>>Oh, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit presented by Accenture. I'm John,  your host of theCube. We're joined by two great guests, Leo Barella, Chief Technology Officer of Takeda and Don Heiliger Managing Director at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. Great to be here.  >>Last year, Karl Hick joined us to discuss Takeda's cloud journey. I know a lot's gone by the pandemic. Didn't go away as fast as we hoped, but we're starting to see visibility of the future with cloud at narrow and seeing cloud scale. Um, it's refactoring of business models, new opportunities. How's it gone? >>Well, I think it's a, it's going wonderful, as planned actually.  I can, I can share with you that there are definitely some lessons learned, uh, what the plan was quite structured. We definitely discovered that  maybe we should have actually had about 50% of our time, uh, in the planning for organizational change management and communication. And because we definitely, uh, want to, uh, be able to kind of explain why, uh, moving to cloud is actually important to, to our business. Uh, and so, so if you were to actually do it again, uh, I think we would have probably put a lot more time in communicating the value of the program and wild visibly. Now, uh, we're going to be able to move a lot faster than a, than a year ago. Uh, seeing that the community of the Qaeda is, uh, is already, you know, kind of come around, uh, to, to truly understand the value of, uh, of, uh, moving to cloud >>No last year, any Jessie gave up on stage the keys to success for the cloud journey, you guys were in the middle of it. Um, what was the big takeaway, um, on the, on, on your, your journey, because a lot of people are having real situational awareness and doubling down on successes, identifying what's not working and being real agile. This has been the big aha. What's the big aha moments you had, uh, this year? >>Well, I can tell you that. I say from the, the migration of our applications to cloud, which, which is basically table stakes for elimination of our data centers. So at the end of the program, we're likely gonna retain only few application in our data centers, but move more than 80% of our application workloads to cloud. What actually most excited about is, uh, is really our new strategy around data as a digital platform enabler. Uh, so from now on we're, we're really going to be focusing on the value stream of the Qaeda at the understanding of, of digital platforms that we actually want to able to, to, to further consolidate, um, and, um, uh, you know, and globally expand, uh, the, the, the technologies that we have, but old built on a data foundation, uh, that, that is actually governed across the community of the Qaeda. So data actually becomes the center of our strategy. Uh, and then digital is basically just a way for us to actually interact with data, uh, which includes applications, such as machine learning and AI, which we were heavily investing in. And, uh, and we definitely plan on now leveraging more and more. >>And just to real quick, before we go to a central for a second, I want you to double down on that journey dynamics because we're seeing and maybe reporting, and the theme here this year at reinvent is multiple workloads in the cloud changing workloads. You have evolution of workloads, data as the center of it. And then this cultural shifts where you got the, you know, these modern applications at the top of the stack. So you were AIS contributing. So you've got three major innovation theaters kind of exploding. I mean, this is pretty, I mean, one of those is, is mindblowing. Nevermind, all three. >>Yeah. And I can tell you that, uh, you know, um, I'd like to achieve further expand the circle, uh, beyond the Qaeda. We don't necessarily believe that the digital transformation is just about, I don't want enterprise. That is definitely a fundamental, uh, but the digital transformation is truly about, um, connecting the Qaeda as a digital, uh, pharmaceutical company to the overall healthcare ecosystem and be able to basically transact with our partners, uh, in real time, which is the reason why we actually put data at the center because at the end of the day, uh, when other partners wants to interact with our data, the should in real time be able to transact as if they were transacting on their own systems with our own data, especially DCPS and patients, >>Don your, your reaction, because a lot of learnings, new opportunities, you're at the center of essentially doing a lot of great work. We've been documented a lot of it as well. What's your reaction? >>I mean, I just to amplify a lot of Leo's comments already, I think if I, if I think back and on this journey with, with the Qaeda and AWS and Accenture as the power of three, I think, you know, leaning in to that has been a recipe for success. So as Leo said, we've definitely had some lessons learned, but you know, being there with this power of three, I think has been, uh, enabling us to, uh, attack those challenges that have, uh, that have come up and, and really gotten ahead of those. I think the other thing you talked about is this, um, you know, all these different things coming together, you know, before the pandemic, we had, uh, done done some research at Accenture that kind of had two groups of companies with the leader leaders and the laggards. And, uh, it showed, know the difference in revenue growth of the leaders that adopt technology and those that are falling behind and really, um, that gap has widened, but there's a new entrance of companies that have emerged, which is the, leapfroggers the ones that take advantage of all of the things that like AWS has to offer in terms of the AI capabilities, the data capabilities, the foundational elements that are enabling them to really do this compressed transformation journey in a much shorter timeline. >>I think that's been the element that, uh, you know, I think we know you and I have firsthand together with our AWS colleagues of us being able to really do this on a pace that I think has just been on, on the unseen or unmatched in the past. >>Well, we get to the innovation pilots you guys are doing. I want to just jump on that topic for a quick second time. If you don't mind, that's a really important point. I think the people who shifted to the cloud and replatformed, and then learned all the goodness and then refactored their businesses have done great. This notion of leapfrog is people who move and say, Hey, I don't need, I'm going to replatform and refactor at the same time, get the learnings from others. Okay. They get the best practice is so what's the scar tissue from all the pioneers who have been playing in the cloud, who got the benefits are also paving the path for others. This is actually a motivating, cultural and personal kind of impact motivation. People are happier. What's your guys' reaction to this culture of the cloud, this cloud reef, leapfrogging and refactoring. >>Yeah. I mean, uh, w what I'm saying, uh, and, and lovely, or your perspective on this too, but frankly, you know, I think, uh, you know, with, with the, uh, the war on talent right now, that's out there. I think, you know, companies are investing, whether they're leaders, whether they're leapfroggers in this digital, uh, you know, platform I think are attracting the best talent and actually making it a place where people can innovate. And I know we're going to talk about some of the innovations here in a second, but I think that is, um, you know, some, a way to differentiate, uh, right now in the marketplace, given everything that we're seeing around, uh, retention and attraction of talent. I mean, being able to be on the front edge of this is quite critical in any company's view, but, you know, especially when you're trying to attract the best talent in, in, uh, developing, uh, medicines that actually say lots, >>Leo jumping on this wave and moving leapfrogging, what's your perspective on this? >>Yeah. You know, I, I agree to, uh, you know, talent is that talent is key. Uh, and quite frankly, uh, you know, Takeda, we've been at, you know, pharmaceutical company for the past 240 years. Uh, and now what should you really, uh, you know, starting to become a digital, um, pharmaceutical, uh, power. Uh, and, and so, uh, part of the attractiveness of, uh, of joining Takeda for instance, is the fact that, uh, not only you actually get to, uh, you know, uh, be with a company that is investing heavily, uh, in, in, in digital re-skilling and actually training of people, but also you're connecting to the mission of, uh, of literally saving saving lives, right? So basically, uh, the, the, the connection of really this transformation to become a digital superpower, uh, and also, uh, the, the mission of, uh, of really finding new medicines were, uh, for people that actually experienced, you know, for instance, you know, order of disease, uh, it's quite exciting because it's, uh, it's the application of artificial intelligence machine learning, uh, where now you're actually really trying to find someone that is, that is struggling. Uh, and we're now actually connecting them to a cure that, that is drastically changing their lifestyle. >>It's interesting, the agile agility and the speed of innovation really kind of puts away the old analysis of like, what's the payback. I mean, if you, if you can't see the value right away, then you, then you don't know what you're doing. Basically people in the cloud that say I can contribute and leapfrog and get that value. This has been a big part of the business model. And one of the ways people are doing it is just getting involved, starting pilots, doing the projects. Um, so I'd like to have you guys share the project that you guys have got going on with nurse line. Can you share what you're trying to achieve and how has the cloud enabled you to, to innovate, but also capture the value and can, and can you see it, is there, is there a big analysis there's like a big payback it's like you're buying this 20 year project, or how do you guys look at this? >>I mean, the nimbleness of, uh, of cloud, uh, in our ability to come in and fail fast is what's extremely attractive to, uh, to, to the business, right? Because now all of a sudden we can quickly spin up a prototype. We can quickly actually put it out as a product and actually see how effective it is compared to traditional processes. Uh, so for instance, nurse line is actually what we, uh, it's one of the many, uh, innovation initiatives that we actually have going on, but specifically addressing, uh, one of our, um, uh, therapy areas, which is, uh, our plasma derived therapies, uh, plasma and other therapies is actually, uh, the supply chain actually really starts with, uh, the good wheel of a innovative individual like yourself, um, deciding to actually not donate plasma that eventually is being processed and fractionated to deliver medicines that are life savings in most cases is actually the, the literally life savings. >>Um, and, uh, so what we're trying to do is actually really make that experience as flawless as, uh, in, as seamless as possible. Uh, if you, if you, if you have ever experienced, you know, going into Amazon go, uh, where you kind of, you know, walk in, you get some groceries and walk out and don't pass through a register. And, uh, it's the same type of experience that we actually want to provide where, uh, in the past, um, when you're actually donating plasma, obviously it's a, it's a fairly invasive procedure because obviously you need to actually be in a, being a bad and your, your plasma is getting distracted, but there's a lot of paperwork that you need to actually fill in. And, uh, and what we actually did, uh, is now actually enabled that through a digital experience where a donor, uh, they do a short approaching the center can now actually initiate a chat with, uh, with Amazon connect the ILX. >>Uh, and then, uh, depending on the priority, uh, the donor is going to assign to a nurse that can actually be anywhere in the country. Uh, in all of a sudden the nurse can actually initiate, uh, through, through Amazon connect, um, a dialogue with the, you know, with, with the donor, uh, answering some of the questions in the, you know, in the regular questionnaire. So, so now all of a sudden the nurse is actually feeding up the people work for you. Uh, and, uh, and that is actually done through the initiation of a video call. Uh, and we're actually using chime, which is, again, a part of like, you know, the, the, you know, the, the Amazon AWS services. And then basically upon the, the completion of a, of the questionnaire that is action, analytic, Tronic signature, that has been applied to, um, you know, to the form. >>Uh, and so did, this is actually all happening while basically the person is actually walking through the center or walking into the center. Uh, and now all of a sudden, the only thing that they need to do is actually having a signed bat and, uh, and actually initiate the process of, uh, of plasma donation. So all of this is actually done through microservices. Uh, now everything that we do now is actually API enabled and, you know, obviously like many other companies right now, what I should really think about microservices and the usability of, of technology and, and reusable components. So we're extremely excited about the fact that now, uh, that experience can actually be carried on, uh, to, to other parts of the business and that, that, that can actually leverage these technologies. >>That's a great example of refactoring. What's next for you guys, a division Accenture, what's the plans? >>Well, again, uh, the Google got done. >>Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think, you know, we, we started touching on it, uh, experience, right. And, uh, how do we embed more technology experiences that we're all used to? I mean, you know, to get into some of the return to office, the easiest way for me to do some of the COVID testing has been using my, uh, my trusty iPhone. Right. And so, as, as Liam talked about that experience, uh, part of this beyond just the therapies and, and attracting donors is really key for any business to succeed and thrive. Um, yeah, I think it, you know, if you think about, um, you've got the natives that are really more technology-based, you've got the, the Peloton of the world that obviously have, you know, a platform, but also a product you're going to see product and specifically life sciences companies get more into platform enabled, uh, services that they can provide outside, uh, as a, uh, service to others. And I think, um, you know, the, the platform, uh, experience and the user experience, the donor experience, all that I'd say innovating in, in more use cases like, uh, some of the ones you just heard that's what's next, and being able to, uh, use those guys more even externally to, uh, to do even more good for society, >>Leah, your thoughts with that. >>Well, um, you know, what I should really just getting started, right? So it's not a, you know, this transformation is now cloud enabled, uh, but, but w we're systematically actually going through our value chain, uh, and trying to throw the, understand, uh, you know, our customers, you know, again, as a business, we don't actually sell directly to consumers. So we're, we're, we're basically brokering through, but primarily through CPS and hospitals, right, to basically be able to diagnose a disease that can actually be cured with our products. Uh, and we do feel that, uh, you know, there is actually a huge role that we can actually play because obviously we're are experts in the, of, uh, you know, of the disease that we actually cure with our products. So basically the interactions, like the one that I just described nurse line, uh, can actually be directed, uh, not only to the HCPs, but also to the patients, uh, and the access to communities. >>Uh, and so we want to actually continue to provide platforms by which, you know, people that experienced, you know, especially a rare disease can now actually already connect and, uh, and, and, and share, um, you know, th th the sense of community that, that the business is, is so, so very important, right? For someone that physically has, uh, you know, the diseases that we cure. Uh, so again, uh, I think that the systematic approach of API APIs, and actually making sure that the data is actually ready for say the FDA to actually consume, to accelerate the clinical trials or to an hospital to kind of already understand if there is maybe a clinical trial that can be applied to one of the patients that is, that is actually showing some, some side effects that, uh, you know, or, or symptoms that visibly can be cured with, you know, with our, with our products, I think is going to be, uh, you know, ultimately the, the value that we can provide to society. So >>You guys did a great work and a great example. And to me, and this really showcases the management philosophy of cloud and the culture of cloud, where you take something like connect, and you can refactor and reconfigure these existing resources in a way that creates value, that saves lives. And this is the new, this new playbook. Congratulations on an exceptional story. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the cube coverage rapist, reinvent executive summit presented by Accenture I'm John ferry, your host, thanks for watching.

