>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Here live in Las Vegas for aws reinvent I'm John for a devil on the ads, always extracting the signal from the noise. We're here for 1/7 reinvent of the eight years that they've had at what a wave. One of the biggest waves is the modernization of procurement, the modernization of business, commercial business and the rapid acceleration of public sector. We're here with the chief of public sector for AWS. Teresa Carlson, vice president publics that globally great to have you >>so great to have the Q begin this year. We appreciate you being here, >>so we're just seeing so much acceleration of modernization. Even in the commercial side, 80 talks about transformation. It's just a hard core on the public sector side. You have so many different areas transforming faster because they haven't transformed before. That's correct. This is a lot of change. What's changed the most for you in your business? >>Well, again, I'll be here 10 years this mad that A B s and my eighth reinvent, and what really changed, which was very exciting this year, is on Monday. We had 550 international government executives here from 40 countries who were talking about their modernization efforts at every level. Now again, think about that. 40 different governments, 550 executives. We had a fantastic day for them planned. It was really phenomenal because the way that these international governments or think about their budget, how much are they going to use that for maintaining? And they want to get that lesson last. Beckett for Modernization The Thin John It's a Beckett for innovation so that they continue not only modernized, but they're really looking at innovation cycles. So that's a big one. And then you heard from somewhere customers at the breakfast this morning morning from from a T. F. As part of the Department of Justice. What they're doing out. I'll call to back on firearms. They completely made you the cloud. They got rid of 20 years of technical debt thio the Veterans Administration on what they're digging for V A benefits to educational institutions like our mighty >>nose, and he had on stages Kino, Cerner, which the health care companies and what struck me about that? I think it relates to your because I want to get your reaction is that the health care is such an acute example that everyone can relate to rising costs. So cloud helping reduce costs increase the efficiencies and patient care is a triple win. The same thing happens in public sector. There's no place to hide anymore. You have a bona fide efficiencies that could come right out of the gate with cloud plus innovation. And it's happening in all the sectors within the public sector. >>So true. Well, Cerner is a great example because they won the award at V a Veteran's administration to do the whole entire medical records modernization. So you have a company on stage that's commercial as I met, commercial as they are public sector that are going into these large modernization efforts. And as you sit on these air, not easy. This takes focus and leadership and a real culture change to make these things happen. >>You know, the international expansion is impressive. We saw each other in London. We did the health care drill down at your office is, of course, a national health. And then you guys were in Bahrain, and what I deserve is it's not like these organizations. They're way behind. I mean, especially the ones that it moved to. The clouds are moving really fast. So well, >>they don't have as much technical debt internationally. It's what we see here in the U. S. So, like I was just in Africa and you know what we talked about digitizing paper. Well, there's no technology on that >>end >>there. It's kind of exciting because they can literally start from square one and get going. And there's a really hunger and the need to make that happen. So it's different for every country in terms of where they are in their cloud journey. >>So I want to ask you about some of the big deals. I'll see Jet eyes in the news, and you can't talk about it because it's in protest and little legal issues. But you have a lot of big deals that you've done. You share some color commentary on from the big deals and what it really means. >>Yeah, well, first of all, let me just say with Department of Defense, Jet are no jet. I We have a very significant business, you know, doing work at every part of different defense. Army, Navy, Air Force in the intelligence community who has a mission for d o d terminus a t o N g eight in a row on And we are not slowing down in D. O d. We had, like, 250 people at a breakfast. Are Lantian yesterday giving ideas on what they're doing and sharing best practices around the fence. So we're not slowing down in D. O d. We're really excited. We have amazing partners. They're doing mission work with us. But in terms of some really kind of fend, things have happened. We did a press announcement today with Finn Rat, the financial regulatory authority here in the U. S. That regulates markets at this is the largest financial transactions you'll ever see being processed and run on the cloud. And the program is called Cat Consolidated Audit Trail. And if you remember the flash crash and the markets kind of going crazy from 2000 day in 2008 when it started, Finneran's started on a journey to try to understand why these market events were happening, and now they have once have been called CAT, which will do more than 100 billion market points a day that will be processed on the cloud. And this is what we know of right now, and they'll be looking for indicators of nefarious behavior within the markets. And we'll look for indicators on a continuous basis. Now what? We've talked about it. We don't even know what we don't know yet because we're getting so much data, we're going to start processing and crunching coming out of all kinds of groups that they're working with, that this is an important point even for Finn rep. They're gonna be retiring technical debt that they have. So they roll out Cat. They'll be retiring other systems, like oats and other programs that they >>just say so that flash crash is really important. Consolidated, honest, because the flash crash, we'll chalk it up to a glitch in the system. Translation. We don't really know what happened. Soto have a consolidated auto trail and having the data and the capabilities, I understand it is really, really important for transparency and confidence in the >>huge and by the way, thinner has been working with us since 2014. They're one of our best partners and are prolific users of the cloud. And I will tell you it's important that we have industries like thin red regulatory authorities, that air going in and saying, Look, we couldn't possibly do what we're doing without cloud computing. >>Tell me about the technical debt because I like this conversation is that we talk about in the commercial side and developer kind of thinking. Most businesses start ups, Whatever. What is technical debt meet in public sector? Can you be specific? >>Well, it's years and years of legacy applications that never had any modernization associated with them in public sector. You know now, because you've talked about these procurement, your very best of your very savvy now public sector >>like 1995 >>not for the faint of heart, for sure that when you do procurement over the years when they would do something they wouldn't build in at new innovations or modernizations. So if you think about if you build a data center today a traditional data center, it's outdated. Tomorrow, the same thing with the procurement. By the time that they delivered on those requirements. They were outdated. So technical debt then has been built up years of on years of not modernizing, just kind of maintaining a status quo with no new insides or analytics. You couldn't add any new tooling. So that is where