some world-class folks that came out of places like the Defense Research Agency and universities that develop the analytics, the algorithms, but we combine those, that math with real life operators, people who themselves were on the offense at one point, right? They were working to, you know, break into other networks. They were the hackers who understand how the adversary operates like nobody else does. Combining the mathematics, the analytics with real life operators, that I'd say, you know, Dave, is the secret sauce because those are how we develop the analytics and the expert system to produce the alerts and draw down those false positives. >> Yeah, it was interesting. Last week, we were at Cisco Live, talking a lot about networking, and one of the biggest things for networking people is a lot of the network that they own, they don't actually own it anymore. It's in Amazon, it's in, you know, I've got my SAF stuff, public clouds, all that I'm dealing with. So, you know, where do you sit, are you mostly focused on public clouds like AWS or, you know, where in the network? >> So its a great question because there's clearly a movement, right, from on PRAM solutions to cloud solutions. AWS is part of that. So we're partners with AWS. So we've developed our analytics to run in AWS as one of our key cloud providers. So, we, with some of our customers, we're all on PRAM, we're in their data center. These are companies that want us there inside their perimeter, right? But then, with others, we have the ability to have sensors in their network but then do all the analytics, all the backend work in AWS, in the cloud environment. And that makes a lot of sense for many companies, especially when you talk about companies that are a little smaller maybe or, you know, we're not talking about the biggest companies. So they do, a lot of their applications are running in the cloud, so that's been a key transition for us as we've developed our product. >> Matt, what would you say are the biggest threats to organizations that they should be aware of? >> Yeah, you know, the biggest threats are the obvious ones in some ways, but there's no doubt that the nation-states that are carrying out attacks, whether we're talking about China or Iran or North Korea or Russia, are increasingly active and are especially dangerous in a volatile geopolitical landscape like we face today. So we're concerned in working with our customers to make sure that we're taking on the level of threat that we see from nation-states. And that's something, I think, at IronNet we understand particularly well, given that we were operating at that nation-state level when we were all in government. Of course, the most pervasive problem is the criminals. And you see that in all manner of hacks in cyber attacks, that the most common type of attack, including ransomware are occurring at the hands of criminals. >> So rewarding. But, your behavioral analytics can help with that problem. What about, like, the weaponization of social media? I mean, what do you make of that? And, I don't know, is there an answer to that that you can help with? >> You know, the way that social media has been used, you know, for example in the election in 2016, it's obviously a problem that we all are concerned about as citizens. And part of that is, I think there's a combination of the government working together with the private sector, in particular, the social media companies, to come up with better ways to take on that problem to make sure that people who are using those platforms are actually people, and not bots, not Russian trolls. We need to do an education campaign for American citizens, who are coming into this election cycle that were, you know, better prepared for what we saw happen in 2016. I mean, it's a big effort and, you know, I'm not sure, to be honest, that as a country we've totally come to grips with the nature of that problem. >> Yeah, I think you're right. We're just trying to get our heads around it. I interviewed Robert Gates one time and I asked him this question, and I've asked other security practitioners, and I get all kinds of different responses. He said, I want to tell you what he said and then maybe you can respond. I'm paraphrasing, of course, for Dr. Gates. He said we have to be really careful. I was asking him offense or defense, you know. Should we, we probably have some of the best security people in the world, we could go on offense, is that the future of warfare? He said we have to be really careful because we have a lot to lose as well in critical infrastructure. Others have said, no, we should go on the offense to flex our muscles. What do you think the right posture is there? >> You know, I think that's a great point, Dave. There clearly is a balance. I mean, it begins with defense, right. It begins with hardening our defenses, having the right people with the right experience and the right expertise in place to protect our networks because, you know, the best offense really is a good defense and protecting our networks. But we do need to have the capability, and we do have the capability to take offensive action when warranted. One of the challenges, I think, in this space is that we haven't necessarily developed the rules of engagement. You know, under what circumstances should the United States government take action on offense in cyber? You know, we saw this in going after ISIS. You know, going after some of their capability as a terrorist group, targeting people in the United States and taking out some of that capability. That's one way I think that we've clearly done the right thing in going on the offense. Harder to say when you have some of the cyber attacks going after a critical infrastructure. What's the right role for the government in going on the offense? I think, again, the first step is a good defense. And one element of a good defense is working better together. Companies working together, as well as companies working in close coordination and cooperation with the government. >> So it's not so much the technology. Obviously the technology is there, but it's the process around that, the collaboration with, whether it's within agencies or organizations. >> I think that's right. I think there's a lot of good technology. We're, our company, we provide a common defense platform for companies to work together. That's what we do at IronNet. And we're doing that with a number of energy companies right now. But the, I think it's getting that policy in place so that companies understand the technology exists to be faster and better working together. How can we then break down whatever barriers there are to sharing information and having that sort of collaborative approach? And we see that happening more and more across the critical infrastructure, whether we're talking finance or healthcare or energy. >> Matt, what's IronNet's relationship with Amazon? Are you part of the market place? How do you go to market together? >> Yeah, we're a registered partner with Amazon. Amazon is our, one of our cloud providers for our, as I mentioned, for where we run our analytics. I also mentioned this common defense platform. We run the correlations that we do for companies working together. That's all done in AWS, in the cloud. We've found Amazon to be a, really an extraordinary partner as an industry leader and a cloud provider. And so we're very close to, and with Amazon, in both going to market but also in developing our product, so it's been a great partnership for us. >> What do you think of the show? I mean, it's insane, isn't it? >> Yeah, it's amazing, right? Just the parking, finding a parking space was incredible. But once I got in. >> We didn't have to park. >> Yeah, once I got in, it's a fantastic show. >> We did have to register. (laughter) >> Likewise. No, congratulations, it's a great show and Amazon has been terrific for us at IronNet. >> Well, we're glad to cover it and we appreciate you joining us, Matt, for this segment. Be back with more coverage here from the AWS Public Sector show. For Dave Vallante, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks again for watching theCUBE.

>> [Introduction Narrator] Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are welcoming to the program Shannon Kellogg. He is the V.P. Public Policy Americas at AWS. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be back on theCUBE. >> Yes, I know. A CUBE veteran. >> Yeah, I feel like a CUBE alumni at this point. >> You are indeed, Shannon. >> Well, this is your show, I mean this is a policies front and center, here at AWS. You got Andy Jassy's Fireside Chat. >> Indeed. >> Kind of his first foray into revealing some of his political thoughts and his mission around what Amazon could do to change it. Pretty interesting time. >> Yeah, it was. I thought it was a really interesting Fireside Chat today with Andy and Teresa. You know, Andy talked about, of course, a lot of what's going on at AWS and some of the big picture challenges that our country faces, so it was great to hear him. >> Well, so that's what I want to get into right now, is that we are having this Summit with the backdrop of an emerging tech backlash, where not only are the regulators sharpening their focus on big tech, and a lot of political candidates saying they we want to break up these companies, the public becoming increasingly wary of big tech's power over us. Give us a little bit of a peek into your mindset and how AWS is thinking about all of these issues. >> Sure, well so I've been at Amazon for about seven years, and so I've seen the growth and evolution of the company firsthand. I've focused during that time frame mostly on working with our Amazon web services business, or AWS, which of course is all around us today. And you know we really, when I started working seven years ago here in Washington, D.C., a lot of people didn't even understand what cloud computing was. I remember one of my first conversations was going into a very senior policy maker on the Hill, and explaining to him what cloud was, and it was very hard to kind of understand during those days this transformation that had already begun if you're a policy maker. And there were a lot of questions back then around security and sort of how the cloud computing would fit within the security discussion. And there was even during that time frame a lot of national discussions around cyber security. And now that conversation has completely changed. More people know what cloud computing is, and now policy makers more and more are seeing cloud computing as part of the answer to help organizations and even governments strengthen their cyber security posture. And Andy talked a little bit about that today at the Fireside Chat. So the conversation has changed in areas like that, even though there are these broader, macro conversations going on as well. >> Well, Shannon, I want to get your thoughts, because you have a history in public policy and policy with tech, which is good. More than ever now, one of the things that we heard from Andy was the acceleration of change happening now. The ability to solve big problems now. New kinds of conversations and approaches are being invented to existing ways. So I got to ask you the question of how policy's modernizing with this modernization cloud trend and where it's remaining the same, so in some cases, the game is still the same, just kind of same wine, new bottle kind of thing, or is there areas that got to be changed. So, for instance, is there an approach that can still be evergreen today that's historically been working for government and private enterprises over the years, and where is it different where it needs to really change. >> Yeah. >> You've got to tease us and walk us through where that policy game is evolving to. >> Well when I started Amazon seven years ago, and started having conversations with customers and policy makers, like I was saying, there were still a lot of people even at the agency level who were experimenting very early on with cloud, and trying to figure out how they were going to use commercial cloud computing, right? And I would classify them as first movers. And so the conversation with them back then was really understanding what they were trying to do by moving a few applications to cloud. What kind of services they were trying to offer and new innovations that they were trying to offer. And so, the policy work that we did around that was much different than what we're doing today, because now you have so many organizations that are moving to cloud and you see this big push, not just in the U.S. but around the world toward IT modernization as an example. And if you're going to modernize your systems within government, then you actually ultimately have to do many different kinds of policy changes, unlike seven or eight years ago, right? And some of those include modernizing or updating your procurement policies and acquisition policies. Some of those include how you're budgeting and funding those initiatives, because there's a shift from capital expenditure into operational expenditure. Some of those policy conversations also involve updating your cyber security policies and your data protection policies. And so all of that is happening today, and we're seeing the federal government, Congress here wanting- >> Net new changes. Net new changes. >> Yeah, net new changes, and adapting, those policies and frameworks to how organizations are moving faster and faster to commercial