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two Cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Becirovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS Business Group technology and practices, Senior Managing Director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Merim said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

(electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture and our coverage of this great event continues. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests with me here to talk about Amazon Connect. Please welcome from Hawaiian Airlines, Will Van Devender, Senior Director of IT Engineering. Will, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me here. >> And from Accenture, Erich Chen is here as well, the Hawaii Regional Lead at Accenture. Erich, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be here. >> I feel very overdressed. You can tell I'm on the mainland with my turtleneck and you guys are on Oahu, which is fantastic. And I'm excited that I have a seat on Hawaiian Airlines in just a few weeks. So you guys, let's talk about this technology solution that you put together. Will, I want to start with you. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Hawaiian Airlines was having prior to working with Accenture and Amazon. >> Well, nothing really unique to us. We had the challenges that everybody had with the pandemic and scaling out to work from home, as well as an old legacy stack that had been around for a long, long time. The specific ones that drove us to launch this particular project was we had been running into some talent acquisition issues. We're not of size where we have a huge telecom team that can specialize in IDRs and other things like that. So we need folks that can play a lot of different spaces. And in this particular case, we had a situation where we had really old technology and the people we were bringing in were a lot more savvy on Cloud and those kinds of things. And so AWS Connect was a way for us to take talent that traditionally wasn't inside the telephony space and use them and bring them to bear for that business need. So it kept us from having to scale up to do this. The other thing we had was a big issue with work from home that actually predated COVID. So we had been, we're in a hurricane zone, we had been doing hurricane preparedness exercises and we realized that we had a difficult time scaling our environment to large scale work from home. So even prior to COVID, we had been started looking at the technologies that we had, which ones worked well outside of an office for a distributed workforce. And we had been moving technology in that direction. And so telephony was one of the ones that we had to beef up. And so it was nice to have a good leg up on it when the pandemic hit us. >> Absolutely. I can't imagine how advantageous that was when it struck. And of course we all know how much the airlines were affected. Talk to me about an interesting catalyst for this solution in terms of challenge with talent acquisition and work from home. Interesting impetus for this solution. Talk to me about, are you long time partners, Hawaiian Airlines with Accenture? Talk to me about how you went about looking for the right solution with them as a partner. >> Ah, okay. So Hawaiian Airlines and Accenture had been partnering for many years, but in a much bigger way in 2019, when we solidified a new managed services deal. So Accenture came in to help us out with our day to day operations. And one of the big reasons for that was actually cloud adoption. So we needed a partner that was much more up to date technology wise. And as we started ramping up our engineering and architecture designs and releasing things on new stacks, we needed folks in the operation side that could keep up with that. And not only that, actually enable and push us in those directions. And so when we went out to RFP, Accenture kind of stood out in that area and that's been a good thing. We've had very little friction as we've been going out and acquiring new technology with being able to bring that out to our run and operation space. >> That's critical, especially given the tumultuous times in which we are still living. Erich, let's go ahead and bring you into the conversation. Now, talk to me about you guys at Accenture developed and deployed this solution quickly. We're talking an eight week timeframe. Talk to me about the solution that you architected, about that delivery, and what some of the challenges were along the way that you tackled and mitigated. >> Yeah. Thanks Lisa. I mean, it was, you know, eight weeks when you look back on it, it's hard to believe we did complete it in that timeframe, but, you know, we were able to do it with some strong experts from our side. Some of the challenges we ran into along the way were probably at the very beginning, just securing the right team for Hawaiian to deliver the kind of the proper designs and development upfront, and then helping to kind of manage through the delivery process itself. You know, they were great. They had some great people with some deep expertise, kind of from a business process side of things, kind of paired with our technical and then also industry knowledge of the airlines as well. It made for a really nice, you know, strong partnership where we could get it through in eight weeks. So it was pretty amazing. >> And then walk me through the actual, oh Will, sorry. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that, that was exactly what we were looking for was that sort of wholesale partner. So when we went out to modernize our entire telephony stack, it wasn't just call centers. It was the conference rooms, it was the telephony, we went to new phone providers and circuit providers, we moved everyone off of Skype over on to Teams, all the desk phones. And so there was this scope of work that was simply larger than our team. And so what we were looking for from a partner was one, who's done this before, and then two, could you manage the whole piece of work? And so what was nice for Accenture, because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked, they found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing. So it was just a very minimal lift from the Hawaiian Airlines side. And since they ran our operations, they then moved it over to the run space. And it was just very few man hours on the Hawaiian Airlines side expended for that outcome. >> Wow. It sounds fairly seamless. Erich, how did you guys accomplish that? >> I mean, that's a type of experience and partnership we like to have with our clients, more of an all-inclusive type service. But we're sometimes accused of not having the cheapest prices on the block, but you know, you do get a great, you know, a pretty holistic experience with us and we do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring kind of the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps. >> Well, one of the things, Will, that you mentioned is we were looking for a partner that had done this before, where there's actual proof in the pudding, especially given the, like I mentioned before, the tumultuous market. Erich talk to me about, if we look at Hawaiian Airlines as an example, as a template here, how common or how often are you seeing these same challenges with respect to talent acquisition and work from home? Is that something that really skyrocketed in the last year and a half? >> Sure. I mean, it's maybe a blessing in the type of business that we're in, right. But whenever there are, you know, big, you know, kind of market issues and kind of pandemics as an example, right. Our clients do turn to us for, you know, support to help them through, you know, smaller times of need. And, you know, maybe very compressed issues. So we're very happy to, you know, reach into our larger organization to make sure that we can bring the best of Accenture to them and help them get through these tough times. >> Will, let's talk about how this solution is helping employees, agents get through these tough times. As we know, Hawaii had some really strict travel restrictions on COVID. And of course, one of the things that a lot of people lost during this time, was patience. Talk to me about how the workforce is improving, the employees, the agents, now that you have this solution implemented and a leg up probably on your competitors. >> Yeah, the whole pandemic hit us in a hard way. So we found ourselves, you know, all of a sudden one day waking up and finding that our customer facing support desks couldn't be staffed. People couldn't get into the office and actually get there. At the same time, as you and everyone else knows, flights were getting canceled and customers were calling at a level we'd never seen before trying to reschedule their flights or get credit back or get money back. And so AWS Connect was interesting in that it was one of the things we could ramp up new call centers very quickly. And so we knew we wanted something that was consumption-based because we didn't know how long it was going to last. And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out. So it was a good win there. What wasn't talked about much was the reliability aspect of it. Being on a really old system, our telephony was pretty stable, but our call center internal business facing ones were not. We had a series of outages out there and those outages directly impact our ability to get planes out in the air. There's the sort of customers calling about tickets and about help with flights, but there's also things like cruise, trying to get cruise scheduling done, trying to get staffing to a plane, trying to get things moved around in an airport. And there's a lot of internal desks that deal with those kinds of things. And having that on an incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us. And so we were able to get Connect deployed, and we were also able to front that with a number of other technologies that allowed us to have DR plans. So even if we lost that desk, how can we quickly move that over to manual calls and desk phones and those kinds of things. And so that's been, that part has been very well received. That has helped us out a lot. Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago. And so thank you all very much for your assistance in getting us to this point. >> Getting that stability and that reliability during a time of chaos that's, and also in a time that can really affect brand reputation, it sounds to me like IT is really helping drive the business forward. This is something that you did in partnership with the business side, because of course during the last year and a half, so many brands have had challenges with reputation and the ability to not do things. Talk to me about that business IT relationship. And was this a facilitator of making that even better? >> Well, it's certainly better. Yeah, we have far better conversations internally than I can ever remember in my time here in Hawaiian Airlines. But you know, when these kinds of emergencies hit, I don't think about it as IT or business. I mean, there's a problem and you got to go fix it. And so we're all in there and IT is one piece of that. How do we get a solution stood up almost overnight in this, you know, very, very difficult pandemic business time? But you know, the business is trying to get talent together and trying to get agents trained and being able to do things like handle these customer calls is very, very skill intensive. So there's a lot of partnership coming in and getting solutions, demoing with the business, dialing them in back and forth, and a lot of collaboration there. And so that builds stronger teams. And that's one of the outcomes I like more than anything else, is we're working together and dialing in the IT and the business needs very much in unison. >> That's probably one of the best outcomes you can hope for. Erich, talk to me about, are you seeing similar things with customers in other industries? Are you seeing that business IT coming together, especially during these challenging times we've been living through? >> Yeah, to varying degrees, you know, that's always the crux of, you know, a successful IT department, right. You know, you're there to serve and support the business side of things, right. We don't do technology for technology sake. But yeah, I think the better ones are getting better, better at, you know, being more fully integrated and it's not a business or IT decision, right, it's a collective kind of team decision. And I think as long as you have people who respect and understand the other side of the coin sometimes, easier the conversation will go. And I think that's what our team was able to do is express, you know, very clearly and concisely kind of what the decisions they had to make were and they could make a decision a little bit easier that way. >> And talk to me, Erich, about the solution, what impressed you? What are you most excited about in terms of what Accenture has helped to accomplish for Hawaiian Airlines? >> Yeah, I was really happy that even, you know, within a short eight week period itself, you know, things always come up as you go throughout a project. And I think the business team was getting excited about the possibilities once they saw kind of the potential of the platform. And so some, you know, requests came up in the middle of the way, you know, in flight. And, you know, our team was able to accommodate a number of the kind of minor enhancements or tweaks to the system to make it even better and serve the business in a better fashion there. >> Gotcha. Will, what is next for Hawaiian Airlines, besides my flight on it in a few weeks? Talk to me about where you guys are going from an IT perspective. >> Well we've rolled out a solution quickly 'cause we needed to, but there's a lot still to be done to dial it in for the business. Where reliability and speed were key, we got those done, but there was some aspects of the old system that were still a little easier. For those call centers where people needed to dial in, get ahold of an agent, and then pass it onto an internal employee, there's still a disconnect between our call center technology, AWS Connect, and the internal collaboration, Microsoft Teams. And that's because Teams really wasn't up to all of the call center technology needs at the time we started this. Things like call recording and things like that just weren't there at the time. So we've got some of our internal desks that still need to be tweaked and integrated more seamlessly between the two platforms or maybe as Teams gets ready, moved back over onto that. So that's, again, the part of it, being able to have this deep conversation with the business, understand their needs, having a partner where you can quickly go respond and go dial it in. And so we don't look at it as our telephony migration is complete. We look at it as we got our first big hurdle done, moving off decades old tech onto our modern stack. And now we're looking at refining it with our partners over the future. >> Right. Phase one, it's always that journey that we talk about. Erich, last question for you. What are some of the things that are coming up next as you help Hawaiian Airlines to continue on this modernization journey? >> Yeah, so more broadly we're really excited because this effort was one of the first or probably more platform centric system integration type projects we've done for Hawaiian. We've been on the operation side, we've done some business consulting worked with them for various business functions already, but this was really more on the application modernization side of things. And, you know, we see that Hawaiian has a number of areas that they're looking to kind of modernize and improve along the way. And we're very excited about, you know, being a strong partner for them in that journey coming up. >> Awesome guys, great work. Congratulations on a huge transformation accomplished during a very chaotic world time period and done so quickly. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, and look forward to seeing what you dial in next. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> For Will Van Devender and Erich Chen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture. (soft music)

welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences, specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who changed their behavior to live healthier lives, a real passion of mine, and getting to the really root cause of health. With me now are Simon Guest, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Generali Vitality, GmbH, and Nils Muller-Sheffer, who's the Managing Director at the Cloud First Application Engineering Lead for the European market at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome Simon. Simon, Generali Vitality is a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put it into practice. Tell us how does it all work? >> Sure. No problem. And thanks for having us on David, pleasure to be here. So look, Generali Vitality is in its core a pretty simple concept. It's a program that you have on your phone. And the idea of this program is that it's a wellness coach for you as an individual, and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment, and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your lifestyle and your wellness, and hopefully help you to live a healthier and a more sort of mindful life, I guess, is the best way of summarizing it. From our point of view as an insurance company, of course, our historical role has always been to be the company that's there if something goes wrong. So if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your life or your family's life, that's historically been our role. But what we see with Generali Vitality is something a little bit different. So it's a program that really is supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life. It's something that we already have in for European markets and in fact, in five from this week, I'm a little bit behind the times. So we're live already in Germany, in France, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain. And fundamentally what we do Dave, is to say to customers, "Look, if you want to understand your health, if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more, or by visiting the doctor more, by eating healthier, by healthy choices on a daily basis, we're going to help you to do that. And we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices. And we're going to reward you for doing the same." So, we partner up with great companies like Garmin, like Adidas, like big brands that are, let's say, invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well, make good choices, be healthy, have an insurance company that partners you along that journey. And if you do that, we've going to reward you for that. So, we're here not just in a difficult times, which of course is one of our main roles, but we're here as a partner, as a lifetime partner to you to help you feel better and live a better life. >> I love it, I mean, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it's very complicated to make the technology simple for the user. You've got mobile involved, you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech, but first I want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes Simon that you've analyzed. What's the feedback that you're getting from your customers? What does the data tell you? How do the incentives work as well? What is the incentive for the member to actually do the right thing? >> Sure, I think actually that the COVID situation that we've had in the last sort of two years is really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value. Just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for our customers. So what we try to do with them, is to get customers to understand their current health situation, using their phone. So, we asked our customers to go through a sort of health assessments around how they live, what they eat, how they sleep, and to go through that sort of process and to give them all the Vitality age, which is a sort of actuarial comparison with their real age. So I'm 45, but unfortunately my Vitality age is 49 and it means I have some work to do to bring that back together. And what we see is that, two thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life. And if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span. So how long are they going to live healthier for? So you see them really engaging in this approach of understanding that current situation. Then what we know actually, because the program is built around this model that's really activity and moving, and exercise is the biggest contributors to living a healthier life. We know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illnesses like poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising. And so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more. And it's not about being an athlete. It's about, getting off the underground one station earlier and walking home or making sure you do your 10,000 steps a day. And what we see is that that sort of 40% of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how much they are exercising. And at the same time, what we do is we set our customers weekly challenges to say, look, if you can move a little bit more than last week, we are go into to reward you for that. And we see that almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week. And it's really a level of engagement that normally as an insurer, we don't see. The way that rewards work is pretty simple. It's similar in a way to an airline program. So every good choice you make every activity to every piece of good food that you eat. When you check your on your health situation, we'll give you points. And the more points you get, you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a golden and a platinum status. And the higher up you get in the status, the higher the value of the rewards that we give you. So almost a quarter of our customers now, and this has accelerated through COVID have reached that platinum status. So they are the most engaged customers that we have and those ones who are really engaging in the program. And what we really tried to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says If you live well, you make good choices, you improve your health, you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more valuable rewards for doing that. And some of those rewards are around health and wellness. So it might be that you get a discounts on gym gear from Adidas, it might be that you get a discount on a device from Garmin, or it might be actually on other things. We also give people Amazon vouchers. We also give people discounts on holidays. And another thing that we did actually in the last year, which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations. Because we work in generosity with a sort of campaign called The Human Safety Net, which is helping out the poorest people in society. And so what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves, they convert it into a charitable donation. So we're actually also linking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal goods. So we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of engagement with our customers. >> That's a powerful cocktail. I love it. You've got the data, because if I see the data, then I can change my behavior. You've got the gamification piece. You actually have hard dollar rewards. You could give those to charities and you've got the most important, which is priceless, you can't put a value on good health. I got one more question for Simon and Nils I'd love for you to chime in as well on this question. How did you guys decide, Simon, to engage with Accenture and AWS and the cloud to build out this platform? What's the story behind that collaboration? Was there unique value that you saw that you wanted to tap, that you feel like they bring to the table? What was your experience? >> Yeah, we work with Accenture as well because the sort of constructs of this Vitality proposition is a pretty complex one. So you mentioned that the idea is simple, but the build is not so simple and that's the case. So Accenture has been part of that journey from the beginning. They are one of the partners that we work with, but specifically around the topic of rewards, we're primarily European focused organization, but when you take those countries that I mentioned, even though we're next to each other geographically, we're quite diverse. And what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go get to market with an increasing amounts of efficiency. And to do that, we needed to work with somebody who understood our business, has this historical, let's say investment in the Vitality concepts and so knows how to bring it to life, but then could really support us in making what can be a complex piece of work, as simple, as replicable as possible across multiple markets, because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we knew we moved to a new market. So we need to find a balance between having a consistent product, a consistent technology offer, a consistent customer experience with the fact that we operate in quite diverse markets. So this was, let's say the reason for more deeply engaging with Accenture on this journey. >> Thank you very much, Nils, why don't you comment on that as well? I'd love to get your thoughts and really is kind of your role here, an Accenture global SI, deep expertise in industry, but also technology, what are your thoughts on this topic? >> Yeah, I'd love to love to comment. So when we started the journey, it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets, have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets, but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages, different partners for the rewards, there's different reward partners in the different markets. So we needed to build an asset basically that could work as a template, centrally standardizing things, but also leaving enough flexibility to then localize in the individual markets. And if we talk about some of the most specific requirements, so one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the, basically the authentication needs to happen. And if we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform, and we were able to do that at the end through the AWS cognitive service, sort of wrapping the individual markets, local IDP systems. And by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of IDP solution in place for markets that do not have a local IDP solution in place, or don't want to use it for this purpose. >> So you had data, you had the integration, you've got local laws, you mentioned the flexibility, you're building ecosystems that are unique to the local, both language and cultures. Please, you had another comment, I interrupted you. >> No, I just wanted to expand basically on the requirements. So that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets, but then there were further requirements. For example, like being able to operate the platform with very low operations overhead. There is no large IT team behind Generali Vitality that, works disservice or can act as this backbone support. So we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot. And that was another big, big driver for first of all, going to cloud, but second of all, making specific choices within cloud. So we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example, managed database services, with automatic backup, with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that has all this built in which usually maybe in a database administrator would take care of. And we applied that concept basically to every component, to everything we looked at, we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot? How can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible, and then lend it on these services. For example, we also use the API gateway from AWS for our API services that also came in handy when, for example, we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call. And then we could just with a flick of a button basically, introduced caching on the level of the API gateway and really improve the user experience because the data wasn't updated so much, so it was easier to cache. So these are all experiences I think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that drove that to have a good user experience. >> Would you say that the architecture is a sort of a, data architecture specifically, is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated, centralized governance? Or is it more of a centralized view, wonder if you could talk about that? >> Yeah, it's actually a centralized platform basically. So the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of the infrastructure. So the data is separated in a way, obviously by the different tenants, but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if the need arises from the business. >> And the reason I asked that Simon is because essentially I look at this as largely a data offering for your customers. And so Nils, you were talking about the local language and Simon as well. I would imagine that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements. And so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security. And that's not a trivial challenge. I wonder if you both could comment on that. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give a start and then Simon can chime in. So what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience, so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer, what rewards have been redeemed, what rewards can be unlocked on the next level, and we foreshadow a little bit to motivate incentivize the customer and asset that data sits in an AWS database by tenant fashion. And you can run analysis on top of that. Maybe what you're getting into is also the, let's say the exercise data, the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built, but I'm sure Simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well. >> Yeah, please. >> Yeah, sure. I think the topic of data and how we use it in our business is a very interesting one because it's not historically been seen, let's say as the remit of insurance to go beyond the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be. But actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in this kind of products. And what I mean by that is, if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy, it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from Generali, and we're not giving you access to this program. And through that program, you are living a healthier life and that might have a positive impact on generosity in terms of, maybe we're going to increase our market share, or maybe we are going through lower claims, or we're going to generate value of that then. One of the points of this program is we then share that value back with customers, through the rewards on the platform that we've built here. And of course, being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the different stages of how much value you are creating. And it's also interesting to know that, in a couple of our markets, we operate in the corporate space. So not with retail customers, but with organizations. And one of the reasons that those companies give Vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce. They want to see higher presenteeism, lower absenteeism of employees, and of course, being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the Vitality program and things like that is also important. And as we've said, the markets are very different. So we need to be able to take the data that we have out of the Vitality Program and be able in the company that I'm managing to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses, we are able to make good decisions about kind of insurance product we have. I think what's interesting to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate states purely within the Vitality business itself and what we do inside the Vitality business is to analyze that data and say, is this also helping our insurance businesses to drive better top line and bottom line in the relevant business lines? And this is different per company. Being able to interrogate that data, understand it, apply it in different markets, in different distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an important one, yes. >> It's an excellent example of a digital business and we talked about digital transformation. What does that mean? This is what it means. It must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry, you're lowering overall costs. I mean, if people are getting less sick, that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products, you can give back some to your corporate clients, you can play that balancing act, you can gain market share. And you've got some knobs to turn, some levers, for your stakeholders, which is awesome. Nils, something that I'm interested in, it must've been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success. Obviously it's up to Generali Vitality to get adoption for their customers, but at the same time, the efficacy of your solution is going to determine, the ease of delivery and consumption. So, how did you map to the specific goals? What were some of the key KPIs in terms of mapping to their aggressive goals. >> Besides the things we already touched on, I think one thing I would mention is the timeline. So, we started the team ramping in January, February, and then within six months basically, we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase. And within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets. So this speed to value, speed to market that we were able to achieve, I think is one of the key criteria that also Simon and team gave to us. There was a timeline and that time I was not going to move. So we needed to make a plan, adjust to that timeline. And I think it's both a testament to the team's work that we met this timeline, but it also is enabled by a technology stack cloud. I have to say, if I go back five years, 10 years, if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally, there would've been no way to do this in 12 months, that's for sure. >> Yeah, Simon, you're a technology company. I mean, insurance has always been a tech heavy company, but as Nils just mentioned, if you had to do that with IT departments in each region. So my question is now you've got this, it's almost like nonrecurring engineering costs, it took one year to actually get the first one done, how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective, not withstanding local regulations and figuring out the go to market? Is that compressed? >> So you asked specifically technology-wise I think we would be able to set up a new market, including localizations that often involves translation of, because in Europe you have all the different languages and so on, I would say four to six weeks, we probably could stand up a localized solution. In reality, it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved, obviously, but just our piece of the solution, we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market. >> But Simon, that means that you can spend time on those other factors, you don't have to really worry so much about the technology. And so you've launched in multiple European markets, what do you see for the future of this program? Come to America. >> You can find that this program in America Dave, but with one of our competitors, we're not operating so much in the US, but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure. But yes, you're right. I think from our perspective, to put this kind of business into a new market is not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a service on a standalone basis to customers, we want to link it with insurance business. In the end, we are an insurance business, and we want to see the value that comes from that. So there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way, also from a customer proposition points of view with our distribution, they are all quite different. Coming to the question of what's next? It comes in three stages for me. So as I mentioned, we are in five markets already. In the first half of 2022, we'll also come to the Czech Republic and Poland, which we're excited to do. And that will basically mean that we have this business in the seven main Generali markets in Europe related to life and health business, which is the most natural at let's say fit for something like Vitality. Then, the sort of second part of that is to say, we have a program that is very heavily focused around activity and rewards, and that's a good place to start, but, wellness these days is not just about, can you move a bit more than you did historically, it's also about mental wellbeing, it's about sleeping good, it's about mindfulness, it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to wellbeing and COVID has taught us, and customer feedback has taught is actually that this is something where we need to go. And here we need to have the technology to move there as well. So to be able to work with partners that are not just based on physical activity, but also on mindfulness. So this is how one other way we will develop the proposition. And I think the third one, which is more strategic and we are really looking into is, there's clearly something in the whole perception of incentives and rewards, which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like Generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically. So I think we need to learn, forgetting about the specific one or Vitality being a wellness program, but if there's an insurer, there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that. And it creates value for us as an insurer, then this is probably a place that we'd want to investigate more. And to be able to do that in other areas means we need to have the technology available, that is, as I said before, replicable faster market can adapt quickly to other ideas that we have, so we can go and test those in different markets. So yes, we have to, we have to complete our scope on Vitality, We have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale, all of those rewards that real scale, and to have the technology that allows us to do that without thinking about it too much. And then to say, okay, how do we widen the proposition? And how do we take the concept that sits behind Vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business. And that's really what the future is going to look like for us. >> The isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business, and pre COVID, a lot of these stories were kind of buried, but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving. And this is an awesome example, and another point is that Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the founders of Cloudera, early Facebook employee, famously said about 10, 12 years ago, "The best and greatest engineering minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads." And this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives. So guys, congratulations, best of luck, really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome. Really appreciate your time on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, and thanks for watching this segment of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more deep dives. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage here in Washington D. C. For a W. S. Public sector summit. I'm john fraser host of the queues and in person event but of course we have remote guests. It's a hybrid event as well. Amazon is streaming amazon web services, streaming all the teams, some of the key notes of course all the cube interviews are free and streaming out there as well on the all the cube channels and all the social coordinates. Our next guest is Melissa Pavlik President and Ceo POV con joining me here to talk about predictive maintenance, bringing that to life for the U. S. Air Force melissa. Thanks for coming in remotely on our virtual cube here at the physical event. >>Excellent, thank you. Good morning >>Show. People have been been um face to face for the first time since 2019. A lot of people remote calling in checking things out kind of an interesting time, right? We're living in so uh what's your, what's your take on all this? >>Sure. I mean it's a new way of doing business, right? Um I will say, I guess for us as a company we always have been remote so it's not too much of a change but it is definitely challenging, especially trying to engage with such a large user community such as the United States Air Force who isn't always used to working as remotely. So it's definitely a unique challenge for sure. >>Well let's get into, I love this topic. You had a real success story. There is a case study with the U. S. Air Force, what's the relationship take us through what you guys are doing together? >>Sure. Absolutely. So we started working with the Air Force now about five years ago on this subject and predictive maintenance. Sometimes you might hear me catch myself and say CBM plus condition based maintenance. They're synonymous. They mean the exact same thing basically. But about five years ago the Air Force was contemplating how do we get into a space of getting ahead of unscheduled maintenance events? Um if the military they're big push always his readiness how do we improve readiness? So to do that it was a big ask of do we have the data to get ahead of failures? So we started on this journey about five years ago as I said and frankly we started under the radar we weren't sure if it was going to work. So we started with two platforms. And of course when I think a lot of people here predictive maintenance, they immediately think of sensor data and sensors are wonderful data but unfortunately especially in an entity such as the Air Force not all assets are censored. So it also opened up a whole other avenue of how do we use the data that they have today to be able to generate and get ahead of failures. So it did start a really great partnership working not only with the individual, I'll say Air Force entities that Air Force Lifecycle Management Center but we also worked across all the major commands, the individual units, supply control, logistics and everyone else. So it's been a really great team effort to bring together all of those but typically would be rather segregated operations together. >>Yeah, they're getting a lot of props lately on a lot of their projects across the board and this one particular, how did you guys specifically help them modernize and with their and get this particular maintenance thing off the ground? >>Absolutely. I think quite simply it was what really we put their existing data to work. We really wanted to get in there and think about they already had a ton of data. There wasn't a need to generate more. We're talking about petabytes of information. So how do we use that and put it into a focus of getting ahead of failure? We said we established basically three key performance parameters right from the beginning it was, we knew we wanted to increase availability which was going to directly improve readiness. We needed to make sure we were reducing mission aborts and we wanted to get ahead of any kind of maintenance costs. So for us it was really how do we leverage and embrace machine learning and ai paired with just big data analytics and how do we take frankly what is more of a World War Two era architecture and turn it into something that is in the information age. So our modernization really started with how do we take their existing data and turn it into something that is useful and then simultaneously how do we educate the workforce and helping them understand what truly machine learning and AI offer because I think sometimes there's everyone has their own opinions of what that means, but when you put it into action and you need to make sure that it's something that they can take action on, right, it's not just pushing a dot moving numbers around, it's really thinking about and considering how their operations are done and then infusing that with the data on the back end, >>it's awesome. You know the old workflows in the cloud, this is legit, I mean physical assets, all kinds of things and his legacy is also but you want the modernization, I was gonna ask you about the machine learning and ai component, you brought that up. What specifically are you leveraging their from the ai side of the machine learning side? >>Absolutely for us, most and foremost we're talking about responsible a i in this case because unfortunately a lot of the data in the Air Force is human entry, so it's manual, which basically means it's open and rife for a lot of error into that data. So we're really focused heavily on the data integrity, we're really focused on utilizing different types of machine learning because I think on the surface the general opinion is there's a lot of data here. So it would open itself naturally into a lot of potential machine learning techniques, but the reality situation is this data is not human understandable unless you are a prior maintainer, frankly, it's a lot of codes, there's not a whole lot of common taxonomy. So what we've done is we've looked at those supervised and unsupervised models, we've taken a whole different approach to infusing it with truly, what I would say arguably is the most important key element, domain expertise. You know, someone who actually understands what this data means. So that way we can in in End up with actionable output something that the air force can actually put into use, see the results coming out of it. And thus far it's been great. Air mobility command has come back and said we've been able to reduce their my caps, which are parts waiting for maintenance by 18%. That's huge in this space. >>Yeah, it's interesting about unsupervised and supervised machine learning. That's a big distinct because you mentioned there's a lot of human error going on. That's a big part. Can you explain a little bit more because that was that to solve the human error part or was it the mix and match because the different data sets, but why the why both machine learning modes. >>So really it was to address both items frankly. When we started down this path, we weren't sure we were going to find right, We went in with some hypotheses and some of those ended up being true and others were not. So it was a way for us to quickly adjust as we needed to again put the data into actionable use and make sure we were responsibly doing that. So for us a lot of it, because it's human understanding and human error that goes into this natural language processing is a really big area in this space. So for us, adjusting between and trying different techniques is really where we were able to discover and find out what was going to be the most effective and useful in this particular space as well as cost effective. Because for us there's also this resistance, you have to have resist the urge to want to monitor everything. In this case we're talking about really focusing on those top drivers and depending on the type of data that we had, depending on the users that we knew were going to get involved with it as well as I would say, the historical information, it really would help us dictate on supervised versus supervised and going the unsupervised route. In some cases there's just still not ready for that because the data is just so manual. Once we get to a point where there is more