you see agencies like a T F. That has said, Wow, if I'm gonna if I'm gonna have a modern agency that tracks things like forensics understands the machine learning of what's happening in justice and public safety, I need to have the most modern tools. And I can't do that on an outdated system. So that's what we kind of call technical death that just maintains that system without having anything new that you're adding to >>their capabilities lag. Everything's products bad. Okay, great. Thanks for definite. I gotta ask you about something that's near and dear to our heart collaboration. If you look at the big successes in the world and within Amazon Quantum Caltex partnering on the quantum side, you've done a lot of collaboration with Cal Cal Poly for ground station Amazon Educate. You've been very collaborative in your business, and that's a continuing to be a best practice you have now new things like the cloud innovation centers. Talk about that dynamic and how collaboration has become an important part of your business model. >>What we use their own principles from Amazon. We got building things in our plan. Innovation centers. We start out piloting those two to see, Could they work? And it's really a public private partnership between eight MPs and universities, but its universities that really want to do something. And Cal Poly's a great example. Arizona State University A great example. The number one most innovative university in the US for like, four years in a row. And what we do is we go in and we do these public sector challenges. So the collaboration happens. John, between the public sector Entity, university with students and us, and what we bring to the table is technical talent, air technology and our mechanisms and processes, like they're working backwards processes, and they were like, We want you to bring your best and brightest students. Let's bring public sector in the bowl. They bring challenges there, riel that we can take on, and then they can go back and absorb, and they're pretty exciting. I today I talked about we have over 44 today that we've documented were working at Cal Poly. The one in Arizona State University is about smart cities. And then you heard We're announcing new ones. We've got two in France, one in Germany now, one that we're doing on cybersecurity with our mighty in Australia to be sitting bata rain. So you're going to see us Add a lot more of these and we're getting the results out of them. So you know we won't do if we don't like him. But right now we really like these partnerships. >>Results are looking good. What's going on with >>you? All right. And I'll tell you why. That why they're different, where we are taking on riel public sector issues and challenges that are happening, they're not kind of pie in the sky. We might get there because those are good things to do. But what we want to do is let's tackle things that are really homelessness, opioid crisis, human sex trafficking, that we're seeing things that are really in these communities and those air kind of grand. But then we're taking on areas like farming where we talked about Can we get strawberries rotting on the vine out of the field into the market before you lose billions of dollars in California. So it's things like that that were so its challenges that are quick and riel. And the thing about Cloud is you can create an application and solution and test it out very rapidly without high cost of doing that. No technical Dan, >>you mentioned Smart Cities. I just attended a session. Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston's, got this 50 50 years smart city plan, and it's pretty impressive, but it's a heavy lift. So what do you see going on in smart cities? And you really can't do it without the cloud, which was kind of my big input cloud. Where's the data? What do you say, >>cloud? I O. T is a big part at these. All the centers that Andy talked about yesterday in his keynote and why the five G partnerships are so important. These centers, they're gonna be everywhere, and you don't even know they really exist because they could be everywhere. And if you have the five G capabilities to move those communications really fast and crypt them so you have all the security you need. This is game changing, but I'll give you an example. I'll go back to the kids for a minute at at Arizona State University, they put Io TI centers everywhere. They no traffic patterns. Have any parking slots? Airfield What Utilities of water, if they're trash bins are being filled at number of seats that are being taken up in stadiums. So it's things like that that they're really working to understand. What are the dynamics of their city and traffic flow around that smart city? And then they're adding things on for the students like Alexis skills. Where's all the activity? So you're adding all things like Alexa Abs, which go into a smart city kind of dynamic. We're not shop. Where's the best activities for about books, for about clothes? What's the pizza on sale tonight? So on and then two things like you saw today on Singapore, where they're taking data from all different elements of agencies and presenting that bad to citizen from their child as example Day one of a birth even before, where's all the service is what I do? How do I track these things? How do I navigate my city? to get all those service is the same. One can find this guy things they're not. They're really and they're actually happening. >>Seems like they're instrumented a lot of the components of the city learning from that and then deciding. Okay, where do we double down on where do we place? >>You're making it Every resilient government, a resilient town. I mean, these were the things that citizens can really help take intro Web and have a voice in doing >>threes. I want to say congratulations to your success. I know it's not for the faint of heart in the public sector of these days, a lot of blockers, a lot of politics, a lot of government lockers and the old procurement system technical debt. I mean, Windows 95 is probably still in a bunch of PCs and 50 45 fighters. 15 fighters. Oh, you've got a great job. You've been doing a great job and riding that wave. So congratulations. >>Well, I'll just say it's worth it. It is worth it. We are committed to public sector, and we really want to see everyone from our war fighters. Are citizens have the capabilities they need. So >>you know, you know that we're very passionate this year about going in the 2020 for the Cube and our audience to do a lot more tech for good programming. This'll is something that's near and dear to your heart as well. You have a chance to shape technology. >>Yes, well, today you saw we had a really amazing not for profit on stage with It's called Game Changer. And what we found with not for profits is that technology can be a game changer if they use it because it makes their mission dollars damage further. And they're an amazing father. And send a team that started game changer at. Taylor was in the hospital five years with terminal cancer, and he and his father, through these five years, kind of looked around. Look at all these Children what they need and they started. He is actually still here with us today, and now he's a young adult taking care of other young Children with cancer, using gaming technologies with their partner, twitch and eight MPs and helping analyze and understand what these young affected Children with cancer need, both that personally and academically and the tools he has He's helping really permit office and get back and it's really hard, Warren says. I was happy. My partner, Mike Level, who is my Gran's commercial sales in business, and I ran public Sector Day. We're honored to give them at a small token of our gift from A to B s to help support their efforts. >>Congratulates, We appreciate you coming on the Cube sharing the update on good luck into 2020. Great to see you 10 years at AWS day one. Still, >>it's day one. I feel like I started >>it like still, like 10 o'clock in the morning or like still a day it wasn't like >>I still wake up every day with the jump in my staff and excited about what I'm gonna do. And so I am. You know, I am really excited that we're doing and like Andy and I say we're just scratching the surface. >>You're a fighter. You are charging We love you, Great executive. You're the chief of public. Get a great job. Great, too. Follow you and ride the wave with Amazon and cover. You guys were documenting history. >>Yeah, exactly. We're in happy holidays to you all and help seeing our seventh and 20 >>so much. Okay, Cube coverage here live in Las Vegas. This is the cube coverage. Extracting the signals. Wanna shout out to eight of us? An intel for putting on the two sets without sponsorship, we wouldn't be able to support the mission of the Cube. I want to thank them. And thank you for watching with more after this short break.