cloud. >> Inside the policy beltway and even Silicon Valley, you've seen a lot of things that has worked and hasn't worked in the past. What do you think works for policy? If you look back histories, we've seen in the short history of technology and computer industries it's not that old, it's still young. We still have the internet, rise of the web, mobile computing, obviously spectrum and all these connectivity issues. What has worked that you think is relevant today that we should double down on and what should be taken away and reinvented? >> Well first of all, I think it's really important for, not just our company, and me as a leader at Amazon on public policy, but quite frankly, the entire industry, all of my peers, we all need to listen to what customers are trying to do to achieve their missions. And so when you think about whether it's NASA and the new initiatives that they have, to not only go back to the moon, but beyond to Mars, or you talk to health and human services or the Veterans Administration or some of our National Security agencies, they all have really, really important missions, so understanding what they are and how you can be supportive is very important. >> Well I mean, but there's all, I get that, that the customer's always right, listen to the customer, that's Andy's line, Amazon's line. But there's some potentially conflicting things, I'll just throw an example out there. Open government, open data creates more observability of data, hence more creativity, that's a theme that's getting a lot of traction in circles. And then customers want security and privacy. >> Right, so lots of unintended consequences to make all that. >> So as this new ground for a real, first-generational problem needs to be solved, you can't just pick one old way. Like you open it up, you're going to expose the data. >> Right. But I'm glad you mentioned open data, because it's actually one of the areas over the last few years that we've actually gotten some really important things done. There was federal legislation here in the U.S. that passed just, I think it was about 18 months ago, the first open data, comprehensive open data legislation. And we're seeing also other governments internationally kind of move in this direction as well. And I was part of those conversations, and other colleagues in my company were part of those conversations, took a lot of education. And took a lot of outreach to policy makers to get them to understand the benefits of open data and how technology could enable those benefits, which by the way, include getting more data sets so people can actually innovate on those data sets and build new businesses, which is a benefit and so- >> Keith Alexander's business, for instance, is all about visibility into threats, as one example. >> Right. But back to your question, what I found that was very helpful to policy makers is to give them a very baseline explanation of what open data was and how technology like cloud computing was enabling more access to that data or protections would need to be in place, but also how organizations and individuals and entrepreneurs were going to use that data, so having that conversation and educating. And I would say, John, that's sort of the new way of lobbying, the new conversations is to actually go in and try to understand, not only what's on a customer's mind, but what is on a policy maker's mind in terms of what do they really care about, and what are they trying to do to support whatever mission or to support whatever big initiative that matters to their district. >> So education is really the blocking and tackling tenet. You keep on pounding the education. Doing things in the open is interesting. You mentioned open data. We're in a world now in digital where everything's out in the open. You can't hide in the shadows. And so I wrote a story about Jedi, which through my sources, I essentially was referring to Oracle having this smear campaign against Amazon, which was supported by many sources. No one wanted to go on the record, so no other journalists reported it. But this is happening out in the open. These are old tactics of lobbying. >> They're old tactics, yeah. >> There's a sea change going on where open, turning the lights on, is more reality for policy lobbyists than ever before. Can you comment on your reaction to that? >> Sure. All anyone has to do, to look at some of the tactics that are being used by companies like Oracle, and we generally look at them as the legacy players, the legacy IT companies that are trying to protect their particular business model and their margins and the way that they're doing business, versus doing what I said earlier, which was listen to your customers, listen where they want to go, and try to align to that, right? Oracle is doing the exact opposite. It doesn't appear that they are listening to their customers at all. But putting Oracle aside as the only company doing this, there are other companies that are doing it as well, and if you look at the history of lobbying over the last 20 years, and you look at companies like Oracle or IBM, some of those players, they have done these kind of things previously, right? I mean, look at the original anti-trust case against Microsoft, or look at what Oracle was doing with Google and the EU on Fair Search. I mean, these are the same old tactics that these companies have used again and again and again, >> Beck and I were talking with the general Keith Alexander on this one point, where misinformation is so elevated now, and with machine learning and AI and openness, you can't do that anymore. There's no place to hide, so the transparency become a big part of processes. >> Right. >> Your reaction to how that's going to change, how policy is shaped, the participants and the actors involved, and potentially accelerated outcomes. Your thoughts on that. >> In terms of what the Department of Defense is trying to do, I think there's been a lot of transparency in that process, and there's been a lot of media coverage and light shown on what's going on there, so I don't probably need to go into those details. You know, I think it's really important for policy makers to always go out and get several perspectives. There are a lot of organizations out there that like policy makers and our general experience are trying to support the mission of these agencies that are trying to transform. And so if you looked at what the Department of Defense is trying to do or if you looked at what the intelligence community has already undergone several years of transformation with commercial cloud and emerging technologies, these are really important missions that policy makers want to support. >> And public policy- >> And you see that again and again and again. And other organizations. National Security think tanks, third party organizations and associations. They want to support that, too. So I would look to those voices versus listening to some of the same old tired IT legacy voices of the past. >> How do I know which entities are tainted or not tainted, because as someone who's not a big D.C. guy or tech guy, we got in through the cloud, and we're seeing all this stuff that's kind of, you see bad behavior and it's out in the open. Wow, I can't believe they're doing that. So the transparency is good, I get that, but how do I know- >> Transparency and learning from history. Look back and read about some of the tactics that have been used previously. I mean this is reported. >> So is there an organization out there that's like we're a think tank for the greater good of society. How do I know that they're not funded by someone? I mean, is there ways to detect- >> Various >> someone's reputation? Is there a working- >> Well there are organizations that are set up just to basically attack either other companies or another audience, and so those are generally known as astroturfing like organizations. >> I've seen those Google fair search, like they're really not a fair search, they're trying- >> And you can usually, if you look under the hood a little bit, you can usually figure out who those are. Not just those of us in the industry who have seen this playbook used again and again and again, by companies like Oracle and IBM, but also policy makers, if they just go out and talk to people they hear different perspectives, they're going to be able to figure out pretty quickly what is an astroturfing organization. Because they use the same old tactics that they've used for many years. >> I want to pick up on something that Andy Jassy was talking about during his Fireside Chat, and then he's talking about the culture of Amazon, which is the culture that tolerates failure, that allows people to go out and pursue these high-risk ideas which could be career-ending in other organizations. I want to hear what your thoughts are about the public sector, and I know the public sector is vast and not monolithic, but how would you describe the culture that you're seeing, the agencies you're working with, also the state and locals, the educational institutions, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, you bet. Well I think it's actually a really critical point in question, because we're seeing, at really every level of government that we work at, we're seeing people who are trying to be creative and innovate and offer new ways of services to citizens or to other constituencies that they serve, but we're also seeing cultural challenges, where you may have this particular group that is trying to come up with a new way to meet the mission, but then you have this other group over here, and they've always managed the data center, they've always been able to hug their box, their iron box, and see the blinking lights and get close to that, and it's hard sometimes for people who have done something for a certain amount of time in a certain way to necessarily embrace a new way of doing things. >> Change is hard. >> For a couple of reasons. Change is hard, but also sometimes because of the, the fact is, if you look at really any level of government, there are always going to be IT failures, right? And there have been some doozies in the past, here at the federal level, as well as at the state and local level. And I would say consistently we've heard from government leaders who are trying to be first movers who are trying to be transformers, that sometimes they are tepid because of the failures of the past. And so then it gets them to step back and maybe go over to this group and do things the way they've always done them, versus take that risk. And what we need to do as citizens and as in our case, industry, and as a company like Amazon that is so customer-focused, we need to go out there and help them be creative, innovative, and have a voice. And that goes back to John's question about how policy has changed. That's the work I want to do. How do you help people who are really change agents who are trying to do the right thing for their constituents, do the right thing for their citizens, do the right thing for the National Security mission of the United States. Do the right thing for the war fighter who is out there executing the mission of the day. How do you help them achieve their goals and to be able to move forward and transform what they're doing. >> Well you got tail winds with the cloud, Andy pointed it out, we've been talking about it, but I think one thing that's key is, as you guys get the policy gurus together, as you lead the younger generation to shape these new territories, it's a - >> [ Shannon Kellogg] Thank you for calling me younger, John. >> Yeah, you're looking good, by the way. But you've been around the block, you've seen a few waves, and you've seen what works and what doesn't work, and when more than ever, younger majors are going to come in, whether they're from science, or different disciplines are going to be, you have to come and bring that interdisciplinary skill to really solve some of these world problems, I mean Andy's laid out a few. >> That's right. That's right. >> It's a critical... These are opportunities now that can be solved. >> Yeah, and by the way, that trend that you're pointing to is something that we're seeing not just domestically here in the U.S., but internationally. And we're seeing a lot of governments set up some kind of innovation units within government, so they bring in younger generation, but also entrepreneurs, folks that have been out in industry, creating and failing, and creating again and innovating, and bringing them in, and really trying to help them transform their missions. We're seeing that in so many different places now. >> Well, we're going to... you need to keep in touch, and check in on your progress and track the accountability of the industry. We've been really passionate about that, so thanks for sharing your vision and perspective. >> You bet. Thanks for having me on theCUBE again. It's really great to be back and to talk to you as always. >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. Stay tuned. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We are live in Washington, D.C. at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is their big event, this is their reinvent for the public sector, but it's technically a summit. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Atkinson who is the CEO of JHC Technologies, small business partner doing huge deals. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, you guys have a lot of experience working on the front lines with some really big deployments, implementations with cloud, working with some agencies. So, first question right out of the gate is, is this really happening, this cloud thing? >> Yeah absolutely, you know, we started the company in 2010 and one of my partners and I worked on recovery.gov as a cloud engineer and it was just something that, at the time, no one knew what the cloud was and we really looked at it as an opportunity when we started the business. This is where things are going to go. We didn't realize when we started the company, though, as a small business, you can't just get started and say, yeah, we know the cloud and can help you do these things. You have to have past performance, you have to have relationships. And so, it's taken so long for the government to get around to the point where they're really just starting now to put a lot of larger production workloads into the cloud. And it's been a long journey where you've had, it's like Groundhog Day, you have the same conversation over and over again with different people and different organizations about security, about compliance, about a variety of issues, how you procure it and everyone has the same questions, has the same problems and it's so much about education. >> Yeah, and saving time and there's a lot of upfront medicine you got to take. Like you said, if you're new, it's like a jungle, oh, wait a minute, I thought it was going to be easier. What was the key motivational point, how did you keep going, what was the driving force? Was it Amazon tailwind for you, was it more of... >> Our relationship with Amazon Web Services has been great. They've been a tremendous supporter of us. And, as a small business, you know, they really relied on their partners to be a force multiplier for them in the public sector space, And that's been tremendous for us. They've really allowed us to play... >> And that's true, that's actually, they're doing that. >> Absolutely, and not necessarily the case as much on the commercial side where they're more apt to deal directly with the customers. But, they really relied on the partner network, partner ecosystem, on the public sector space to really help them drive things forward. So, for us, to have that relationship has been tremendous value for us. But also, we do things and allow those to broaden the group and what we have from a vehicles perspective, small business set of size that allow us to do business with organizations that AWS can't. >> Well I think I'm going to explain what you guys do, great commentary on the cloud and your opportunity. What do you guys do for services, what kind of services are you providing, and can you take a minute to talk about the company. >> Sure, we started the company in 2010, really it was my two partners and I, we'd been consultants in the IT industry, and worked in the beltway, and felt like we should do a company that was different than everyone else, more of a commercial style focused entity, where it's about the technology and how do you bring that disruptive technology to government and business so that they can take advantage of it as opposed to being overwhelmed by it, and the cloud is really that underlying core technology that really affects, it's really a paradigm shift for how organizations do business. So for us, that's the area we wanted to get into, and we did a lot around mobility, a lot around collaboration, virtualization, virtual apps, virtual desktops, but really at the end of the day, the cloud-- >> Are you guys writing software, are you an integrator? >> Well, we're really, it was about building a company that technologists, who are in this area, there's some great smart people who work in the D.C. area, people will, in the Beltway, you'll sit at a desk, doing a job, for five years, your company will lose that contract to some other company, you'll stay in the same seat, you'll go work for a different company for the next five years. Somebody else will win the contract and you'll stay in that same seat. So, you're really working for the agency and not really working for the company that you're employed by, and we really wanted to build something that was more commercial-esque where it was about what do you bring to me as an organization, how do I put you in a position that you're challenged by the workload that's in front of you that you get to do different things and that you're more upwardly mobile as opposed to just being a butt in a seat, as with a lot of, what work they call it. >> So this morning, Theresa showed a slide, I think I counted 60 consulting partners. Now you guys have achieved a premier consulting partners status, you're not like a everyday name, like some of the big guys that are on there, so how did you achieve that, how do you differentiate, in that sea of really world-class consultants, and how do you achieve that premier status with AWS? >> It's been a lot of work for us. There are some organizations that have gotten it just based off their size. AWS needs to have those larger partners. But we, I think we really did earn it, we've met every requirement to get to that status and for us, it's a huge badge of honor that we've achieved that, and it's a lot of hard work for a small company. We're coming up on 70 employees, so we're not 10,000, 20,000 employee environment, so for us to achieve that and have the level of sales that we do in the space, it's certainly not easy, it's really being singularly focused on the vision of how we want to run the company and sticking to that, even though the market may try to push you other directions, and even your customers say we're not ready for cloud, you have to really stick to it and be focused on that being your core business. >> You talked about moving production workloads to the cloud earlier. I wonder if you could help us sort of squint through that because when you talk to what Andy Jassy calls the Old Guard, John, right, they all say, people aren't moving production workloads to the cloud. When you talk to AWS, you just referenced, production workloads are going into the cloud. I like to talk to consultants that are at least quasi-independent. What's really happening there? What kind of production workloads are going into the cloud? >> I think we're just now hitting that part of the market, where we're starting to see more of the large scale production workloads being moved to the cloud. We moved our first organization, 2500 user environment, that we moved to the cloud three, four years ago, so for us, being able to do that kind of workload to be all in on the cloud, isn't something that we shied away from. But when you started to deal with a lot of these organizations, we have prime contracts with NOAA, which has massive data, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and working with the USGS, some of these agencies have massive data, they're just weren't really built as an organization to be able to adopt that cloud technology, so we really looked at it a couple years ago, and made a bit of a conscious effort to help to push them as an organization to help them understand the structure of how they need to really build their organization. We're very much an I till shop, how you build an IT process, but even with that, it doesn't really take in innovative technology. The speed at which AWS innovates and produces new technology, new features, is something that I don't think that anyone has seen before in an IT realm, so, building an organization that's able to understand that, to be able to implement that technology and be in a compliant manner to make it available to their application owners and their users is something that you really have to have the right organizational structure to be able to achieve. >> And why is that not a problem for AWS customers, your customers, because if a legacy IT vendor, first of all, they can't innovate that fast, but if they were to innovate that fast, they tend to move at a much slower speed, the IT organizations that buy from them. Why is that pace of innovation not problematic for your customers? >> I think it is, and again I think, our challenge has been to help them to build the type of an organization that can respond to that, knowing that there's one constant in IT technology today, which is change. Whatever's here today is going to be different tomorrow. There's going to be new features, and you have to be able to build an organization that isn't just we're going to build a data center, build a bunch of firewalls around it, put our data there and we're going to be safe. Today's IT landscape moves too quickly. You really have to build, look to the way it's done in the commercial enterprises, the way a Netflix builds really to be destructive and how they build their technology, knowing it's going to fail, and look to do that same type of implementation, help build your security within a federal organization. >> You're going to change the culture and process, everything all at once with new tech, so I want to ask you the question that's in everyone's mind, mine included, what's your observation of the current state of affairs with respect to the cloud native and cloud because you've got people who might jump on it, say I love this, some'll be fearful, you're there, what's the new aha moment that people are having, can you share some insight into (laughs) what's going on in the mind and the actual implementations, what's changed, what's the most important story that we should be telling? >> We're right now at that point. I think I've heard reports less than 7% of the data center workloads have been moved to infrastructures of service. I think that's probably even on the high side, 7%, but you're now starting to get all of the work that we've done, a lot of these organizations is they've been pilots, proof of concepts, really dipping their toe, large organizations just dipping their toe in the water. We're getting to the point now where these organizations are approaching their primary applications for their organization saying we're ready to move that too. For us it's a lot, it's been so much education so much work to try to help get them there, so for us we're just excited to actually see it come to fruition. >> In 2010, around the time you started your company, I remember, John, VM Ware, at the time Paul Moritz was saying any app, any workload will run on VM Ware, and there were a lot of skeptics, and they've largely achieved that, remember they used to talk about the software mainframe. You know with the cloud, similar kind of narrative. Now it's a little different now, let's take the example of Oracle in particular, you're seeing Oracle use for example its pricing power to really try to force people to use its own cloud jacking up prices if they want to use it on Amazon. What do you tell customers that are basically reliant on that Oracle database? Should they move that into the cloud, should they try to figure out okay let's go to Aurora or Redshift, or some other better, what's the right strategy? >> So I mean we're a technology agnostic, generally speaking-- >> Right that's why I can trust your answer here. >> But we really do lean to where what we call best in breed technologies. So AWS has been something that we've been all in on AWS since 2011, 2012. We made that a conscious effort and they've really done some things I think as part of their business model that we really appreciate as a partner, and as a customer. We've always had our infrastructure from day one on AWS. Also our infrastructure on Office 365. We understand where to focus those efforts. When it comes to an organization like an Oracle, I don't want to necessarily disparage them, but they're not necessarily focused on bringing the best value to their customers. A lot of times it seems that it's about what's right for the bottom line of their stockholders and what drives up the price of their stock as opposed to what's the best solution I could put forward to really be great at database. I think if you look at it, AWS has already built a roadmap to where you can get 70-80% of your database applications to be migrated to an open software database model, and you can massively reduce, so many of these large organizations, a large portion of their IT spend is on those Oracle and those specialty applications. >> It's the licenses too. >> So if you can drop that cost by 60, 70%. What we always tell those organizations, don't just throw that money away, take those savings, roll that into making a better application. Use that 60, 70% savings and fix how you deliver. Make your data more mobile, make it more available to your userbase. >> Invest in analytics. >> Invest back in how you're doing, using Redshift or whatever other analytics, to get better results. >> Awesome, Craig, great insight, congratulations on your success at JHC Technologies, you're the founder and CEO of, congratulations on all the hard work, you got to just, I don't want to say do your time, I've heard that quoted in the government sector, you got to do your time, time's shrinking with the cloud, so you've got a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, for having me. >> You're watching theCUBE here live in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, day one here is continuing, be right back. (synth music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE live in Washington, D.C. for AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. This is the event for Global Public Sector, and