automation and more automated data collection, unsupervised will definitely no doubt become more valuable right now though, in order to get those actionable. That supervised modeling was really what we found to be the most valuable >>and that makes total sense. You've got a lot of head room to grow into with Unsupervised, which is actually harder as you as you know, everyone, everyone everyone knows that. But I mean that's really the reality. Congratulations. I gotta ask you on the AWS side what part do they play in all this? Obviously the cloud um their relationship with the Air Force as well, what's their what's their role in this particular maintenance solution? >>Sure, absolutely. And I'll just say, I mean we're really proud to be a partner network with them and so when we started this there was no cloud, so today a lot of opportunity or things we hear about in the Air Force where like cloud one platform one, those weren't in existence, you know, five years ago or so. So for us when we started down this path and we had to identify very quickly a format and a host location that would allow us not only handle large amounts of data but do all of the deep analysis we needed to AWS GovCloud is where that came in. Plus it also is awesome that they were already approved at I. L. Five to be able to host that we in collaboration with them host a nist 801 +71 environment. And so it's really allowed us to to grow and deliver this this impact out over 6000 users today on the Air Force side. So for us with a W. S. Has been a great partnership. They obviously have some really great native services that are inside their cloud as well as the pairing and easy collaboration among not only licensed products but also all that free and open source that's out there because again, arguably that's the best community to pull from because they're constantly evolving and working in the space. But a W has been a really great partner for us and of course we have some of our very favorite services I'm happy to talk about, but they've been really great to work with >>what's the top services. >>So for us, a lot of top services are like ec two's work spaces, of course S three and Glacier um are right up there, but you really enjoy working across glue Athena were really big on, we find a commercial service we're looking for that's not yet available in Govcloud. And we pull in our AWS partners and ask, hey, you know when it's going to get into the gulf cloud space and they move pretty quickly to get those in there. So recent months are definitely a theme in blue. Well, >>congratulations, great solution, I love this application because it highlights the power of the cloud, What's the future in store for the U. S. Air Force when it comes to predictive maintenance. >>Sure. I mean, I think at this point they are just going to continue adding additional top driver analyses you through our work for the past couple years. We've identified a lot of operational and functional opportunities for them. So there's gonna be some definitely foundational changing coming along, some enabling new technologies to get that data integrity more automated as well so that there isn't such a heavy lift on the downstream, we're talking about data cleansing, but I think as far as predictive maintenance goes, we're definitely going to see more and more improvements across the readiness level, getting rid of and eliminating that unscheduled event that drives a lot of the readiness concerns that are out there. And we're also hoping to see a lot more improvement and I'd say enhancement across the supply chain because we know that's also an area that really they could get ahead on your part of our other work as we developed a five year long range supply forecast and it's really been opening some eyes to see how they can better plan, not only on the maintenance side but also supporting maintenance from a logistics and supply, >>great stuff melissa. Great to have you on President Ceo Path Con, you're also the business owner. Um how's things going with the business? The pandemic looks like I'm gonna come out of it stronger. Got the tailwind with cloud technology. The modernization boom is here in, in Govcloud, 10 years celebrating Govcloud birthday here at this event. How's business house? How are you doing >>good. Everything has actually been, we were, I guess fortunate, as I mentioned the very beginning, we were remote companies. So fortunately for us the pandemic did not have that much of an operational hiccup and being that a lot of our clients are in the federal space, we were able to continue working and amazingly we actually grew during the pandemic. We added quite a bit of a personnel to the team and so we're looking forward to doing some more predictive maintenance across, not only explaining the Air Force but the other services as well. >>You know, the people who were Agile had some cloud action going on, we're productive and they came out stronger melissa. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you for coming in remotely and joining our face to face event from the interwebs. Thank you so much for coming on cuba >>All right, thank you, john have a great rest of your day. >>Okay. I'm john for here at the cube with a W. S. Public sector summit in person and remote bringing guest on. We've got the new capability of bringing remotes in. We do in person. I'll see you face to face hear the cube and it's like to be here at the public sector summit. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm >>robert, Herjavec

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS summit public sector here live in Washington, DC, where we're actually having a physical event, but also broadcasting to a hybrid audience digitally. I'm John, your hosted, like you've got a great panel here. Martin Rieger's chief solutions, officer stack armor, the thin poli who's with Splunk group vice president of partner go to market Americas and public sector, and Troy Bertram, vice president sales, a telos. Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be. So you guys stuck on them to have a great solution on AWS called faster. Okay. Which is nice name what's what's it all about? >>So faster is about getting cloud service providers to an authorization, to operate with the federal government, uh, basically as fast as possible. It is the collection of threat alert, which is a fed ramp designed solution and boundary solution. That includes all those key security stack components. Uh, primarily our partners over at Splunk and telos. Uh, those products are scripted, streamlined, and designed to get customers there as fast as possible in a compliant manner. >>I love the acronym fast tr faster on AWS. Uh, how did you guys come up with the threat alerts concept? What did, what's this all about? How did it all come together? >>Uh, threat alert was, was born out of one of our primary services, which is migration and, uh, for roughly about a five-year stretch migrating federal agency systems, um, to Amazon, both east, west and gov cloud, uh, we recognized quickly that there was a need to include a security stack of common components, such as vulnerability scanning, uh, security incident event monitoring, uh, as well as a number of other key components designed around the continuous monitoring aspect of it. And so we quickly realized that, you know, the packaging of this solution and putting together a dashboard that allows us to tie everything in, uh, deploy very, very quickly through infrastructure as a code, um, was a vehicle that could help, uh, our customers and CSPs as well as agencies get through the FedRAMP ATO process. Um, quickly >>Talk about the relationship with Splunk and telos. How's this all connecting with? Just what's your role? >>Yeah, so really with the support of NIST and the new Oscar standard, which I'm going to make sure I get the acronym right. Open securities controls, assessment language, or asked gal, um, with our release of Exacta and automation of the compliance standards working with, and the framework, we've been able to look at best of breed partners in the industry, and it is all around acceleration of how can we move faster to deliver the end customer, the controls they need and want in a secure compliant manner. Um, and as someone that served in the government, right, it's, it's passion for the mission. And that's really what brought the three companies together >>And my opinion, by the way, congratulations on Telus going public. You guys do a lot of great cyber work. Congratulations. Now that data is the heart of this. I mean, Splunk that's all you guys do is think about data. How do you guys connect into, into the product? >>Well, it's exactly that really providing that data platform, then they analytics capability to enable the subject matter experts to bring the data to life. Right. And that's what we, that's why these partnerships are so important to Splunk because, uh, they have the subject matter expertise and can really leverage the power of the data platform to provide services to customers. >>Yeah. One of the big trends that's kind of underreported, in my opinion, is that partnerships required to kind of get the cyber security equation, right? This is a huge trend. People are sharing, but also working together. How, how do you guys see that evolving? Because you know, there has to be an openness around the data. There has to be more open solutions. How do you guys see that evolving? Um, >>Well you kind of hit the hammer on the heads. Splunk is, is essentially the heart and soul of our auditing logging and continuous monitoring piece. Um, in terms of, of the relationships and how we all work together. We we've evolved now to a point where we are able to pre-stage customers well in advance. Um, and in working with our partners, uh, tell us on Splunk. By the time we get started with a customer, we, we reduced the amount of time this takes, uh, on average by 40%, um, and even faster with the exact piece because, uh, as, as Troy kind of mentioned, the OSC gal component, um, is the future of accreditation. And it's certainly not limited to fed ramp, but that machine language, that XML Yammel Jason code, we've got things to the point where not only are we deploying Splunk in a, in a scripted pre-configured manner to work with our technology, we're also doing the same thing with Exacta. >>So the controls are three documented for everything that we provide, which means we don't have to spend the time going through the process of saying, okay, tell me what you're doing. We already have that down. The other best of breed type components that were mentioned by Troy. Um, it's the same thing, right? So customers, when they show up, they have a security stack that's ready to go. They already have FIPs compliance for encryption. They already have hardening in place so that when, when they approach us, all they've really got to do is deploy their application and close a very small gap in documentation, which we do with Exacta and then auditors can come in, hit the, they can jump, get what they need out of Exacta. And eventually once everyone else catches up to OSC gal, we'll be connecting systems to other systems and just pushing the package, the days of PDFs. And those are almost gone >>As someone that went through, um, achieving an ATO, the paper process and the Excel spreadsheets. It's a nightmare. And you've got sales engineers, you've got solution architects that are spending their time, not focused on delivering mission outcomes or new products and services to our public sector customers, but on the process and the paperwork, >>Can you share order of magnitude the old way, time wasting versus this solution? What's, what's gained cause that's key. This needs a resources when people are >>Every CFO ad in ISV wants to do two things, right? They want to support the sales efforts to move into the federal or state environment, right? We're talking about fed ramp, but state ramp is upon us now. So they want two things. How do I do this at the lowest cost possible limit my resources that are really expensive on the engineering side and how do I shrink the amount of time? So 40% is a very conservative estimate. I believe that we can continue with implementations of Bosco and other ingestation points, especially across government. We can shrink that time, which reduces the cost immensely >>The time savings day. What about the stack? >>But if you want to put it in perspective, right? I've been doing this since the beginning in 2012, and I've stood up three different three pills. I've audited over 200 companies. I've been doing this a long time. And in the beginning it was an average of 12 months just to get someone ready, just to get ready. That didn't include the audit time. So we've evolved to a point now where on average, that's down to 12 weeks. And that was before the inclusion of the exact piece. We were able to shave off four more weeks with that, to the point where we're down to eight weeks and the government is pushing to try to get towards a 30 day ATO. And I think Oscar was the answer for that. And so to give you an idea of where we were to where we are now, we went from 12 months to 12 weeks. >>That's huge. So the data is the key in here. And then you got faster on AWS. Love the name wa how does that compare to other ATO solutions? How do you guys see that comparing a wonder place? >>I think in terms of the other solutions that are available out there, there, there's a couple key things that, that I think the rest of the market is trying to do to catch up. And one of those is the dashboard technology that we have in place integrates directly with Splunk and with Exacta, it pulls in from all the AWS sources that are available in terms of security and information and centralizes it in one spot. And so nobody else is doing that and we've been doing it for years. And this, this to me, OSS gal, and the addition of the exact component was the next evolution. >>Um, on the partnership side, how do you guys see it evolving? What's next >>More continuous monitoring, I think, right. It's not just about a FedRAMP authorization, but continuous monitoring in general for, for all of our public sector. >>That's day two operations continues ongoing AI operations. There's gotta be some machine learning in here somewhere. Is there? >>Yeah. I'll speak to the partnerships a little bit. And I think even back to AWS, right? Why we're here and it's great to be in person is it's around us working together as an industry and companies, right? The authority to operate on AWS, the ATO and AWS was started to bring like-minded companies together to help solve these problems. Yeah. >>I mean, it's a real benefit. It really shows that you can put a stack together, right. And then save time like that 12 months to 12 weeks. That's what cloud's about right now. Then the question is security. Think you should get that right. That is going to be an evolution. What's the vision of the product? >>Um, well, there's two things around that we, we, we talked about, yes, it's, it's planned prepare authorized, right? That is the current fed ramp mantra and post ATO. The continuous monitoring piece is really a core element. But in terms of the future three PAOs, the third-party assessment organizations that, that audit our customers, that, that we're all preparing together. Eventually they're systems, they're all developing audit systems around. And so where we're going is the auditor will connect to Exacta and they will simply over API or whatever calls they make. They will pull all of that audit information control information, which is only going to accelerate this even more. >>Yeah. I mean, the observability, the data, the automation all plays into more speed, more agility, faster, >>And, and meeting all of the standards, right? Whether it's smart Z or it's HIPAA state Ram home in Austin, Texas Tex ramp is, is a thing, right? How do we help each one of these customers with their own compliance or super smart, >>You know, the business model of reduce the steps it takes to do something, make it easier and faster is a good business model. Wow. >>It's not, it's becoming an ecosystem right. In the sense that, um, you know, Oscar has been under development for three years and, and, and stack armor, we've been supporting some components at NIST, but to the point where, uh, once we eliminate the, the traditional paper, you know, word doc XL PDF, um, and get to a point where everything is tied together. But one there's one important aspect to this is that it's all in boundary. So the authorization boundary is that invisible red line. We draw around everything in scope for an audit. And so that, by the way, is another critical component. The Splunk servers are in boundary. The exact servers are in boundary, which is a huge, huge element to this. >>Yeah. Good. Great. To see the spunk partnership, adding value here with telos, good, your cybersecurity expertise, pulling it all together. It's a great solution. >>It is, and great partners to work with, right? And I know that we will have additional solutions and product offerings in the future. >>Martin treadmill, Bethann. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the show. As we wind down day two of cube live coverage in-person event, AWS public sector summit in Washington, DC. This is the cube. We right back after this short break,