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

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello. Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 not only are we there in person this year we're remote because of the pandemic and all that going on with the virtual event three weeks coverage here and special coverage of public sector. Got a great guest, Lorraine Bassett, Chief of Staff in Public Sector of Sandy Carter at AWS. Thanks for joining us. >> Hey John and thank you very much for the invitation. It's really good to be here. >> We've had great conversations with Sandy Carter and her team at awards program really just last year. Just a lot of success stories now with public sector and the pandemic. There's been just a lot of things going on where the technology has pulled you know from the future to present and the public sector needs it the most. This is a key thing. What's your role there? How are you working with Sandy and the team? Take a minute to explain what your background is and your current role. >> So I recently joined the Sandy Carter's team as a Chief of Staff and business advisor. And originally just before then let up the, the go-to-market strategy for the internet of things and Smart Seas in the public sector. So bringing that experience and expertise into Sandy's team and really being able to help provide guidance and advise where necessary. I think that's... it's going to add value to the core team. >> John: Yeah. And certainly there's just been a massive demand. We've been reporting on it really since February just the surge of just the acceleration of digital-- >> Oh yeah. >> Transformation in public sector across the board from education to military agencies just amazing. A lot of things going on here >> Yes. At re:Invent. Can you tell me more about this new services inception go-to-market team because this is new. Take me through explain. >> Yeah it is new and it's really timely and, and a really pivotal new service that we're adding in and well of the new service team that we're creating. So it's really focused on partners. So you know with it's really has a core objective to develop strategy and execute plans for the rollout of new priority services and features across AWS's Public Sector partner teams. So really the new inception the new services inception team its goal is to really be the connection point and the feedback loop for partners with our AWS service teams, our service go-to-market teams and our worldwide public sector teams. We really want to make that transition and that cycle as easy as possible. Ultimately, the new services inception team's objective is really we're going to be able to deliver AWS services to public sector partners and our customers by building connections between all of our services, all our service launches, our public sector partners. And I think really pivotal to this is in all GEOS regardless of the size of the partners and the types. So you know let me just close that out to say you know our strategy it's focused on new services not either in private or if the services in Pre-GA you know that resonate more so in the public sector. And really our goal overall role is to identify you know monetization paths enable them as necessary building marketing and go-to-market assets and helping evangelize the service and increase adoption. >> The number one question is going to ask is why now? What's behind this motivation? Can you just add some commentary to why now is it the pandemic? Is it all things coming together as that cloud scale? I mean what's, what's (laughs) what's the motivation. Why now? >> Well, we you know AWS you know we release we have a lot of new services that yeah and our partners need to have visibility into these services early and yes you're right. There's also been a lot of change and new demand that we hadn't seen before with you know really just in 2020 has been really interesting on the types of different new news cases that we're seeing. So you know we have new services that we want to be able to bring to markets. And so you know and our public sector partners it's long been part of our AWS be the program. So that's nothing new. So what this team is aiming to do is really formalize that process and the program to ensure that we're really maximizing participation from public sector partners. You know how do we do this? So how do we do this differently? It's really ensure that partners are aware of new services that are coming down the road that could impact business or impact their business heavily. >> Yeah. >> And work closely with them to identify the joint value proposition develop go-to-market content and provide value. And you're right John, right? This is, it's all of the above but and it's really how we enable customers based on everything that we've learned and what they need for 20 you know as we go into 2021. >> Okay. So there's the million dollar question. I'm a partner, pretend I'm a partner, what's in it for me? I'm I making more money? Am I got to to go faster? >> Oh yeah. >> What's the benefits to me as a partner? >> So this is you know there, there are... So you're right. There are a lot of really good benefits. So there's a couple that come to mind straight away. So let's just, let's just pull out kind of really what's going to be important to the customers... To the partners first. Right firstly, so being part of a formal better program enables faster market which should lead to market differentiation on launch. So this early release and early visibility and early position is really critical I think to our partners. Secondly, there's an ability to influence roadmap early on through our feedback cycle. So all of our partners who work with us know that we're, we're all about innovation. We need to hear what is going on with our customers or with our partners and what we need to do to improve So you know that feedback cycle is key. And thirdly, you know Dedicate you know as you launch and go to market, you will have access to or partners have access to dedicated launch specialist team. That's assigned specifically to work with you on those, on those new services. And lastly, access to technical and sales expertise the sales expertise that will really help drive go-to-market motions. But you know I just... It is I think more than that and is there, there is an ability to diversify revenue streams. There is an ability to upsell and cross sell based on key learnings. And really as we, as we grow and learn from the new services we can build new business models through go joint go-to-market planning you know and really just take in some of the key benefits that the, the new services that inception team can offer. >> So what's the requirements to get in? All partners is there a pre-recs? Is that a wait list? Can you just give in kind of quick detail on how it works and how