I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante; next guest, Salman Al Khalifa, vice CEO of Bahrain, Information and eGovernment Authority, excited to have him on theCUBE, and dying to talk to you for over a year. Welcome to theCUBE; thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, one of the things we've been covering, and Terese has been really hot on this for over a year, and I think people are starting to figure it out, that the digital nation concept of digitizing and being a digital country is a moonshot kind of thinking, but it's reality for a lot of people. You guys have a story working with AWS, I think is super fascinating, so I want to get into it. How did it all start? What are you guys doing? Take a minute to explain what's going on in Bahrain, in your country. >> How did it start? Basically, every IT guy in government, is like bogged down, day in, day out, buying stuff, building stuff, and it's a constant race to just keep changing things over. We've got a really smart leader, and he has a vision. He said, "We're going to go to the cloud." It caught us off guard. What do you mean, take everything and move it to the cloud? That's crazy, but sitting down, really analyzing what the cloud will do for us, I was excited. I mean, take into consideration, 70% of our time is spent buying, installing, and re-buying, and re-installing stuff. So, I'm in a constant cycle of buying, tendering, and you know government bureaucracy. You can't pick up the phone and say "Hey, HP, "get us the server; get us this application." No, you need to put it in the public domain; you need to put in tender, evaluate it publicly, and then, write a contract and the contract... But it takes you to buy anything, six months. So, you're constantly, every month, issuing tenders. And, you're losing sight of what's really important. It's building applications that can help the citizen, not helping vendors. And I think the key thing is we need to focus our attention on building applications that serve the citizens. That's the bottom line; that's what we own. We own the business; we own the data, not the hardware. We don't want to keep buying hardware, so what the cloud gave us was the ability to innovate without having to go through all those hoops. And I think that is the real benefit to us as a government by moving to the cloud. >> Alright, so what's the status of the current situation? Amazon's the provider. >> Yep. >> Talk about the relationship with Amazon, and then we'll come into the cool things that are going on in Bahrain. >> Amazon is a strategic partner. They've opened up a region in Bahrain because the government saw this is the right approach. We've always seen where everything is going. In the 1970s, the government had the first satellite in the region. Lebanon, the war came on, and then the banks panicked. Where do they go? And they came where? The only region that was available and was able to take all the international banks at that time? Bahrain. And so, Bahrain was established as a banking sector. Now, we are betting on the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest and the best with more options for us. We're betting big on Amazon. We believe by having Amazon in Bahrain, they will help stimulate and stimulate innovation of our citizens because at the end of the day, we're not an oil-rich country. Our crowned jewel is the citizen, and the people are the innovators. They are going to be our future developers and entrepreneurs. And making them ready for the cloud is going to help us succeed. And that's where we see Amazon. >> What's the mission and vision of the eGovernment Authority and the modernization with digital? Is it to make citizens happy? Of course. Is it to attract business in? So talk about the mission of Bahrain because, obviously, when you stand up the cloud, Amazon regions, it's like a lot of things are going to start happening. You guys looking for more outward migration, inward migration, of talent and business. What are you guys trying to achieve? >> Business can work anywhere. But business wants to work in an environment where it's easy for them to establish. Without the bureaucracies, they can establish themselves in hours, not in weeks, or in months. That's what we want; we want people to come and establish their business in Bahrain and serve the region. That's the ultimate objective. And have a workforce that is competent enough to work in today's technology, not on yesterday's technology. And I think that is where we see it, as an innovative marketplace that is flexible enough to accommodate any international company coming in, and help stimulate local products, and that's the other part. >> So you have to have the infrastructure that attracts those people. >> Exactly. >> That makes them want to come to you. That's almost table stakes. Right now, talk about your journey. We saw this gentleman from the CIA talk about the icebergs today, that the part you see, maybe the software, maybe the licenses, but there's everything else that you talked about, the installation, the planning, the maintenance. How has that been affected or how do you expect that to be affected that below the iceberg that you see? >> So we've built up the below the iceberg. We're actually moving to the new iceberg, but that's the iceberg, is the cloud. So, we already have, there are a lot of smart people that work with us, and they've adapted their architecture and our applications to suit the cloud. And what they've done is they've come up with a master architecture for all the government agencies to follow. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We tell them how to do it; this is how you're going to protect yourselves, and we have the team there to support all the 40 agencies that are moving to the cloud. So that's step one; we've got the right architecture, we've got the right security in place that is open to, that has so many options and flavors that allows them to innovate, as well-- >> You've got a lot of-- >> Down to single stack. >> You've got a lot of flexibility, but also, just to give you guys some credit, you're the first country to adopt a cloud first-- >> Yes. >> Policy. >> In the region. >> Yes. >> In the region; this is historic. What's the impact of that; what's been the feedback? Are people confused, are they happy, are they jumping up and down, what's going on? >> Truth? Panic. (laughing) To start. Like I did. But once they understood what's at stake, oh they're loving it. We can't keep up, some agencies are faster than others, some are slower than others, and for different reasons. Obviously, the different stacks that they have. But in reality, now, fear has changed over to excitement. And I think, that I can see right now. We can't keep up, so we had to work with local partners to help other agencies move to the cloud faster. So, that is the positive side. So, as you already mentioned, you saw us start with the cloud first, but once you do that, they need to be educated, so we've set up sort of a program where we can re-skill the IT guys in government and say, "Here you go, here's the courses. "Go in, no charge. "We're going to help skill you up to the cloud," and they're loving it. Anybody, especially our developers, they're loving it. Anything away from operations, they're loving it. They don't need to deal with the operations guys. Because we've already started to establish a dev-ops, and with this dev-ops, the agility of moving, seamlessly, the application faster to the cloud becomes much smoother. >> Talk about startups in the region, the startup mentality. When John first told me about Bahrain, we were so excited to have you on. He's like, "Dave, this country "is like the startup mentality country." Talk about startups, cloud, and that mentality. >> In the region, previously, there's not much startups historically. But with the cloud, that is the ultimate catalyst for any startup. If you had an idea, and you wanted to develop it, you used to have to invest a lot of money into infrastructure, security, but with the cloud, with serverless, with all the tools that you've got, it's going to cost you nothing to establish an application. You have enough tools to compete against the big establishments out there. So we've got Careem, for example, which is basically a local taxi hire company, like Uber of the world. And it's doing incredibly well, shockingly well. And they are like the Cinderella Story of the region. And now, everybody's into it. Everybody's building applications. Last application that I heard was a guy who links up all the fishermen in the ports, and they can sell their fish to the locals without the middleman. And that's what you're going to see, some small guys coming up and girls coming up with applications that will innovate the way they do business, and we will see a lot more of it with the cloud. >> That's a motivational factor. People are seeing real advantages coming off this what was once a scary prospect of cloud to innovation actually happening. Okay, how do you continue it? What's the plan? How're you going to keep the train rolling, keep the momentum going? What's the focus, what's your plan? >> So we've got the economic development board, and the economic development board will handle that sector. Basically, their focus is stimulate the market regionally and locally and help innovators and entrepreneurs establish themselves on the cloud in Bahrain. And they are giving them every kind of support you can imagine: capacity building, capacity on the cloud, even accounting, business advice, all of that is free. And that is amazing. So as a startup, you know the tech, you know the problem. But you don't know how to establish that from the cloud. Alright, go to these guys, and they say, "Okay, "Here's enough credit through another organization. "Take it to the cloud. "You want to market your product? "Here's another company." And that is all embedded, and free of charge. That will, I believe, really help stimulate the small, but innovative companies and help them grow. >> So thoughts on the AWS partnership. Obviously, they chose to put a region in the region in your country. That's got to be huge, but what's the relationship like with AWS? Where do you want to see it go? >> Alright, so we're at the lift and shift stage of that. We just started, as you guys are aware. But already, in the pipeline, we're looking at innovations on the cloud. So, healthcare is a big deal for us, and we believe that the healthcare in the region has a lot of opportunities to improve. And by moving the healthcare system to the cloud and leveraging artificial intelligence, and helping things like oncology departments identify cancer better, treat cancer better, using technology, I think is the next frontier for us. I think that is an opportunity. I believe we'll see a lot of more innovation and simplifying government processes through mobile apps that are becoming much better. But I think we'll be more efficient. We will be able to continuously improve government services, for example, in the cloud at a faster rate. It used to take us two years for a change, now it's going to take us weeks for a change. That's the degree of flexibility and rapid response that we can give to our citizens, to our guests that come into the country, to satisfy their demands. >> And your developers. >> Yes, our developers love it. >> It's a huge economic opportunity to grow a new generation of citizens that are tech-savvy, and they don't have to be total nerds. Anyone can be programming, anyone can be developing big data. It should open up, I think, really good commerce for you guys, as well. I think that's a great opportunity. The question is, when is theCUBE going to come to Bahrain? When are we going to see theCUBE? >> We're getting you on the plane right now. (laughing) >> Salman, thanks for spending the time. Great to see you, final question: For the folks watching back at home and around the world, AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, D.C., what's your impression, the vibe? What's the content? For the people who aren't here, take a minute to share your color commentary on what's happening here. >> I think it's very difficult to express the enthusiasm. It's in the air, you can smell it, you can feel it, the way people are talking. It's not only the private sectors that are talking about moving to the cloud, it's government. And you feel it here. It's not a pipe dream; it's a reality. And I think coming here to really show people that the world is changing, and if they're not on the cloud, they're going to be left behind. That is my impression. >> It's a big opportunity. >> Absolutely. >> Salman, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it, great to see you on theCUBE. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante bringing you all the action, most important stories happening here at AWS Public Sector Summit. Bahrain, cloud first policy, really going to pay off, a real investment in the future of their citizens. An example of being cloud first, creating value. Stay with us. More live coverage here in Washington after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Washington D.C. everybody you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Vellante, with John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector summit Barry Russell is here, the General Manager of Worldwide Business Development and Operations for the AWS marketplace and service catalog and he's joined by Dmitri Alperovitch who is the co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike a hot new company, just raised a boatload of dough we're going to talk about that, but welcome gentleman, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Barry, let's start with you. So we saw Teresa put up a slide, I tried to count and it was over two hundred ISVs and SAS providers for GovCloud, the marketplace is booming. What's going on from your perspective? >> So we launched marketplace in the GovCloud at New York summit last year, back in 2017 and we launched it in a little over four hundred products that were available. The team is more than double that now, there's nine hundred and fifty or more products available. But the exciting thing for us is that today we're able to make SAS; SAS inscription, SAS contracts available from partners such as CrowdStrike. It just gives customers more flexibility and choice in how they deploy software into a region like GovCloud. >> So Dmitri, we're going to get into the funding and the news in a second. But from your standpoint, marketplace, why the attractiveness, no concerns, it's all systems go, go hard in. What's your perspective? >> Absolutely. AWS has been a huge partner for us since really the beginning of the company. We've built our entire business on AWS, we're cloud end point security vendors so we have a little agent that lives on every server, desktop, laptop, both on premise and cloud environments. But the back-end is all on AWS where we process mass amounts of data and the exciting thing in the last year or so in partnering with AWS is being able to offer that capability to their customers through the marketplace where every asset that you have on AWS can now be protected by CrowdStrike and we're very very excited about that and actually today, we launched our 'Falcon' is the name of our product on GovCloud, offering to target primarily the Federal Government as well as the state and local and other enterprises actually, that are interested in that high level of assurance that GovCloud provides. >> What specifically- can you just drill down the product I just want to make sure that we get that right. So, you're on Amazon, you're protecting Amazon end points within their cloud. That's great for Amazon commercial enterprises, repeat one more time the public sector piece, how does that work? Who's the customer? Is it just the agency, or is it also enterprises who work with that? Talk about the dynamics. >> So when you look at our customers it's a mix of large enterprises, about twenty percent of fortune 500 companies, and various federal agencies. Basically we install on every machine they have that runs Windows, Mac or Linux systems so servers, desktops, laptops, everything within their environment but there's no on-premise equipment. So the agent connects to our cloud which runs on AWS and we collect all the execution activities that are taking place and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover security threats. So it's a big data problem and we collect over a hundred billion events every single day just to give you a sense of how much that is, in two days we process the amount of data that Twitter processes in a year. So, really huge amounts of data. >> So Barry, do you go out to partners, do you even have to sell them on this concept, are they beating down your door, what's that dynamic like? >> Yeah, we work with partners that, well first of all, we have to get them to architect for AWS. So, before we even think about listing a product in marketplace, Dmitri will tell you, they have to first architect to run well on AWS so that when the software is deployed or the customer accesses that environment, it's running optimally. And the customer is protecting both assets that they have running on AWS and On-Prem. I think vendors have really warmed up to the idea of marketplace as a sales channel for them. And the reason for that is we really serve two different types of customers. One type of customer who can go to the public marketplace website and subscribe to a product, deploy that and immediately purchase it. And then, for large enterprise and public sector federal government customers, we still have that feature of private offers, which enables the customer and the vendor to negotiate on price and terms but still transact digitally through marketplace and have it all seamlessly built by AWS. Lots of flexibility for sales teams that are in the field. >> Okay, so they work out the financial arrangements and you guys facilitate that experience? >> That's right. We handle the deployment, subscription and billing for the customer. >> So obviously, you know, the commercial space SAS is exploding. What are the drivers in federal, are they similar, what are the differences? >> For customers that are wanting to move to SAS based applications, I think it's pretty simple. Customers have reached a point where they don't necessarily want to manage the underlying infrastructure or software itself. So they're really looking to manufacturers like CrowdStrike who have a fully managed SAS based environment running on AWS. All the customer wants is the outcome the functionality of the software, for it to be performant and do what the vendor said that it was going to do. Managing all of that infrastructure and underlying technology, that's the expertise of the manufacturer themselves and the movement to SAS is all about simplifying for customers. >> How about CrowdStrike news I want to get to the valuation question. You guys are valued at over three billion dollars just reported on siliconangle.com and around the world you guys raised two hundred million dollars in a round of funding. Total capitalization is about four hundred million, roughly? >> Yeah, over four hundred million. >> OK. So you're feeling good today, right? >> Very good. More than anything else it's an indication of our growth, we've doubled the company in terms of revenue last year. We had a year over year increase of five hundred percent in terms of one million dollar deals we've closed. So it's really an indication that we're separating ourselves from the rest of the pretty crowded endpoint security marketplace and establishing ourselves as a leader. >> And what's the money going to be used for? Mostly expansion, sales, marketing? >> It's further expansion, our growth internationally sales and marketing, engineering, helping build out more of the platform capabilities. >> I want to get your take on the cloud because you guys built your business on day one. We were commenting off-camera saying that with our company we have never owned a data center. Have you ever owned a data center? >> We do a few things, small things, but most of our stuff is on AWS. >> So, for the people out there trying to do cloud that don't have that clean sheet of paper of a start-up like you guys were seven years ago. The key to success, to really take advantage of the cloud, not just migrate to it, but actually use it. >> Well, you know, it's interesting in security it's been an interesting journey because when we started back in 2011, doing security in the cloud was a heresy. In fact, I remember meetings with major banks back in those days when we were telling them about our plans and how we're going to do security in a very different way. They said 'This sounds intriguing, but we'll never be a customer because we'll never do cloud." Now, most of these guys are customers, so the mindset has definitely changed a lot. And what we're seeing now is actually our competitors that for years have been trying to compete with us by saying 'Well we're on-premise, CrowdStrike is cloud, you can't trust cloud.' Now they're desperately trying to move to the cloud and of course, unless you build it natively in the cloud to begin with it's very very hard to do. You can't just put an appliance in a data center and call it a cloud, and that's what they're struggling with. >> How do customers determine whether something- How does it pass the smell test? You know, you can say you do things, what's the flaw in having that non-optimized fully cloud-ready, or born in the cloud solution? What's the test? >> That's a great question. So, one test is scalability. We replace a lot of our competitors because they just couldn't scale. Because they used traditional sequel-based databases, single appliances, not a multi-tenet environment, they deploy it to two hundred thousand end points and the thing just comes crashing down. So that's one big thing and then in terms of better security, unless this is what the cloud really gives you in security, unless you can aggregate all of this data, and we process a hundred billion events per day and do machine learning on that data to try and discover new types of attacks, you're not leveraging the benefits of the cloud you're not delivering better protection. >> We've had many interviews over the years, Dave and I, around security with Amazon. You took a lot of heat on it being not secure turns out the cloud is actually becoming more secure, you're an expert in security, you've done a lot of thread analysis over the years looking at your bio and you're successfully leading a great company. Hackers love to attack where the data is, so the cloud's complexity, if you will, or its distributive nature, makes it less hackable, some say. What's your take on that? How do you view that opportunity? So say, look at it, if I put everything in one spot, I can brute-force it, or I'm going to get hacked. What's your take on using the cloud as an opportunity to have better security? >> You know, in this day and age almost every single company that is not concerned in moving to the cloud is making a huge mistake because the reality is, when you look at the security teams that Amazon has, or other cloud providers have, they are way ahead of virtually everyone in this market. They're way ahead of the big banks that have a lot of money,6 they're certainly way ahead of the federal government, so you're getting the best of the best and security technologies they have the same level of scale that we do in terms of seeing all these types of attacks and can react a lot faster. So yes, while it may present itself as a bigger target the reality is that you'll be getting a much higher level of protection than you can ever do yourself. >> So what's the inside scoop on the tipping point? You were talking before, years ago, financial services, customers for example said 'Never, we'll never go to the cloud'. We've had many interviews, 'that's an evil word.' >> That's right. >> What was the tipping point? Was it the realization that companies like Amazon could do a better job? Was it fear of missing out? Was it economics? Was it the losses that they were taking? What was it? >> I think it was a combination of everything. It's funny because in those days we actually asked them, 'Well, how did you feel about virtualization when it came out? I bet you didn't like that either.' 'No, we didn't like that, now we use the virtualization.' 'How do you feel about open source?' 'No, no. We hated it. Now we use it.' Right, so it's a journey for a lot of companies. Whenever something new comes out that's a big paradigm shift. But a few years in typically they realize the adoption. What we're seeing now particularly in the public sector is that realization that the commercial sector went through probably three or four years ago. And now we're seeing the big push and the executive order from the present that you have to adopt cloud, that you have to move to modern IT infrastructure and we're seeing a lot of success and the federal government agencies are realizing we need to do security in particular very differently and the cloud is a huge differentiator. >> How about, anything you can add to that Barry? Your perspectives on it? >> No, we're seeing enterprise customers and not just in financial services but across all industries. On the public sector side, you have organizations like GoodWill or City and Newport and then on the enterprise side, you have really large organizations like Siemens or 3M that are not only leveraging AWS but have also started leveraging solutions that are available in the marketplace and I think that in the past couple of years we have seen a turn both in the enterprise customer and in public sector customers that are really starting to adopt cloud and move to that as their primary mechanism. >> And we have seen in the last year huge adoption of the public sector across many sensitive agencies they're starting to adopt our solution on the GovCloud platform because they're seeing the benefits of that security model. >> It's a no-brainer, really, if you look at the speed and scale that you can do things, but you've got to check the boxes of the public sector, a little bit different than the commercial enterprise. So, talk about the public sector we're here at the public sector summit, it's like a reinvent in and of itself of that ecosystem. What does the current landscape look like? What's the orientation? What's the posture of their technology strategies? What's their appetite? Can you guys just give us some color commentary on the public sector customers? >> Sure, go ahead? >> Yeah. You know, one of the reasons that GovCloud was built and stood out was to give customers that needed FedRAMP or ITAR compliancy, you know and an opportunity to operate those workloads that they were moving over. Here's what I would say, you know, it's not just traditional public sector customers, like