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

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Summit. In-person here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier, your host, great to be back face to face. We've got a great, special guest Clint Crosier, who is the Director of AWS' Aerospace & Satellite. Major General of The Air Force/Space Force. Retired. Great to see you in person again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. >> First of all, props to you for doing a great job at Amazon, bringing all your knowledge from Space Force and Air Force into the cloud. >> Thank you. >> So that's great, historical context. >> It's been valuable and it's provided a whole lot of insight into what we're building with the AWS space team, for sure. >> So number one question I get a lot is: We want more space content. What's the coolest thing going on in space? Is there a really a satellite behind the moon there, hidden there somewhere? What's the coolest thing going on in space? >> Well, the coolest thing that's going on in space, I think is you're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, I mean, to me. I've been in the space industry for 34 years now, and there have been periods where we projected lots of growth and activity and it just didn't really come about, especially in the 80's and the 90's. But what we're seeing today is that growth is taking place. Whether it's the numbers of satellites that are being launched around the globe every year, there's some 3,000 objects on orbit today. Estimates are that there'll be 30,000 objects at the end of the decade, or the number of new companies, or the number of global spinning. It is just happening right now, and it's really exciting. >> So, when people say or hear space, there's a lot of economic changes in terms of the cost structures of how to get things deployed into space. That brings up the question of: Is space an opportunity? Is it a threat vector? What about congestion and security? >> Yeah, well three great things, absolutely an opportunity. We're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, and we're seeing more commercialization than ever before. In my whole career, The Air Force or, NASA, or the NRO would sort of, hold things and do them themselves Today, you're seeing commercial contracts going out from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, from The Air Force, from the Space Force. So lots of opportunity for commercial companies. Security. Absolutely, priority number one should be security is baked into everything we do at AWS. And our customers, our Government classified customers tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security is top notch and certified for all their workloads. And as you well know, we have from unclassified all the way up to top secret capabilities on the AWS cloud. So just powerful opportunities for our customers. >> Yeah. And a lot of competitors will throw foot on that. I know, I've reported on some of that and not a lot of people have that same credential. >> Sure. >> Compared to the competition. >> Sure. >> Now I have to ask you, now that you have the top secret, all these clouds that are very tailorable, flexible with space: How are you helping customers with this Aerospace Division? Is it is a commercial? In the public sector together? What's the... >> All of the above. >> Take us through the value proposition. >> Yeah, happy to do this. So what we recognized over the last two years or so we, at AWS, recognized all this rapid growth that we're talking about within the space industry. Every sector from launch to on-orbit activities, to space exploration, all of it. And so AWS saw that and we looked at ourselves and said: "Do we have the right organization and expertise in place really to help our customers lean into that?" And the answer was: we decided to build a team that had deep experience in space, and that was the team that we grew because our thesis was: If you have a deep experience in space, a deep experience in cloud, you bring those two together and it's a powerful contribution. And so we've assembled a team with more than 500 years of collective hands-on experience, flying satellites, launching rockets. And when we sit down with our customers to innovate on their behalf, we're able to come up with some incredible solutions and I'm happy to talk about those. >> I'd love to, but tell you what, first of all, there's a lot of space nerds out there. I love space. I love space geeking out on the technology, but take us through the year you had, you've had a pretty incredible year with some results. You have that brain trust there. I know you're hiring. I know that people want to work for you. I'm sure the resumes are flying in, a lot of action. >> There is. >> What are the highlights from this year? >> So the highlights I think is, we've built a team that the industry is telling us was needed. Again, there was no organization that really served the space cloud industry. And so we're kind of building this industry within the industry, the space cloud industry. And so number one, just establishing that team and leaning into that industry has been valuable. The other thing that we're real proud of is we built a global team, because space is a global enterprise. We have teams in Europe and in Asia and South America here in the U.S., so we built a global team. One of the things that we did right up front, we weren't even six months old, when we envisioned the idea of doing the AWS Space Accelerator. And some of the folks told me: "Clint, six months under your belt, maybe you ought to get your feet under you." And I said: "No, no. We move fast to support our customers." And so we made a call for any space startup that wanted to come on board with AWS and go through our four week Space Accelerator. We partnered with Sarah from Capital. And the idea was: if you're a small company that wants to grow and build and learn how you can use the cloud to gain competitive advantage, come with us. And so John, I would have been happy if we had 50 companies applied, we had 194 companies across 44 countries that applied to our accelerator. We had to down select a 10, but that was a tremendous accomplishment, two of those are speaking this afternoon, where they met each other at our accelerator and now have formed a partnership: Ursa Space and HawkEye 360 on how they build on the cloud together. Fascinating. >> Well, I love that story. First of all, I love the military mindset. No, we're not going to wait. >> Move it out. >> It's not take that hill, it's take that planet. >> Our customers won't wait, innovation, doesn't wait, the future doesn't wait. We have to move out. >> So, this brings up the entrepreneurship angle. We got there a little early, but I want to talk about it because it's super important. There's an entrepreneurial culture happening right now in the space community >> There is. At large, and it's getting bigger and wider. >> Bigger every day. >> What is that? What if someone says: "Hey, what's going on with entrepreneurship in this space? What are the key dynamics? What's the power dynamics?" It's not money, there's money out there, but like what's the structural thing happening? >> The key dynamic, I think, is we're seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before. And one of our goals is: the more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world. It unlocks things we couldn't do. We're working with space companies who are using space data to track endangered whales off the coast of California. We're working with companies that are using space data to measure thermal and greenhouse emissions for climate change and climate management. We're working with one company, Edgybees, who has a small satellite constellation, and they're using it to build satellite based, augmented reality, to provide it to first responders as they go into a disaster response area. And they get a 3D-view of what they're going into. None of those workloads were possible five years ago. And the cloud and cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kinds of workloads up. >> What kind of higher level services do you see emerging from space cloud? Because you know, obviously you have to have some infrastructure. >> Absolutely. Got to put some stuff into space. That's a supply chain, reliability, also threat. I mean, I can have a satellite attack, another satellite, or I'm just making that up, but I'm sure there's other scenarios that the generals are thinking about. >> So space security and cyberspace security is critical. And as I said, it's built into everything we do in all of our platforms, so you're absolutely right about that, but when we think about the entrepreneurship, you know, what we're seeing is, and I'll give you a good example of why the industry is growing so fast and why cloud. So one company we work with, LeoLabs. So Leo identified the growth in the LEO: Low Earth Orbit segment. 3,000 objects on orbit today, 30,000 tomorrow. Who's going to do the space traffic management for 30,000 objects in space that are all in the same orbital regime? And so LeoLabs built a process to do space traffic management, collision avoidance. They were running it on premises. It took them eight hours to do a single run for a single satellite conjunction. We got them to help understand how to use the cloud. They moved all that to AWS. Now that same run they do in 10 seconds. Eight hours to 10 seconds. Those are the kind of workloads as space proliferates in and we grow, that we just can't execute without cloud and cloud-based technologies. >> It's interesting, you know, the cloud has that same kind of line: move your workloads to the cloud and then refactor. >> Yeah. So space workloads are coming to the cloud. >> They are. >> Just changing the culture. So I have to ask you, I know there's a lot of young people out there looking for careers and interests. I mean, Cal poly is going into the high school now offering classes. >> Yeah So high school, there's so much interest in space and technology. What is the cultural mindset to be successful? Andy Jassy last year, reading and talk about the mindset of the builder and the enterprise CXO: "Get off your butt and start building" There's a space ethos going on. What is the mindset? Would you share your view on it? >> The mindset is innovation and moving fast, right? We, we lived, most of my career, in the time where we had an unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time. And so we were really slow and deliberate about how we built things. The future won't wait, whether it's commercial application, or military application, we have to move fast. And so the culture is: the faster we can move, The more we'll succeed, and there's no way to move faster than when you're building on the AWS cloud. Ground station is a good example. You know, the proposition of the cloud is: Don't invest your limited resources in your own infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your capability. And so we did that same thing with ground station. And we've said to companies: "Don't spend millions of dollars on developing your own ground station infrastructure, pay by the minute to use AWS's and focus your limited resources back in your product, which differentiate your space mission." and that's just been power. >> How is that going from customer perspective? >> Great. It's going great. We continue to grow. We added another location recently. And just in the last week we announced a licensed accelerator. One of the things our customers told us is it takes too long to work with global governments to get licensed, to operate around the world. And we know that's been the case. So we put together a team that leaned in to solve that problem, and we just announced the licensed accelerator, where we will work with companies to walk them through that process, and we can shave an 18 month process into a three or four month process. And that's been... we've gotten great response on that from our company. >> I've always said: >> I remember when you were hired and the whole space thing was happening. I remember saying to myself: "Man, if democratization can bring, come to space" >> And we're seeing that happening >> You guys started it and you guys, props to your team. >> Making space available to more and more people, and they'll dazzle us with the innovative ways we use space. 