do people engage? How do the partners engage with the program? >> Now that's a good question. So really any APN tier partner consulting and technology partner that is really willing to commit to working with us is committed to testing developing public sector, partner and customer references and providing regular feedback. I mean really this is all about innovation. So we don't want to be specific and narrow on the partners who want to drive these or want to be able to drive these new services. >> What does a successful launch look like when you have your partners engaged, things are happening, the service new service team comes in. What's it look like take us through what success looks like here? >> Well success. So I think if you just kind of work backwards from this success you know it's really it's in our culture to be customer obsessed. So really success is it's key to listen to our partners and customers to help us build what that successful model would look like. So there's two questions we'd come up with is what services do we engage? And what partners should we engage? And that will help maximize our ability to be successful. So that what services we engage is, is linked to what resonates most for the public sector ecosystem. Now and the customers. So it also is looking at the most pressing challenges that customers are facing and also how the new service can help unlock value. >> Yeah. >> So that's success around the services. Now success around partners is you know what partners to engage that is you know that is around determining the ideal partner profile for example for service. And we do that by looking at competencies, references, vertical focus, and the customer base. And so you know going back to your original question about what is success it really is a strong alignment with partners and the services that really maximize the you know the strength of our go to market together. >> All right thanks so much for explaining the new services inception go-to-market team and capabilities. Final question where can people learn more information and get engaged? Can you share any data on, on what can they do? >> So the fastest path is to engage with the account team AWS and our partner development managers. Then you know there you can learn to and how to participate in future new service launches and facilitate introductions you know between us you know between the new inceptions teams so that we can get to know you. >> Lorraine Bassett Chief of Staff for AWS Public Sector partners. Great to have you on looking forward to hearing more of how it's going with Sandy. I know there's a lot of growth. A lot of action happening >> Yeah. >> With the pandemic public sector has an awakening. They've realized that now's the best time to pivot all those years of living in the antiquated old world is now coming to fruition. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> Yeah this is a very exciting time. Thank you very much John. >> Yeah. >> Really appreciated. >> It's going to be massive change and it's super exciting. Public sector is going to be moving very, very fast. >> Yes. >> Thanks for coming I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay so keeps coverage. I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual this year. We're not in person. This is part of AWS has been through all three weeks we've been here deep, doing deep dives, getting all the conversations. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. This is theCUBE virtual. Special coverage of the public sector. Today Rebecca Wetherly, Director of Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners for AWS. Great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. >> So just the news we've been covering all through re:Invented priors, just the growth in public sector. The acceleration with the pandemic, it's just that this acceleration has been massive. So I want to just get get your take. It's been hard but also, it's been an opportunity for partners. >> You leading the Integrators. >> Sure. >> They're on the front lines. I got to ask you, (chuckling) what is AWS doing to support their partners, as the business models are forced really upon them to move faster? >> Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me start with saying that, companies are really building a business in partnering with us. Because of global needs such as the pandemic. But we also have many partners that are coming to us because of our customer demand outside of COVID. Because we're a leader in cloud innovation, and because we've got a global field engagement and go-to-market strategy. You know AWS is a customer driven company, and our partners are also our customers. We have a full suite of programs for our partners and whether they be a consulting partner or a technology partner. We have tens of thousands of partners all across the globe, with more than 35,000 new partners since January 2016. And in our public sector space, we have over 1,500 partners with solutions and experience, delivering on a combination of government, education, and nonprofit customer missions all around the world. Consulting partners are really professional services firms. That help customers of all types and sizes design, architect, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS. They accelerate the journey to the cloud for our customers. And they often are implementing technology solutions. As you referred to around COVID, that our technology partners are actually developing. So consulting partners are SIs that I work with, Strategic Consultant Partners, Managed Service Providers, and also resellers. And they are providing really great value to our customers by providing strategic advisory services, implementation and migration services, Staffog. They also have great specialty depth and machine learning or AI. IOT, data lakes and analytics. And even in things like communication tools using technologies like we're doing today on zoom, and taking those to our customers. Our technology partners on the other hand they deliver hardware, connectivity services and software solutions that are hosted or integrated with AWS cloud. And they deliver components to broad customer solutions, often via our consulting partners. We have a great, a great way of delivering technology through our AWS Marketplace and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I will say, that our tech partners are helping our customers decrease their deployment times, provide cost optimization and infrastructure for DevOps and production workloads. They're also lowering their costs on code development by using our broad portfolio of services. And oftentimes for our public sector customers they are helping shorten the path to achieving regulatory requirements for our public sector needs. >> That's awesome. You guys have a lot to do there to support your partners. Obviously the main concern is, how do I maintain that profitability in the fast pace. And then making sure that their customers can also transition and ride the digital transformation wave. So I have to ask you, what programs are you guys offering to help these partners succeed because certainly it's beyond just the profitability. it's this new business model of Cloud-scale. So what programs specifically are you guys offering? >> Yeah, we have a lot of different programs at AWS. The first stop is really the AWS Partner Network. Which I'll refer to as the APN. This is really our global partner program for technology and consulting businesses to leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN is the first place where companies can build, market, and sell their offerings, and provide valuable business, technical, and opportunities for marketing with their customers. Our programs provide promotional support. We provide visibility throughout our website. We give partners opportunities to engage with