government agencies or the federal government that are operating in GovCloud, it's also enterprise customers that serve those needs. So there's this cross-section of pollination of customers and server team partners that are serving the federal government and government entities and large educational institutions or state and local government. But they want the same level of innovation, scale, they want to free up their developers to develop new applications and services for the citizens that they serve. They want all of the same things that the enterprise customers that we've been talking about have had for a number of years. They want the exact same thing. >> The paradigm shift, Dmitri, we were talking off-camera about the public sectors looking to the private sector because there's leadership there. No-one says, 'Hey, let's just do what the government does, there's no real- the inefficiencies that use cases there. You mention paradigm shift. How has the paradigm of operating and servicing and selling and delivering product value to the public sector changed? I mean, we still hear, the Oracle, thing was in the news about the DOD JEDI project? So the old way of selling and procuring is changing? >> It is, and the fact that customers can now leveraging Amazon and buy through the marketplace, all of these services directly from Amazon without having to go do separate contracting vehicles and separate prosumers, but the other benefit you get is the SAS deployment model in times of value. Traditional security solutions as an example take literally twelve to eighteen months to deploy. We had an agency in the US government that bought our solution recently and deployed throughout the entire agency in two weeks. So that ability to automatically get value of the solution helps secure the enterprise is something that you can only achieve with a cloud-based solution. >> I talk to a lot of people in D. C., we've been covering, opening up more coverage here it's still hot-market for the cloud area and certainly government as well. And then, in an off-the-record conversation, I won't say the name, but he says 'Look, I can't deny the Amazon solution, this cloud-native stuff is amazing, when have prices ever gone up? They don't, they go down, but they take more account-control because they get more penetration. So the prices go down. In the old way, prices went up! So, again, this is the shift in the mindset where you get more business, but you're driving the prices down at the element level. Is this the key thing that you're hearing too? >> Absolutely, and when you look at some of the customers that, I don't want to speak for you, but that Amazon has acquired in terms of intelligence community and others that you would never think would ever move to the cloud given the sensitivity that they have, and yet they've realized that to do things differently, to accomplish their mission, they have to use the cloud. So we're absolutely seeing that paradigm shift and the nice thing is that it's coming both from the bottom-up with these agencies realizing that they have to do things differently, and there is support in the White House in terms of IT modernization that we need to adopt the cloud to be successful. >> So do you feel like we'll finally start turning the corner in security? What I mean by that, is if you look at some of the metrics about, OK, a company gets infiltrated, they don't even realize it for whatever, two hundred and seventy five days, we spend more on security every year but we feel less secure. Is the cloud beginning to change that or are some of those metrics or even subjective measurements, I'm happy to spend more but I want to be more secure, are we starting to see the fulfillment of that promise? >> Absolutely, no question about it. And I'll give you a very concrete example. We actually launched, two weeks ago, a guarantee. If you're a customer using our service and you get breached on a system we protect, we pay up to a million dollars of various costs that you have because we believe that we can actually secure you and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and establish that guarantee and there's no one in the industry that is doing anything like that. >> That's putting your money where your mouth is, I mean that's fantastic, usually these guarantees give a free month of service. >> No, no, no. We will pay cash to reimburse various expenses and set a response, legal fees, everything else that comes into it. >> Congratulations for taking that step. I mean, others are going to have to follow. >> That's good leadership. One of the guys on the stage from the CIA, Dave, you had the quote said that security-- >> Cloud security on its worst day- Cloud security on its very worst day is far better than my client's server systems. (John laughs) >> So there it is, to your point, OK, let's get the plug in for you guys. So you've got eight months of you starting to work together in the marketplace. >> We did. >> Tell us about that relationship, how's it going? What do you guys do? You're selling products together? Give a quick update on the relationship between that. >> Okay, so our Falcon platform in the last eight months has been on marketplace where customers that are coming in, and provisionary resources on EC2, on AWS can immediately get Falcon to protect those resources and that has been a fantastic growth area for us. We've also been partnering on the new GuardDuty offering that Amazon launched last year we're the intelligence provider for that platform. So it's been a great partnership we're looking to do a lot more, in particular with the GovCloud in the public sector. >> Last word? >> Well for us now, we're able to have a solution we can recommend to customers that's fully SAS-based, running on AWS and proven in its capability so, you know, it's great to partner with their sales and alliance team on the commercial and public sector side. We're going to look forward to seeing what we can do for the rest of the year. >> Well, Barry, thanks for coming back again it's great to have you on theCUBE and Dmitri, wonderful, and congratulations on the raise and making some progress, really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, John Furrier and I will be back with Stu Miniman, we're live from AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCube. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the nation's capital everybody. You're watching theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, and we're covering, this is day one of the AWS Public Sector Summit, #AWSPSSummit, got that right, right, Stu? >> You did, Dave. >> Lynn Martin is here. She's the Vice President and General Manager of Government, Education, and Healthcare at VMware. We got news. Lynn, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. So let's start, before we get into the news, let's start with VMware and Public Sector. You were kind of explaining to us off-camera. Talk about VMware and its role in Public Sector. >> So VMware has been ingrained in the government agencies and the education across state, local, and federal government for the beginning of VMware. There's billions of dollars of investments across all the different parts of Public Sector. So we have a trusted partnership, 90% share of wallet across those agencies, and the different entities across state and local government as well. And today, I'll pivot a little bit towards the announcement, today's announcement. We were partnered with AWS around the VMC on AWS GovCloud. Today, we offer VMC on AWS. That is a commercial offering that supports all of our customers that do not require the same levels of security that the federal government and some of our state and local customers require. >> Lynn, I'm just wondering. We're intimately familiar with VMC. John Furrier was at the announcement with AWS, and VMware went and announced. But for our audience that's not, maybe just the short summary as to what that solution is. >> Sure. So VMware Cloud, that's VMC, on AWS, allows you to leverage the VMware suite of product sets that are already being used in running your data centers today. And then be able to move your workload into the public cloud. So we call it hybrid cloud technology, utilizing the tools of the software-defined data center that are already running in those customer environments, and give you the flexibility and agility to move workloads in and out as you need for your business demands at a high level. >> We were just speaking to the former CTO of the CIA, and he took us back to sort of the initial impetus for the CIA moving to cloud. And he gave four things, velocity, efficiency, drive innovation, and security. If I think about the early days of VMware and the impact that it had on the data center, I could have listed those same four things. It's now we're just taking it up another level. >> Right. >> In terms of everything is higher velocity, the drive for efficiency is even greater. Innovations like we've never seen before, and security is more important than ever before. So you go that dialed up, but you also now have, to your point, the hybrid factor. Used to be all on prem, now we got this morphing into public and private. So I wonder if you could talk about sort of those four pillars. They're similar issues for IT people today as it was yesterday. >> I don't think they've changed, to be honest with you. >> That's what you're hearing from customers, right? >> So I would say, part of the desire to move forward with the VMC on AWS GovCloud is what we've heard from customers. So the solution will provide that flexibility even at another level than public cloud, because today, as most people know, when you go to move your applications, CIA's a great one, they started that endeavor I think three years ago plus? Maybe four, it's coming on? Three to four? To get those workloads moved is heavy lifting. So with the flexibility of the VMC on AWS, and I think that's what's interesting in the partnership between Andy and Pat around this, is really being able to take that software layer and being able to move much faster. So a great example would be MIT had built an on prem solution with VMware. Just recently we moved them to VMC on AWS. Those workloads got moved in days. The first time it took months and months and months and a year before we could move all 900 workloads. Literally that was done in less than two weeks and it could go back and forth. So the flexibility for new things when they come up, and then when you wrap that around with the security layers, I think that's what really creates a unique value proposition. So I think public cloud's here. I think you're going to see in the future over the next three to five years more and more different cloud providers, and hybrid cloud technology with that layer that allows you to figure out where you want to go, when you want to go, unique situations, if you think about the government, omissions that come up. That gives you a flexibility to move at a speed that doesn't exist in the marketplace today. >> Yeah, Lynn, I remember last year at VMworld I talked to a customer, and there was a group inside the company that was like we need to do more cloud, we need to move faster. But from an administrative standpoint, it's like, ugh, I need need to retrain, I need to do things, the talent, and they're like, when I told them it's a full VMware stack, they were like, they actually opened up and they were able to move forward, and that was step one in making changes as to how they were building their applications. >> That was, Teresa's keynote today had a slide on the people piece. And I think one of the biggest benefits today is that your talent is already trained on the VMware tools. So you're not really getting through that mindset of doing everything different and retraining and trying to figure out how to get the expertise in. Those same computer operators that run the Vmware environment can now run your cloud environment. >> That's a really important point. I remember when Hadoop first kind of hit the scene. Everybody wanted SQL, because they didn't have to re-skill. >> Exactly. >> And that was a game-changer. And this is part of the, I want to bring in the Modernizing Government Technology Act. So to the extent that you don't have to completely re-skill, you're going to be able to-- >> Modernize. >> Modernize faster, right? >> Right. So I think today, the differentiator from the beginning of VMware was, we still had to teach a lot of the workforce how to use the VMware tools. Now, everybody was behind. If you worked at an HP or Dell or IBM, anyone selling hardware for server consolidation, they learned quickly how to spin up a VM and then move. Today, those organizations have invested in other software-defined data center tools, whether it be our networking tools, our storage tools, and then you got the compute layer, and you can abstract that up and then have a management feature that allows you to make your hybrid cloud decisions, and look at price points across the market as well. With the same people that know how to work that environment and manage it. And I think part of the issue is when you look at server virtualization in the early days, I happened to work at another company back then, the challenge we ran into was the change-management processes at the government sites, and it took years to transform the workforce into that type of an environment. >> So an example would be maybe security, or backup, would be, I would