10 years ago, we couldn't have envisioned those things I told you about earlier. Now, we're opening up all sorts of workloads and John, real quick, one of the reasons is, in the past, you had to have a specific forte or expertise in working with space data, 'cause it was so unique and formatted and in pipeline systems. We're making that democratized. So it's just like any other data, like apps on your phone. If you can build apps for your phone and manage data, we want to make it that easy to operate with space data, and that's going to change the way the industry operates. >> And that's fundamentally, that's great innovation because you're enabling that. That's why I have to ask you on that note Of the innovation trends that you see or activities: What excites you the most? >> So a lot of things, but I'll give you two examples very quickly: One is high-performance compute. We're seeing more and more companies really lean in to understanding how fast they can go on AWS. I told you about LeoLabs, eight hours to 10 seconds. But that high-performance computes going to be a game changer. The other thing is: oh, and real quick, I want to tell you, Descartes Labs. So Descartes Labs came to us and said: "We want to compete in the Annual Global Top 500 supercomputer challenge" And so we worked with them for a couple of weeks. We built a workload on the AWS standard platform. We came in number 40 in the globe for the Top 500 super computer lists, just by building some workloads on our standard platform. That's powerful, high-performance compute. But the second example I wanted to give you is: digital modeling, digital simulation, digital engineering. Boom Aerospace is a company, Boom, that we work with. Boom decided to build their entire supersonic commercial, supersonic aircraft, digital engineering on the AWS cloud. In the last three years, John, they've executed 6,000 years of high-performance compute in the last three years. How do you do 6,000 years in compute in three years? You spin up thousands of AWS servers simultaneously, let them do your digital management, digital analysis, digital design, bring back a million different perturbations of a wing structure and then pick the one that's best and then come back tomorrow and run it again. That's powerful. >> And that was not even possible, years ago. >> Not at that speed, no, not at that speed. And that's what it's really opening up in terms of innovation. >> So now you've done it so much in your career, okay? Now you're here with Amazon. Looking back on this past year or so, What's the learnings for you? >> The learning is, truly how valuable cloud can be to the space industry, I'll admit to you most people in the space industry and especially in the government space industry. If you ask us a year ago, two years ago: "Hey, what do you think about cloud?" We would have said: "Well, you know, I hear people talk about the cloud. There's probably some value. We should probably look at that" And I was in the same boat, but now that I've dug deeply into the cloud and understand the value of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, a ground station infrastructure, all those things, I'm more excited than ever before about what the space industry can benefit from cloud computing, and so bringing that, customer by customer is just a really fulfilling way to continue to be part of the space industry. Even though I retired from government service. >> Is there a... I'm just curious because you brought it up. Is there a lot of people coming in from the old, the space industry from public sector? Are they coming into commercial? >> Absolutely. >> Commercial rising up and there's, I mean, I know there's a lot of public/private partnerships, What's the current situation? >> Yeah, lots of partnerships, but we're seeing an interesting trend. You know, it used to be that NASA led the way in science and technology, or the military led the way in science and technology, and they still do in some areas. And then the commercial industry would follow along. We're seeing that's reversed. There's so much growth in the commercial industry. So much money, venture capital being poured in and so many innovative solutions being built, for instance, on the cloud that now the commercial industry is leading technology and building new technology trends that the military and the DOD and their government are trying to take advantage of. And that's why you're seeing all these commercial contracts being led from Air Force, Space Force, NASA, and NRO. To take advantage of that commercialization. >> You like your job. >> I love my job. (laughing) -I can tell, >> I love my job. >> I mean, it is a cool job. I kind of want to work for you. >> So John, space is cool. That's our tagline: space is cool. >> Space is cool. Space equals ratings in the digital TV realm, it is really, super exciting a lot of young people are interested, I mean, robotics clubs in high schools are now varsity sports, eSports, all blend together. >> Space, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics. It's all becoming a singular sector today and it's open to more people than ever before, for the reasons we talked about. >> Big wave and you guys are building the surf boards, everyone a ride it, congratulations. Great to see you in person. >> Thank you. Again, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate that. >> Thanks for having us. >> Clint Crosier is the Director of AWS Aerospace & Satellite. Legend in the industry. Now at AWS. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of eight of his public sector summit live in Washington D. C, where it's a face to face real event. I'm johN for a year host but virtual events. Hybrid events were hybrid event as well. We've got a great remote interview. Got a guest here in person, Jon Stankovic, president of cloud solutions. Smartronix and Britain was the VP of eight of his managed services, also known as A M. S with amazon web services, jOHN and jOHN and three johns here. Welcome to the cube remote >>in person. >>Hybrid. >>Thanks. Thank you. Great to be on the cube longtime viewer and I really appreciate what you >>do for fun to be here remotely but I feel like it right there. >>Yeah, I love the hybrid if it's only gonna get better next time will be in the metaverse soon. But uh, jOHn on the line there, I want to ask you with AWS managed services, take us through what you guys are doing with Smart Trust because this is an interesting service you guys are working together. How's that relates at the table for us. >>Yeah, well, you know, we're really excited about this announcement, We've been working with Smartronix since we launched A. M S 4.5 years ago. So we've been able to build up working with them, you know, a huge library of automation capabilities and this really just formalised as that in an offer for our joint customers where we can bring the expertise from AWS and Smartronix and offer a full solution that's highly integrated to help help our customers jointly accelerate their cloud adoption as well as their operating model transformation as they start to move to a more devops motion and they need help. We're there together to provide our expertise and make that simple for them. >>Well I appreciate the call. You john b john s over here. Js john Stankevich. Um tell me about Smart trust because you heard what's going on with devoPS to point a whole revolutions going on in devops, you're starting to see a highly accelerated modern application development environment which means that the software developers are setting the pace there, the pace car of the innovation, right? And so other teams like security or I. T. Become blockers. Blockers a drag and anchor. So the shift left on security for instance is causing a lot of problems on the security team. So all this is going on like right now so still the speed is the game. What's your take? >>Sure so absolutely. I think that's where this partnership really really excels. You know, we want customers to focus on their mission, you know, national security, health care outcomes. Um we want them to kind of take the rest off their plate. So when you say some of the quote unquote blockers around security uh Smartronix has invested heavily in a federally authorized platform that sits on top of what a WS has done from a Fed ramp and so right off the bat speed agility. We don't want our customers spending time replicating things that we've done at scale and leveraging what AWS has and so by kind of utilizing this, this joint offer all of a sudden a big part of that compliance is taken care of. Uh, and then things like devoPS, things like SRE models that you hear a lot about, we fold all that into this uh, combined service offering. >>I know a little about what you guys are doing. You mentioned SRE is very cool, but let's take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you guys are on the cutting edge of solving a lot of problems from infrastructure fools around the deVOPS stack. What are you guys doing in the cloud services? >>Sure. So I think jOHN hit a little bit on it. But you know, we look at AMS as best in breed at scale managing core parts of the U. S. Infrastructure. What Smartronix does is many times customers have some unique requirements and we take that core kind of powered by aims and we try and fill in those kind of complementary skill sets and complementary requirements. And so something like the devops, which is basically making sure that those people developing that software, they have also the ability to manage it and on an ongoing basis. Kind of run it. We develop all the frameworks and that's part of this offering to enable that. >>What's the solution jOHN B because I think you guys don't, this is people have challenges. I want to understand those challenges. And then when they go to the external managed service, what's involved, you walk us through that? Because I think that's important. >>Yeah, sure. You know, it turns out jOHN nailed this one. That moving to the cloud can be, can be a big transformation for many, many enterprises and government teams. Right. They worked for many years and have an ecosystem in their traditional data center. But when they move to the cloud, there's a lot of moving pieces and so what we like to focus on is helping them with the undifferentiated aspects of safely and automating cloud operations. So working with, with Smartronix allows us to take what we're doing across the infrastructure services, around security, around automation, around patching instance management, container management, all of those uh, undifferentiated, heavy lifting passed by now with Smartronix and expertise across the application layer across customers, unique environments across federal and moderate the various government standards and compliance is, and we think we're able to get, take a customer um, from kind of really early stage cloud experience and rapidly deploy configure and get them into a very stable scalable posture operationally on the cloud so that they can start to invest in their people, their skills and their differentiated application on the cloud that really drive the differentiation in their business and not have to worry about best practice configurations and operational run books and, and and automation is and and and the latest dep sec ops capabilities that will pick up for them while they're training and getting, they're getting their emotions in place, >>jOHn is on the Smartronix side. Talk about the difference between scale okay. Which is a big issue with cloud these customers want to have with AMS but then you also have some scale, maybe some scale to but highly compliant environments, regulated industries, for instance, this is the hot areas because scale is unwieldy, but if you don't want get rain it in, it can be chaotic. Right? So also regulations and compliance is a huge issue. >>Yeah. What what we found is um, at times customers look at it and they just get frustrated because it can be kind of intimidating and we as a combined team really have spent a lot of time we have accelerators to walk customers through that process and a really flexible model. If they feel that they have a lot of domain expertise in it, then we'll just kind of be almost a supporter other customers look at it and say, you know, we'd like you to take the entire patch of that compliance and so highly regulated environments. Both commercial D. O. D. National Security, um federal civilian agencies, state and local, they're all looking to this and saying we really want someone that's been through things like the U. S. Audited managed service provider, things like they're managed security service provider, things like fed ramp or D. O. D. Ill four and five. And I think to be honest Smartronix has just invested heavily in that with the goal of reducing all that complexity and it's it's really been taken off and we really appreciate the partnership specifically with jOHn and uh the A. W. S. A. M. S. Team. >>All right so you guys were going together, what's the ultimate benefit to the customer? >>I can I'll give my thing right off the bat all this innovation coming out of A. W. S. Um It's fantastic but only if you have the ability to take advantage of it. And so thousands of new services being rolled out. We really want customers to be able to take advantage of that and let at times us do what we do best and let them focus on their mission. And I think that's what really AWS is all about and we just feel very fortunate to be an enabler of that >>john be talking about talking about the staffing issues too because one of the problems that we have been reporting and this has come up at every reinvest on the max. Peterson about this as well. He's promised last year was gonna train 29 million people. See how that comes out of reinvent when the report card comes back. I was kinda busting his chops a little bit there but he had a smile on his face I think is gonna hit the numbers a lot of times, Maybe people don't have an SRE they don't have a devout person or they have some staff that they're in transition or transforming this is a huge factor. What's your take on this, >>you know, that that is so important, you know, as john mentioned, it's all about helping the customers focused and and their their cloud talent is scarce and it's a scarce resource and you you want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they're going to leave and and as you train and skill, these folks, they want to focus on what really impacts the business, what's really differentiating doing, you know, doing the cloud and the necessities on operations and operational tasks and sec ops and things like that, sometimes, that's not the sexiest part of the work that the customer really wants to focus their team on. So again, I think together we're able to help drive high levels of automation and really do that day in and day out work that is not necessarily the differentiator of their business and that's going to attract and keep the best and brightest minds in these in these customers um which allows us to help them with the undifferentiated aspects of of the heavy lifting. >>Not only is availability of people, it's keeping the people, I love that great call out there, Okay, where does this go? Where's the relationship. So you guys are partnering, you have the M. S. Is going on? Strong managed services not gonna go away mormon people were using managed services. It's part of the ecosystem within the ecosystem. What's next in the relationship? >>Well, I think, you know, I'll speak first, john, I'm sure you've got some thoughts to, but you know, we've got so many things on our plate around predictive operations and the predictive capabilities that we're excited about tackling together. Obviously there's all sorts of unique applications that require even deeper capabilities and working with Smartronix to help us, you know, provide even greater insight into the application layer. So I kind of see us expanding um both horizontally as well as well as vertically and horizontally. We've got customers looking at the edge with the outpost solutions and we can snap into those capabilities as well. So there's a tremendous amount of kind of, I'd say vertical and horizontal opportunity that we can continue to expand it together, >>john your reaction, That's >>pretty right on Absolutely. I think john Berger really hit it and I think really machine learning, you know, that's a big area of focus, if you look at all this data is being collected, predictive modeling and so we have this kind of transition from a model where people were basically watching screens reacting and what the AWS MSP offer and what you know, AmS offers is really predicting, so you you're not doing that, you're not reacting, you're proactively ahead of things. And that's the honest truth is AWS is such a well run service. It just doesn't break, you know, it doesn't break like what you see in the traditional kind of legacy infrastructure. And so at times we're just continuing to climb that stack. As, as john mentioned, >>it's really interesting as you guys are, as you're talking, I'm thinking myself just go back a couple of years ago, eight years ago or so. DevoPS is a bad word. Dev's dominate up. So I was through them now, operational leverage is a huge part of this ai operations, um, the entire I. T service management being disrupted heavily by cloud operations that also facilitate rapid development models. Right? So, again, this is like under reported, but it's a really nuanced point hardened operations for security and not holding back the developers is the cloud scale. What's your guys reaction to that? >>Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, the automation piece of things and I think customers are still going through transitions. You know, traditionally managed services means a big staff and it's like I said, sitting there watching screens and you flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It's, you know, it's very transitional and very transformative and I think that's where an offering, like what we've really partnered on really, really helps because at times it can be overwhelming for customers and we just want to simplify that. And as I've said, let them focus on their mission. >>Amen one last question before we break, because I was talking to another partner, a big part of AWS. Um, and we're talking about SAS versus solutions and sometimes if you're too Sassy, you're not really building a custom solution, but you can have the best of both worlds. A little professional services, maybe some headroom on the stack, if you will your building solutions. So the next question is, as you guys put this cutting edge innovative innovative solution together, how are your customers consuming it? Like what's the consumption? I'm assuming there must be happy because a lot of heavy lifting being taken away, they don't have to deal with house the contract process. >>Well, you know, I think, you know, we have the opportunity, we support customers and kind of all modes of their application stack. So, you know, a full stacks solution. You know, even a legacy architecture moving to the cloud requires a high degree of automation to support it. And then as those applications become modernized over time, they become much more cloud native at some point, they might even become a full stack Starzz offer. So many of our customers actually run their SAAS platform leveraging our capability as well. So, you know, I think it gives the customer a lot of optionality uh, and future kind of growth as they modernize their application stack. >>Yeah, john your reaction. Absolutely. >>I think one of the greatest benefits is it's freeing up funds to do mission work. And so instead of spending time procuring hardware and managing it and leasing data center space, they literally have more funding. And so we've seen customers literally transform their business because this piece of it's done more efficiently and they have really excess and really additional funding to do their mission. >>We love the business model innovation, faster um, higher quality, easy and inexpensive. That's the flywheel gentlemen, Thank you for coming on and get the three. John john thank you. Vice President Cloud Solutions. That Smartronix, thank you for coming on. John Barrington BP of amazon websites managed. There is a also known as AWS and A M. S. A W. S got upside down. W. M. Looks the same. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. We appreciate great great Cube covers here. eight of us summit we're live on the ground and were remote. It's a hybrid event. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Live in Washington, DC. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furr, your host. We're in person face-to-face event it's kicking off day two. Dave Levy's here, Vice President of US government Nonprofit and healthcare businesses for AWS Public Sector. Dave, great to see you again, welcome back. >> Dave: Great to see you, John. >> So, great time last time we were in person, 2019, looks like the event, the last year was virtual, what's new? >> Well, first of all, I think it's just exciting. I mean, I'm excited to be back and in-person and so much has happened in our personal lives in our communities and so I'm really glad that we can all be together and it's been great so far. >> I was talking yesterday with some folks and I saw people doing some networking. I heard someone, "Hey, I'm want to hire someone." So, the face-to-face is back, we're also streaming. Max Peterson told me they're pushing it everywhere on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere, Twitch, so free content, but still a lot of registrations here in person, good stuff. >> Yeah, great registrations. We're thrilled with the support from partners and customers. And also too, like you said, the connections that people are making, so it does feel good that things are flowing and people are having conversations and- >> Well, you got healthcare, nonprofits, US government, healthcare has been a big focus so far in this show. A lot of action, local governments, governments and healthcare seem to be like pandemic enabled to change. What's the update? What's the highlights so far for you? >> Well, I think the highlights are in those areas that, what we've been able to help our customers with is the ability to respond and that's what Cloud is all about and their ability to react and to respond to things that they don't necessarily know is going to happen and the big thing that none of us knew was going to happen was the pandemic. And so that ability and agility and preparedness to respond has really been great to see from a lot of those customers. >> You know, Max Peterson had the CIO from the Air Force up on stage and she's known for her comments about data and data's our data, the US Air Force and so data's big part of it. They are having a transformation and the how's that project going? What's the update there? What's your impression on that? >> Yeah, well, it was great to see the Air Force on stage and great to see Laura up there and we're really proud to support the DOD and the Air Force. And the Air Force has a lot to be proud of in their transformation journey and what they're doing with Cloud One is pretty substantial and amazing transformation for them. And then they've got 35 applications running on AWS. And so we think their progress is really good and they're thinking the right way in terms of their software factories and other types of projects. >> What's interesting is it's watching like who's adopting, it's like you look at like the pandemic has really opened up the view of the projects, which ones are doing well. And how do I say this politely? The projects that were being blocked or hidden, or the KPIs camouflaging the value were exposed because I mean, once that pulled back the curtain, people realized, "Oh my God, we're stuck," Or "we're inadequate, we are antiquated. We need to change," because now the pressure to deliver shifted to digital. I mean, this literally exposed the good, bad, and the ugly. >> It did and some were more prepared than others. There are great examples. We worked with the SBA to help expand the portal for the payroll protection program to get more lenders access faster. And that was a great project. They were able to respond really quickly and we were able to support them in that. Others, not so much. I think it you're right, it did expose that there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity to accelerate some of the things that they were doing already in terms of digital transformation. >> How about the GovCloud and the federal customers that you have, what's the traction point? How has that going? Is there a new generation here? >> GovCloud has been a great success. GovCloud it's our- >> John: 10-year anniversary. >> It's our 10-year anniversary, so we're thrilled to celebrate that. I can't believe it's 2011. >> EC2 is 15. Is that 315? I guess 15, too is SQS, the original building blocks. >> So, we've got a lot of great success through GovCloud and GovCloud was really something that was born out of what customers wanted, primarily federal customers. But we've also seen over the last few years, real adoption from regulated industry, real adoption from partners that are going into GovCloud that really want to take advantage of the security and compliance that federal customers need and the larger defense industrial base organizations need. So, GovCloud's been a fabulous success and expect I expect a lot of growth going forward. >> Yeah, is there a cultural shift in the federal government now? I can imagine some countries have been exploring this. I did talk briefly about it with Ms. Shannon Kellogg and John Wood, about how, if you're under the age of 40 and you work in the federal government, you got to be like, "Why aren't we doing this?" Like there seems to be like a cultural shift, younger generation coming in and be like, looking at the old way and be like, "Why are we still doing that?" >> Well, I think look bipartisan support for digital transformation, for making sure that we have the competitive edge for generations and generations to come in the US both in business and in defense and national security, I think is an imperative. I mean nobody I've talked to disagrees that we need to do this. And I think that younger workforce coming in behind I'm jealous of the 40-year olds, I wish I was under 40, but none of workforce really sees the obstacles that maybe previous generation saw these emerging technologies are becoming, the basic unit of computer's getting smaller, the cost to do these things is coming way down and I think that younger workforce says, "Why aren't we doing this?" >> Yeah and I think the Air Force projects are interesting too because that shows us not just about the CIA or the DOD that you have, they're leaning into production workloads, and the mission critical workloads too, the DOD is also now continuing to adopt. What else are you guys doing with the DOD? >> Well, we're partnering with GDIT on milCloud and that's going to give DOD mission owners access to a whole suite of AWS services. So, we're really excited about that. And those are available now. We're the only Cloud provider that's making that accessible to them on milCloud. And so this is going to open up the opportunity for them to start doing that mission work that you described. A good example of that are programs like ABMS, Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System. It's part of their effort around JADC2 and a great set of capabilities that they're delivering there. We're happy to have participated. We did some testing and some show intel, if you will at Ramstein Air Force Base and we're really proud to support that effort and we're excited about what the Air Force is doing. >> You know, I've always been impressed with the DOD when the tactical edge concept came out, that was very impressive because they're really using the data properly and I know Amazon has been doing well in this area because you've got things like Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball products. How's that edge piece developing? Do you see that becoming more critical now? >> It's absolutely critical. It's not becoming critical, it is critical and I think if you look at what the DOD and all of their partners are trying to accomplish, it's really moving all of that data around from the very edge in theater, back home to where it needs to be analyzed, doing it fast, doing it secure, being able to deliver on their missions and that's what this is all about. So, we see huge, huge opportunities to really innovate around the edge. >> Yeah, the data equation really is fascinating to me. Just when you think about things like words, highly available versus high availability means something 'cause you're going to want real time, not just on available data, you got to have it real time so the pressure around these projects are high. And so technically, you've got to have low latency on all this stuff. >> That's true, that's true. You've got to either have near real time or real-time availability and in many cases there's high stakes. So, the ability the DOD to pull this off is really, really important and we're a big supporter of that. >> Dave, I want to get your perspective because you've been in the industry, you've seen that the ways, we talked before cameras about the '90s and data centers and stuff. 10 years of GovCloud, look at public sector, just to look at the 10 years, interesting evolution. I mean, you couldn't give Cloud a wait 15 years ago. They weren't moving, glacier speed of adoption, now, massive adoption, uptakes there, the transformations are happening, migrations are huge, healthcare, which is like silo the data, HIPAA compliance lock everything down, everything's opening up. This is causing a lot of change. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, my reaction to that is I think customers are starting to connect what their outcomes are, whether it's a business outcome or a mission outcome or both to what Cloud can actually do. And I think that's freeing them up to make decisions about enabling Cloud in their environment, enabling experimentation, because that's what you want. You don't know what you're going to be faced with. We don't know what the threats are. We don't know if there's going to be another major pandemic. We hope there's not, but we don't know and if you set goals around your outcomes for mission and tie those, Cloud becomes such an enabler for that. And I see customers embracing that. Customers across the spectrum, nonprofit, healthcare providers, everybody, Homeland Security, VA, they're all thinking about, "What are the mission outcomes we're trying to drive?" >> Yeah, what's interesting too on that is that, just to point out is that the applications now aren't as complex to build relatively to the speed. In other words, you can get the time to value. So, the pandemic showed people that if you were in the Cloud and had that agility or optionality to be agile, you could write software 'cause software is the key in this, and not let's do the waterfall, 12-weeks assessment, 10-month rollout. Now people are doing it in 10 days, new applications. >> Sure, sure. Well, I tell customers a lot, "Think about McDonald's during the pandemic and think about customers like that who had to react to a new environment of delivery and your fast food fresh and how quickly companies like that are able to roll out capabilities." And I don't know that federal customers will be able to do it in a week or two weeks, but it's certainly possible. And it certainly will shorten that lead time that they have now in their software development. >> Well, great to see you, Dave. Is there any customers you want to highlight and you want to talk about, get a plug in for? >> Yeah, a lot of great customers here representing today and we're really appreciative also just want to say it was really great to see Max on stage for his first summit and think it was great to see Laura and others as well too. We've got some great customers coming here, The Veteran's affairs is going to be here as well as the Navy presenting on a lot of their capabilities today. So, I'm really excited about that. >> Yeah, a lot of action and education, healthcare, really blooming, really changing and modernizing. Big-wave migration, modernization, all kinds of the big wave. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah, big things coming and some of these systems are ready, so these systems are 40 and 50 years old and we're here to help these customers deliver on the agility and the extensibility of these systems to really serve citizens. >> What's your outlook for next year? What are you seeing next year so happening? How do you see everything unfolding? So you mentioned the pandemic, we're still in it, Delta Virus, who knows what's going to happen next, the world stage is changing, the global economy, space. >> I see customers really leaning in and starting to see the benefits of moving their data to the Cloud, number one, and then also to getting the insights using AI and ML to really drive the insights that they need to make the decisions on that data and I see more and more customers doing that. I did a panel this week, moderated a panel with some great customers around that and getting started is probably the biggest thing that I see and we're going to have more and more customers getting started. >> Yeah, getting into the Cloud. Congratulations to milCloud by the way, too. That was a good call out. All right, thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> John: Yeah, thanks, Sean. >> Okay, keep coverage here. The Public Sector Summit, live in Washington, D.C. in-person event also hybrid we're streaming out. We're doing remote interviews and Amazon is streaming all the keynotes and key sessions for the digital folks out there. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)