customers for events, social media. And we provide access to funding and go-to market opportunities. I touched on briefly our AWS Marketplace . And this is really a great program offering to our customers both consulting partners and technology partners. The AWS Marketplace simplifies procurement and entitlement of provisioning software across 50 different categories. And we have more than 8,000 transactional listings. That marketplace connects customers with more than 1,000 different ISBs or independent software vendors to help meet their business needs. And we have more than 300,000 customers using software from the AWS Marketplace. The Marketplace is also available on 24 different regions. So when a customer chooses to use the Marketplace they have the opportunity to procure their software from our consulting partners and leverage the software and the technology from our from our tech partners. Other really cool programs we have are our Partner Transformation Program or SaaS Factory Program, and also our Migration Acceleration Program. >> Awesome. Great programs. What else are you guys besides programs, Are you guys doing >> Yeah. >> to help partners succeed. Because I know there's a lot of touches, there's some new things going on. What else do you guys do? >> Yeah, I think we have a lot of great resources available to our partners. Most of our partners have Partner Development Managers that are working with them on a daily basis. Access to our business development and sales teams, solutions architects and other subject matter experts. Really getting deep into the technology and having access to those folks to help our partners design, build, architect and validate a purchase with customers. Also our Professional Services Teams.Right? They are deep subject matter experts that our partners have the ability to tap into. And then of course, because of the way we go to market in public sector, access and engagement with our capture, bid, and proposal teams are super important. We also have to consider access for our partners to be trained and become certified. That's a real requirement that our customers need to help them achieve their goals. We offer digital and classroom training for our partners to be able to learn at their own pace or via an AWS instructor. And AWS training and certification helps our partners build competence, confidence, and credibility with our customers. We also have AWS competencies. And our competency program is designed to identify, validate, and promote APN partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success. One of the most critical competencies for us is and these days is around our migration. Migration competencies allows our partners to accelerate their customer's cloud adoption journey by providing strategy, personnel tools, education, and tech support to their customers. One of those customers and partners is InterVision. They're a consulting firm that provide strategic advisory services to organizations to help them run, grow, and transform their business needs with the cloud via modern IT services. Their experts have a deep history in technology solutions and they have a deep bench of certified engineers and data scientists to excel delivering Managed Services and Migration Services to both public sector and commercial customers. And with the California Department of Technology. Which is a state agency that provides authority and responsibility over all aspects of technology for California state governments, they selected InterVision to work with them due to their expertise and their proprietary offering called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance. And that offering provided that CDT, the ability, pardon me. To take advantage of their Cloud Migration operations and optimization specialty. So our partners are really getting great opportunities to build their business and to accelerate their their work with us through a variety of programs, and by really digging deep and leveraging all of the programs that are available to them. >> It's nice with the mix of programs, plus the field support, plus the care they're nurtured that, grow that. As you know in these in these markets where you have partnerships and channels and relationships. You need to be profitable. And profitability is about happy customers. >> Rebecca: Sure. >> And margins.(chuckles) Making money. >> Rebecca: Yeah. Sure. >> You got to make money to stay in business. So, this is a big opportunity as the new economics of cloud come into the channel. This is really a big conversation. Moving fast, scaling up, new kinds of services. The integrators are really having a good time here. And these are new practices. How can someone learn more? What's out there? How does someone get engaged with you guys? What information can they, is there a site? Is there a program? How does someone get the resources? What would they do? >> Yeah. Well, I will tell you. The first stop is really our website. And that may sound trivial but that is the best place to get started for us. You're going to find there by visiting https://aws.amazon.com. You can register to become an AWS partner very easily. Right there you're going to get step-by-step instructions and learning paths, as well as tutorials and how to get your business up and running, and how to become a partner. And the journey largely looks like this. Right? One. get on board. Get familiar. Establish your relationship and join the Amazon Partner Network. Go through some very basic training and get familiar with their services. Second. Develop those technical and sales skills. Develop a business model where AWS lends the greatest value to your partner business. And as you move through the tiers of maturity, we will co-invest in your business to help you scale. And then three, really go to market. Establish the pathways to your customers. Build out your differentiated approach. Look at the competencies we offer and decide which ones are going to be the most relevant to you. We want you to leverage the funding mechanisms we have, and we want you also to think about how we co-market together. There are so many roads to success and AWS offers lots of different partner programs and opportunities to develop your unique roadmap John. >> Yeah, that's great enablement. That is super valuable. Having the co-funding, the go marketing, and the tools and the programs. All there to enable services to be successful. Rebecca, thanks for sharing that program. >> My pleasure. >> Great to have you on. Rebecca Wetherly, >> Thank you so much. Director of the Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners. A big growing part of the public sector when we need it the most, which is now and it's growing. So check them out. Thanks for watching. This is theCUBE coverage. CUBE virtual, for AWS re:Invent reinvent public sector, special coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCube, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by, AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Okay, welcome back to theCube's coverage, of re:Invent 2020 virtual. It's theCube virtual, I'm John Farrow your host, we're here celebrating, the special coverage of public sector with Sandy Carter, vice president of AWS Public Sector Partners. She heads up the partner group within Public Sector, now in multiple for about a year now. Right Sandy, or so? >> Right, you got it, John. >> About a year? Congratulations, welcome back to theCube, >> Thank you. >> for reason- >> Always a pleasure to be here and what an exciting re:Invent right? >> It's been exciting, we've got wall-to-wall coverage, multiple sets, a lot of actions, virtual it's three weeks, we're not in person we have to do it remote this year. So when real life comes back, we'll bring the Cube back. But I want to take a minute to step back, take a minute to explain your role for the folks that