think, would be-- >> Easy, DR. >> Yeah, DR, data protection. >> Or new missions for things, or the postal service for the Christmas mailing system instead of spending millions of dollars in spin-up infrastructure, you spin out to the cloud, then in January you come back in to your own prem database. >> Okay, but I wonder if you could help explain a little bit, what goes into getting VMC on GovCloud? We heard from Teresa there are certain things that was like, oh, Aurora's on there, it's like, oh, we've been talking about Aurora for a while, so why isn't it ready day one? What's the process to get through it? And can you give us a little visibility as to when this will launch? >> So what we announced today was our intent to enter into the FedRAMP process jointly. So the engineering teams both are working right now on the solutioning. The differentiator is we already have the VMC on AWS, as you guys know, and it's available in quite a few places, and more are spinning up and being announced, of the AWS locations. It's taking that through the security accreditation processes that the government has. And we will be pursuing FedRAMP High, as well as DoD impact levels. So we are going for the highest levels of security, 'cause then you can do everything else after that. >> Okay, but it's not a days or weeks kind of initiative. This is a months plus kind of thing. >> Months, but once you enter into the FedRAMP process which we're looking towards fall of this year, once you enter in, you actually can start going after procurements in there, because you're in process, so through that. >> I mean, that's early, you just announced it. But maybe you talked to a few customers beforehand. What's the reaction been, what's the feedback? >> So we have a list of customers that are fighting to be our sponsor. We have more customers wanting to sponsor it than we can have. >> So you do you then-- >> And I would say the driver from the market really to push this with VMware was customers. >> Yeah. >> Customers were like, VMC on AWS is great, but these customers here that we're talking to at Public they're all like, we need it on AWS GovCloud. >> It's interesting how things have changed so quickly. It was like VMware and AWS were kind of adversaries. It was a lot of fear that oh, the public cloud is going to kill, and then all of a sudden, these two companies come together, and you see this huge momentum. >> Well and I think that it's a unique value proposition that isn't offered in the marketplace combined. So all the cloud proprietors that are there today, I think they still are struggling with how you, you know, you can move workloads, but then there's going to be some you just can't get off of the VMware platform. I could go count by count, and there's some they're keeping in house. This allows you to afford the flexibility of the cloud environment, utilizing what you have there on prem. >> Well, and you're share of wallet. >> True hybrid. >> But your share of wallet makes it different as well, because you have such a huge footprint. Other cloud companies have relationships, or other companies have relationships with cloud companies, but VMware is the standard. >> For virtualization. >> Right? So that's kind of, you know, those customers talking, and Jessie always says, we're customer driven, we're not competitive driven. I mean, I think the culture-- >> I think for us as well, I'm sure you guys have talked to Pat. So even with us, I think we realize, that's a good marriage for us too, and our customers. It solves a problem that no one else has solved. That's very unique. >> Has the Dell acquisition, what has that changed, if anything, or expanded, or, culturally? I know VMware's largely sort of its own separate entity, but still, you know, Michael's around, he's very-- >> I just spent last week here at a bunch of customer meetings with Dell on executive calls with their worldwide sales leader. So I would say that the culture between Dell, legacy Dell, and VMware are very similar. EMC a little different, but the culture between those two are very, very similar. I think the good news is, and I give Michael Dell a lot of credit for this with the Dell Technologies, which is a collection of all the companies underneath that, VMware, Pivotal, Secureworks, RSA, Dell EMC, et cetera. He really has tried to put together a business model that customers get the benefit of that. So when VMware was owned by EMC, we kind of said, oh yeah, you can get EMC VMware together, but then customers had to write two contracts, customers had to deal with two different, here, Michael's allowed, in Creative Frameworks, to allow customers to get the benefits of Dell technology when they want to. They don't have to. VMware still is this independent company and we work with all the different companies. But he's created an environment that really is conducive for the teaming for customers' best interests. >> So, Lynn, what should we be watching, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term, in terms of just, adoption, in federal, maybe partnerships, ecosystem growth? >> So I think you'll see what we're already beginning to see across the marketplace with non-GovCloud adoption, and I would say that the Public Sector team is actually driving a faster rate of adoption than other parts of our business already. >> Really, okay. >> Very interesting to see what's going on in all our joint planning meetings with Amazon and VMware, and looking at the adoption we're seeing from the government as well as state and local and education. And then I think you'll see the ecosystem. Terese and I have worked through who's the right ecosystem. What does that look like? Who are yours, what are ours? You know that's been a big emphasis for AWS. So it's very complementary. We've got distribution set up to be able to enable us across this market. Because that's important for the markets and because of they they procure, we have to do everything uniquely for them. So I think there's going to be a lot of exciting stuff, and then as soon as we can get in process, with a lot of activity in the market to respond to. >> But you also, you touched on it, but you do healthcare and education as well. >> I do. >> Very quickly, what are the sort of similarities and differences there relative to-- >> I see a lot of similarity between all three verticals. They're all unique in their own way. But because they're unique, there's benefits of it being together for VMware. So a great example would be, our commercial healthcare business may not have FedRAMP, but they have special certifications for patient records and things that require engineering to build special products a certain way to support our healthcare market. So you can take the same processes and things that we put together and applied for federal and state and local, and then apply it to the healthcare market. The other piece I would say is some of the things we're doing first, and I would compliment AWS on this, is they really did a good job of standing up the government business, and it provided benefit to the rest of their business as a result of that emphasis in government. I think the same thing applies across VMware as we start to look at the verticals that have special needs, and then because you can handle different kinds of security requirements and things that are unique, it's easier to scale that back towards the other business, as a benefit. Like financials, think about it. If it's good enough for certain customers, CIA and things like that, it's good enough for them, right? Or patient care records. Things like that. So there's actually application of all that to the other pieces, and then there's this 20% that fed's different because they're fed. SLED's different 'cause they're SLED. And then healthcare's different 'cause it's healthcare. So we see a lot of great synergy. That's relatively new. Last year we merged the healthcare team into the new organization. >> Kind of like our kids do. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Well Lynn thanks so much for coming to theCube, it was great having you. >> I enjoyed it, thanks so much. >> All right, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, John Furrier's here as well. You're watching theCube from AWS Public Sector Summit, and we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Washington, DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The District everybody. We're here covering the AWS Public Sector Summit, #AWSPSSummit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman. Gus Hunt is here, he's the Managing Director of Accenture. Great to see you. >> Great, thanks. Dave, Stu, appreciate being here. >> Thanks for coming on. Last night we were at the Accenture Event, it was hosted by Teresa Carlson and Accenture, a jam packed high-level audience. It was really, really fabulous. You couldn't make it, cause you got stuck in-- >> Weather-wise, got trapped in Atlanta. >> Unfortunately, Gus, you missed a lot, it was very good. But bring us up to speed on just sort of the state of where we're at with Accenture. You guys are heavily involved with the CIA implementation. We can talk about that a little bit. But start with Accenture, what you guys got going on in the Government. >> So Accenture Federal Services, which is the part I'm within, supports all of our federal agencies across the board. And we do enormous amount of work in the Cloud Services. In fact, Accenture itself is the largest partner of AWS in the world, right, providing cloud services directly engaged with Amazon. We have our Accenture Amazon Business Group, for example, that we leverage across the board. So we are really heavily steep, both in what it takes to help companies and our federal clients move to the cloud, but also how to take real advantage of it, how to gain the efficiencies that they need, and how to do this very securely. Because so much of I think the concerns that get expressed by people are a misunderstanding about whether or not the cloud is secure, versus how to do it securely in the cloud, if you understand the nuance difference there. >> Right, right. So, well, explain that. Let's double-click on that nuance there. A lot of people so early on it was concerns about the cloud, and then it kind of flipped and said, well, obviously the cloud's going to be more secure than what I could do as an organization. We heard what the CIA said today. They said, "On the worst day in the public cloud, "security's far better than in it is "in my client service systems." So help us unpack that a little. >> So, I'll take you back a few years. I spent 20 years in Federal Government working for CIA. I retired from there as their Chief Technology Officer. And I led basically the C2S deal that we put together in order to bring cloud services into the agency. And we did that fundamentally for four reasons. One was velocity. We had to get our speed of abilities, delivery capabilities up to match that what was happening in the private sector, in the cloud. The second was efficiencies. We had to find a way to really tap into the extraordinary efficiencies being driven by the cloud world and the cloud environment, with this continuous drop in price and storage, and computing, and things like that. How do we leverage that to our advantage and enable us now instead of to keep pace in the world when we knew that data was doing like this, and that the ability to exploit data is what the business is all about, right? >> And that was going like that at the time. >> With the cost, what we didn't want was the cost to do this, right? This is where the cloud was going to play a critical role to enable us to really keep pace with the explosion of data big data, and yet through storage and compute in the cloud, be able to do this at a fairly level cost curve, that was the objective. The third was to drive innovation, right? So we had to be able to innovate as fast as the private sector was able to innovate, to deliver new capabilities continuously all the time, and do those things. And the final reason really was about security, right? To your point, we're getting back to, the question that was originally asked was that the cloud, when we investigated the cloud, it turned out that the cloud was much more secure as a basic platform than almost anything that anybody could deliver inside their own data center across the board. And if you leverage the cloud in a particular way, security, it becomes a much more secure environment for people to operate in and do work in, then you could possibly achieve inside of your own data centers, your own data center environments. >> Gus, I'm hearing things like speed, innovation and security. I'm thinking, can you tell us a little bit about developers inside the agency? Do they have a DevOps initiative, as part of achieving those goals? >> Absolutely. So we actually got started doing Agile Development back in 2005. And what happened was, curiously enough with Agile development using scrum techniques is what we applied. We were able to build software capabilities much faster than we could actually get them hosted. So we had an impedance mismatch, a velocity mismatch, between the ability to build capabilities with Agile Development and to go. Now, when we got started in the cloud world here, DevOps was a relatively new term, but now of course DevOps just permeates everything that gets done. Accenture Federal Services, we teach DevOps for the intelligence community across the board, we teach