are new to theCube virtual and what you're doing over there at Public Sector. Take a moment to introduce yourself to the new viewers. >> Well, welcome. theCube is phenomenal, and of course we love our new virtual re:Invent as well, as John said, my name is Sandy Carter and I'm vice president with our public sector partners group. So what does that mean? That means I get to work with thousands of partners globally covering exciting verticals like, space and healthcare, education, state and local government, federal government, and more. And what I get to do is, to help our partners learn more about AWS so that they can help our customers really be successful in the marketplace. >> What has been the most, exciting thing for you in the job? >> Well, you know, I love, wow, I love everything about it, but I think one of the things I love the most, is how we in Public Sector, really make technology have a meaningful impact on the world. So John, I get to work with partners like Orbis which is a non-profit they're fighting preventable blindness. They're a partner of ours. They've got something called CyberSec AI which enables us to use machine learning over 20 different machine learning algorithms to detect common eye diseases in seconds. So, you know, that purpose for me is so important. We also work with a partner called Twist Inc it's hard to say, but it just does a phenomenal job with AWS IoT and helps make water pumps, smart pumps. So they are in 7,300 remote locations around the world helping us with clean water. So for me that's probably the most exciting and meaningful part of the job that I have today. >> And it's so impactful because you guys really knew Amazon's business model has always been about enablement from startups to now up and running Public Sector; entities, agencies, education, healthcare, again, and even in spaces, this IoT in space. But you've been on the 100 partner tour over a 100 days. What did you learn, what are you hearing from partners now? What's the messages that you're hearing? >> Well, first of all, it was so exciting. I had a 100 different partner meetings in a 100 days because John, just like you, I missed going around the world and meeting in person. So I said, well, if I can't meet in person I will do a virtual tour and I talked to partners, in 68 different countries. So a couple of things I heard, one is a lot of love for our map program and that's our migration acceleration program. We now have funding available for partners as they assess migration, we can mobilize it and as they migrate it. And you may or may not know, but we have over twice the number of migration competency partners doing business in Public Sector this year, than we did last year. The second thing we heard was that, partners really love our marketing programs. We had some really nice success this year showcasing value for our customers with cyber security. And I love that because security is so important. Andy Jassy always talks about how her customers really have that as priority zeros. So we were able to work with a couple of different areas that we were very proud at and I loved that the partners were too. We did some repeatable solutions with our consulting partners. And then I think the third big takeaway that I saw was just our partners love the AWS technology. I heard a lot about AI and ML. We offered this new program called The Rapid Adoption Assistance Program. It's going global in 2021, and so we help partners brainstorm and envision what they could do with it. And then of course, 5G. 5G is ushering in, kind of a new era of new demand. And we going to to do a PartnerCast on all about 5G for partners in the first quarter. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot. What are the three most talked about programs that you heard? >> Oh, wow, let's see. The three most talked about programs that I heard about, the first one was, is something I'm really excited about. It's called a Think Big for Small Business. It really focuses in on diverse partner groups and types. What it does is it provides just a little bit of extra boost to our small and medium businesses to help them get some of the benefits of our AWS partner program. So companies like MFT they're based down in South Africa it's a husband and wife team that focus on that Black Economic Empowerment rating and they use the program to get some of the go to market capability. So that's number one. Let's see, you said three. Okay, so number two would be our ProServe ready pilot. This helps to accelerate our partner activation and enablement and provides partners a way to get badged on the ProServe best practices get trained up and does opportunity matching. And I think a lot of partners were kind of buzzing about that program and wanting to know more about it. And then ,last but not least, the one that I think of probably really has impact to time to compliance it's called ATO or Authority to Operate and what we do is we help our partners, both technology partners and consulting partners get support for compliance framework. So FedRAMP, of course, we have over 129 solutions right now that are FedRAMPed but we also added John, PCI for financial HIPPA for healthcare, for public safety, IRS 1075 for international GDPR and of course for defense, aisle four, five and six, and CMMC. That program is amazing because it cuts the time to market and have cuts across and have and really steps partners through all of our best practices. I think those are the top three. >> Yeah, I've been like a broken record for the folks that don't know all my interviews I've done with Public Sector over the years. The last one is interesting and I think that's a secret sauce that you guys have done, the compliance piece, being an entrepreneur and starting companies that first three steps in a cloud of dust momentum the flywheel to get going. It's always the hardest and getting the certification if you don't have the resources, it's time consuming. I think you guys really cracked the code on that. I really want to call that out 'cause that's I think really super valuable for the folks that pay attention to and of course sales enablement through the program. So great stuff. Now, given that's all cool, (hands claps) the question I have and I hear all the time is, okay, I'm involved I got a lot of pressure pandemic has forced me to rethink I don't have a lot of IT I don't have a big budget I always complaint but not anymore. Mandate is move fast, get built out, leverage the cloud. Okay, I want to get going. What's the best ways for me to grow with Public Sector? How do I do that if I'm a customer, I really want to... I won't say take a shortcut because there's probably no shortage. How do I throttle up? Quickly, what's your take on that? >> Well, John, first I want to give one star that came to us from a Twilio. They had interviewed a ton of companies and they found that there was more digital transformation since March since when the pandemic started to now than in the last five years. So that just blew me away. And I know all of our partners are looking to see how they can really grow based on that. So if you're a consulting partner, one of the things that we say to help you grow is we've already done some integrations and if you can take advantage of those that can speed up your time to market. So I know know this one, the VMware Cloud on AWS. what a powerful integration, it provides protection of skillsets to your customer, increases your time to market because now VMware, vSphere, VSAN is all on AWS. So it's the same user interface and it really helps to reduce costs. And there's another integration that I think really helps which is Amazon connect one of our fastest growing areas because it's a ML AI, breads solution to help with call centers. It's been integrated with Salesforce but the Service Cloud and the Sales Cloud. So how powerful is that this integrated customer workflow? So I think both of those are really interesting for our consulting partners. >> That's a great point. In fact, well, that's the big part of the story here at re:Invent. These three weeks has been the integration. Salesforce as you mentioned connect has been huge and partner- >> Huge >> so just just great success again, I've seen great momentum. People are seeing their jobs being saved, they're saving lives. People are pretty excited and it's certainly a lot of work you've done in healthcare and education two big areas of activity which is really hard corporation, really, really hard. So congratulations on that and great work. Great to see you, I going to ask you one final question. What's the big message for your customers watching as they prepare for 2021 real life is coming back vaccines on the horizon. We're hearing some good news a lot of great cloud help there. What's your message to send to 2021? >> 2021, for our partners for 2021, one, there is a tremendous growth ahead and tremendous value that our partners have added. And that's both on the mission side, which both Theresa and I discussed during our sessions as well as technology. So I think first messages is, there's lots of growth ahead and a lot of ways that we can add value. Second is, all of those programs and initiatives, there's so much help out there for partners. So look for how you could really accelerate using some of those areas on your customer journey as you're going along. And then finally, I just want John, everybody to know , that we love our partners and AWS is there to help you every step of the way. And if you need anything at all obviously reach out to your PDM or your account manager or you're always welcome to reach out to me. And my final message is just, thank you, through so many different things that have happened in 2020, our partners have come through amazingly with passion with value and just with persistence, never stopping. So thank you to all of our partners out there who've really added so much value to our customers. >> And Amazon is recognizing the leadership of partners in the work you're doing. Your leadership session was awesome for the folks who missed it, check it out on demand. Thank you very much, Sandy for coming on the sharing the update. >> Thank you, John, and great to see all your partners out there. >> Okay, this is theCube virtual covering AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual three weeks, wall-to-wall coverage. A lot of videos ,check out all the videos on demand the leadership sessions, theCube videos and of course the Public Sector video on demand. Micro-site with theCube. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector >>Hi and welcome to the Q Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector. I'm your host, Rebecca >>Knight. >>Today we have two guests for our segment. We have Kevin McCallum Jr. He is the chief technology officer at Maximus. Thanks for joining us, Kevin, and we have way. And we have Steve Zimmerman, who is the vice president of consulting services at Insight. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Steve. >>Thank you for having us appreciate it. >>So I want to start by asking. You both have to tell us a little bit more about your company's. Kevin. Let's start with you. Tell us a little bit more about Maximus. >>Yes, Thanks for having me. Maximus is a 40 year old company. We partner with state, federal and local governments to provide communities with critical health and human service programs. We leverage extensive experience to develop high quality services and solutions that are cost effective and tailored to their unique needs. One of the things that we do is offer government's ability to programs rapidly and scalable so that we can focus on the automation and their operations. We do services from Medicare to Medicaid, Welford work, and we have comprehensive solutions. Help the government's run effectively and efficiently. >>Great, Steve, tell us a little bit about insight. >>Yeah, sure. Um, Insight is a Fortune 500 company, you know, in 2020 will roughly do you know, probably a plus billion dollars in revenue. Global company. You know, we have thousands of treaty GIC relationships, but I'd say we have probably a couple 100 partners. We focus on one of those key partners to us is a W s. Right. As we go to market, Azzawi start, you know, working with our customers around transformation, of which we're gonna talk a little bit about that today with Kevin as it relates, Thio incite public sector. It's >>a pretty sizable >>part of our business. You know, we'll do about $1.5 billion in revenue. We have 200 plus contract vehicles, will work out there over 500 plus teammates, and we're seeing that business grow quarter over quarter, 20% growth. So It's a big investment for us and really looking forward to hearing Kevin talk about Maximus, uh, to the team, because obviously it's a big lever for us for inside public sector to get the word out there about the great transformation work. What you do with our customers. >>That's a great segue. So let's go back to you, Kevin, and talk a little bit about Maximus. Cloud transformation. Why did you hire insight for help you with this? >>Yeah, A Z We started our journey. One of the things we realized is as we were moving to the cloud is the experience. We needed a trusted partner and we ran an RFP process looking for partners out there that have done it that have done major data center programs. You're moving large companies, you know, We're moving about 6000 workloads 160 plus applications. So it was not a light or easy project and insight fit that. Aziz, We went through the interview process. It became very clear that they have done this for Fortune 500 companies in the past and their experience is beneficial to helping us drive to the future and the other factors is we wanted to make sure that once we were done with the project, we had the experience internally that they helped us with Thio drive forward. >>So talking about the importance of a trusted partner, which is such a key component of digital transformation cloud journeys tell us a little bit about the the strategy tied to the data center transformation and why you chose AWS. >>Sure. So, as we started doing our research, we did analysis across all of the cloud providers who were out there. AWS is clear leader in the marketplace. Their technology is better aligned with what Maximus has as the underlying technologies were, ah, majority of Lennox Base. We also have windows. We have Oracle, which, with the AWS depth on breath of our offerings, tied better to what we had. The other thing we were looking to do is get rid of our monolithic off the shelf products and use mawr of the cloud based products that are out there. Amazon has a very deep, uh, native technology that allows you to replace your old services where you had to bolt on or purchase another product to something that is integrated and streamlined, you know, down Thio, how do you monitor your systems? How do you do logs things like that. And, you know, as we looked at the time frame, we had to deliver this. They had to be able to grow with us. So as we were building out, new infrastructure were able to build where previously internally. With data centers, you have to buy infrastructure. You wait for it to arrive, you install it. Amazon has it at the click of a ah button. So we're able Thio basically have environment stood up in a day rather than having to wait weeks for it. So and the last thing was up time. So you know Amazon. They're five nines plus in up time and most of our contracts or three nines or better requirements. We had to find a bender that had multiple availability zones and regions that allowed us to be flexible in how we deployed. >>So talking about the convenience and the ability to streamline, and also the need for