Agile Development, we're heavily engaged. But our big move now is into DevSecOps, right? So the new impedance mismatch is the fact that I can deliver and build software very quickly. I can host it very quickly in the cloud, but my problem is that my security people who have to credit and approve the ability to run these things, are not working in sync very well with what happens in the space there. It's not that they're not great people, it's just that the methodologies that have been applied, now are causing a delay. So this is where DevSecOps comes into play and this is our big push in Accenture Federal Services. all of our clients in the cloud is to adopt DevSecOps so that we can have security tied directly into the entire development cycle all the way through, so that there are no surprises, right? We know exactly what the status is all along, and if you know anything about cyber security, in particular, both things, security on at the end is the worst possible thing you can do. And fixing cyber security holes at the end is 30 times more expensive than having just done it up front in the beginning across the board. So we are heavily invested in driving both Agile Development and DevSecOps now, in support of our cloud customers. >> Can you talk, Gus, about just as an observer, you're obviously deep into federal, but just the delta between commercial and federal? Certainly within federal you see pockets of highly advanced, whether it's security or analytics, et cetera, but across the board the Federal Government systems are obviously a lot of money is spent on maintenance, a lot of time and effort. Is Federal still learning, the public sector still learning from the commercial sector? Is it flipping? What's your take on that? >> So it's interesting. So when I retired and went out to work, from the public sector into the private sector, there's this really interesting point of view that's out there. When I was in the Federal Government, we really thought that the private sector was way ahead of us. And so we spent lot of time working with the financial service people who were brilliant, and working with Amazon and all of the people and all of the things that they were doing, because they were brilliant. So it was a really interesting engagement. But when I got to the other side, it's looked at the other way, right? They want to know what's going on because, particularly from a cyber-security optic, from a security optic, the Federal Government is viewed in many ways and particularly the intelligence community itself, is viewed as being far ahead of what goes on in the rest of the world. And in terms of analytics and things, the federal government has terrific capabilities, and has built terrific systems to do these things. So it's an interesting optic. Each one looking at the other from the outside in, is observing things and the reality is, is that like anything in life, you have this distribution. There are those that are terrific on one end of the spectrum and those that are nascent on the other end of the spectrum. This is true in the public sector, it's true in the private sector across the board. And it's just getting people together. I think the most important thing is to find a way to get us together so we share information really effectively, so that we understand what's going on, we can educate and we can all elevate ourselves up the chain, to deliver better capabilities, both for our clients and our customers, and to the citizens of our country. >> Yeah, and that public private partnership really isn't formalized. Frankly, it's companies like Accenture that are the glue there, don't you think? >> Yes, exactly. I think that that's a key point. It's companies like Accenture, companies like Amazon, who have engagements across the spectrum and on a global basis, that are able to see and experience things that most companies can't do 'cause they don't have that global perspective. One of the biggest issues we see is that most companies view the world through their narrow optic of their local sets of problems and issues, and this is what catches up with them, particularly in the cyber realm, for example. Which is they're looking at the world through the their own little narrow soda straw. And the global view of an AWS and the global view of an Accenture can be brought to bear to help us with our federal clients, for example, to see the issues more broadly and engage more effectively in a public private sector discourse. >> So there are threats everywhere, obviously. Increasingly people are talking about the weaponization of social media. Obviously, there's critical infrastructure, which we've talked about for years. Where do you see the priorities going? Where is the focus, the spending? Is it on response? Is it on keeping the bad guys out? What do you sense? >> I would say that most of the spending today is focused on trying to keep bad guys out. And that model, while critically important, has got to change, right? Because as you notice while important to do and absolutely essential, it has been wholly insufficient in actually dealing with the problem. We have to move ourselves into a completely different posture in the world today. We have to adopt very much proactive capabilities, hunt for things, do critical reviews and pen testing, discover your vulnerabilities before the adversary does. Adopt cloud services because they can change the security game. If we write cloud native code and distribute it in multiple availability zones and fully leverage elasticity and software to find networking, we can turn it into a shell game where the adversary has to find me, not the other way around. We can become what I call the polymorphic attack surface, as opposed to us having to do with polymorphic viruses, and things like that, that we have to find that are constantly trying to hide themselves from us. And so, it's adopting those things that then drive us to a state of resilience, which have to get to. Resilience is the ability to have an event and keep on operating. As opposed to what happens today, where you have an event and everything gets shut down, and all hands on deck and panic ensues. >> So, Gus, we've talked a little bit about some of the constraints and why some people might be concerned. Wondering if we could talk about some of the opportunities. What kind of innovation are you seeing from partners and customers that you're working with, that they're driving when they do adopt cloud? >> Innovation just across the board, or? >> Yeah, any cool things they're doing, there's edge technologies, you got IOT. >> I would say that the big drivers of innovation, of course, are the ones that everybody else talks about. Which is really what's happening in the machine learning and AI space. And that is really critical because those are the things that will enable us to both deal and act with issues, particularly in my realm, the cyber realm at machine speed across the board, and stop things before they can actually become problematic. But it's also going to be the mechanism by which we can enable the human population across the board to better themselves. So you take that and you combine it with the Internet of Things, which is growing explosively across the board, to begin to automate and drive efficiencies and enable remote health care and all those things like that. We're really at the cusp, I believe, of a true renaissance, if you will, of enabling society in ways that we can't possibly begin to imagine, just looking at it from where we are today. >> A lot of talk, you know, about machine intelligence. I didn't say AI, so I don't have to do a shot. Where do you see that fitting in, generally, and then maybe specifically in cyber? And the second part of that question is you're seeing this DevOps and SecOps worlds coming together? >> Yeah, right. So we talked previously about DevSecOps. Just to go back to that real quickly. That's an absolute essential. We have to get the business, the beauty of Agile Development and DevOps was it got the business and the infrastructure people who had to run things successfully all the time, and the developers who needed to do things very quickly, all at the table to engage and ensuring that they could do that. The gap in there was the security people. So with DevSecOps, you've got the security people brought in right up front across the board there. That move into DevSecOps is more than just essential, it's a must-do, I believe, for all organizations here as they move themselves into the future, and to find a way to adopt it. How did you phrase it? You didn't use the word AI, you said? >> Machine intelligence. >> Machine intelligence directive. I think that those capabilities are maturing very, very rapidly, and I think that what you're going to see is a rapid shift in two ways. One is that while machine intelligence is great, the machine is only as smart as the data and the information that are fed to it, right? If you feed a machine a bunch of information that's highly biased, you're going to get highly biased information out. So there's two things you have to have. One, the intelligence is going to grow inside the machines, but two, there's going to be and must be a parallel thread where you have to have some form of social consciousness and social awareness that ensures that the machines themselves don't develop unconscious biases that are then leveraged, and used to the disadvantage of citizens in society, or other people and things like that. And so machine intelligence is going to grow, but that same ability is emerging, and in fact it's something we talk about at Accenture and have written papers on, about the fact that we have to have this social conscience or social awareness around Artificial Intelligence, the machine learning, to ensure that it is most effectively used to the benefit of the citizens of the country. >> Right, well, in this notion of polymorphic attack surface, presumably it just can't be humans moving stuff around. >> No, that's where machinery and automation come into play, they have to act at machine speed. It's the only thing that can act at machine speed. Humans will always be involved. Okay, you're never going to get away from the human factor. What these things do is they do the heavy lifting, and then enable humans to focus on what their brains are really, really good at, which is making hard decisions about what's actually going on, and what they actually need to do in many cases. We can automate some things, but a lot of it is still going to require really smart people to engage. >> So when you look back at your original four objectives with respect to the cloud velocity, efficiencies, trying to keep the costs where they are or lower them, driving innovation and security, how would you grade, maybe the agency, the industry, whatever you feel comfortable attaching? >> Great question. I'm going to avoid giving you a specific answer like this. >> Fair enough. >> Again there's a spectrum of engagement, across the board. Some agencies are doing really well and have been leaders in the space, and I would argue that my old agency is one of those, really. There are others that are also leaders in the space and are engaging and adopting cloud services, they're pushing very heavily down these pathways we talked about. They're embracing these technologies because they realize what they can do. And then there are others that are lagging behind, but they are lagging behind for any number of several reasons that are out there. So first and foremost is the fact that there's a massive legacy set of workloads and capabilities out there, and it's very hard to figure out what are those that I want to engage in to move to the cloud and do things. So IT modernization dollars were put into play by the federal government in order to help federal agencies do this, modernize their IT with the goal of moving themselves to the cloud, so that they could drive the efficiencies and adopt the things that are going to be there. There's also the concerns we mentioned about security. There's too much fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I think misunderstanding about the cloud, and that was great. I missed the talk today from my old agency, but I'm glad to hear them talk about the fact that I've said this for the longest time, the basic cloud is much more secure than almost everything new. And if I apply and build and develop cloud native capabilities, I can actually leverage the cloud to my advantage to dramatically change the game and deliver cyber resilience into my customers set. So this is the messaging that we want to be able to do. The only way that people are going to do this in the end, because of this big backlog of capabilities, is they have to remember that they got into where their current state is one application, one system at a time. And the only way they're going to get out of it is one application, one system at a time. They just have to begin to think about what are the ones that matter and how they want to go about that. >> No quick fixes there, but a lot of hard work and thoughtfulness. Gus, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really great to have you, appreciate you sharing your insight and your knowledge. >> Delighted, Dave. >> Pleasure. >> Stu, thanks so much. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back, John Furrier is here as well with our next guest. We're live at the AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE. >> Thanks, guys.