flexibility in the covert era. Of course, the word hybrid work environments has taken on a new meaning. But I want to ask you about how you see the hybrid era in the long term affecting Maximus. >>Yeah. Since Maximus is a government contractor, we will always be in a hybrid, uh, set up. So some of our contracts are very restrictive, especially when you get into our S d. O. D. And some of those agencies you have a fed ramp requirement is right. Well, with some of the federal agencies. So some of those components about to stay internally So where we can force, uh, you know, moving to the cloud because of the flexibility we have to deploy, that is the right will go. Um, co vid has introduced a new complexity. When it started back in March, you know, Maximus had 30,000 or so employees, and we instantly were thrown into You gotta make those employees get those employees to work from home. So we used Amazon's workspace Thio push our employees to work from home, where, you know, some of the employees and some of our contracts are customer owned equipment. So we couldn't actually take that equipment home. So we had to move to a B y o d model on Amazon workspaces in order to get the users to work from home and the complexity that, with what Amazon has to offer, allowed us to quickly move over 25,000 employees on the Amazon workspaces and work from home and then keeping the data center migration moving in the middle of it has also been, ah, challenge. So we will, in our federal space, still have internal data centers. Integration points that Amazon offers with their inter connects is key toe. How we make it a seamless process because we may have a business unit has stuff sitting in the data center and at Amazon, and they have to look at the seamless package. >>Steve, I want to bring you in here a little bit into this conversation. Cloud transformation, digital transformation. These are These are difficult and huge undertaking in the best of times. How does this pandemic this health crisis emergency. How has that affected the way you help your clients the way you work with your clients? Collaborate, communicate, talk a little bit about the effect of Kobe on this on the >>eso I would. I'll answer the question in a couple different ways, so I would agree with Kevin because, you know, forget about what we do with our customers. You know, we had a pivot really quick to write all remote workforce. You know, I think about my team, you know, 1000 plus teammates. Everyone's 80% travel all gone like, um, and I write eso everybody working remote. Everybody work from their homes. And but the challenging part was working with our customers. And, you know, I look at you know, I looked at with Kevin. You know, I've never met Kevin in person, you know, frankly, and there's teammates have come on to our to the project and execute executing this program remotely, so it makes it that much harder working with the customer. Um, you know, doing more video chats. You know, our methodology is built to be all remote. We have a proprietary tool called snap start that allows to bail scan environments. All that things done. Remote migrations could be done remote. The hard part is when you have to go on site because there's this stuff you have to go on site for around physical inventory to look at the equipment, but it just makes it that much harder. You know, I think he taking advantage of these video tools like we're doing today. You know, I can't tell me how many Skype You know how many calls have been on with Kevin like this and with his peers and with his leadership. But communication is really important program like this because, you know, in a program like this, there will be problems, right? And there will be challenges and, you know, getting on a call on being I will look at Kevin face to face and see what his reaction is really key. But you gotta work that much harder. You gotta work that much harder now in the pandemic. You know, I have other projects right now leaving with this other projects that, frankly, we have sold all remote and we're doing it all remote. And what I'm seeing with the bidam IQ is an acceleration of digital transformation. So, other similar projects like we're doing with Kevin. We're doing for other large fortune 500 companies because it's an acceleration of Hey, look, we gotta be old digital now, so it'll be interesting to see you know how the pandemic effects is long term because it is definitely accelerating out their digital transformation if you haven't done it, you're in trouble because it's gonna eat your company alive. >>Mhm. So, Kevin, he's talking. He talked a little bit about she talked a little bit about the importance of communication, particularly when work so many people are working from home. Um, talk a little bit of about other best practices that have emerged. Things that you have noticed. Things that you advice you would have to your peers. I mean, a Z we heard from Steve. If you're not there yet, you're in trouble. But for the for the people, for the executives out there who are watching this, What advice would you have for them? >>Yeah, I think that you know this this is brought to light. You know, there was always a view that you had to be in an office on a white board and actual actually functioning in that fashion. So, you know, before the pandemic, I was traveling three weeks a month on now, not traveling. I feel that I actually get more work done. I actually feel that I'm closer to the team just because we've introduced a lot of different digital channels. So now we have slack we have teams we do zoom. I require everybody to be on a on video, whereas previously before the pandemic you'd rarely have anybody on video. Um, and you've seen Ah, transformation is people pick up the phone a lot quicker than they did in the past. So it is, actually, I believe, brought the team closer together because now you know, everybody's on. Um, the downside of it is everybody's on all the time. So you've also had to have people step away from work because generally when they take PTO, they leave the office that go somewhere with their family. Now it's your kind of at home. There's not much to dio. You kinda have to force them to take the time off. One of the major factors that has has been interesting is we're doing this transformation in the middle of co vid with moving. All of our resource is the home. So we've we've had to take pauses, toe focus on getting everybody to work from home. Okay, now their work from home back to the project. And, you know, it's kind of a change the timeline a little bit, but in the end, you know we have some hard deadlines to meet. So it's been an interesting transition. You >>know, Kevin, um, I wanna agree with you two points is, uh you know, I think we're also getting not only your time, but also senior leadership, that I think, frankly, we never would have gotten, you know, I'm talking, you know, your peers and your leadership, Like I would fly for those meetings. I think about all the time that I've saved. But then again, it never ends, right? Never. It begins and never ends. And, you know, one of the things I'm concerned about is you know, the long term burnout factor for these folks because and depending on what state you're in, it never ends. You don't have anywhere to go, right. And you know, I think about teammates. I think you know, Kevin, I have talked about this related to our project like burdens and really thing right now for sure. 889 months into this thing. It's a real thing. Is people they have to focus on. Is is work sometimes. So it's a it's a concern for all of us is a project team is we start looking at the executing. This continue to execute this program for the next year. >>And it really highlights the importance of visionary leadership and a leader who cares who is empathetic, who is checking in with his or her team and making sure that the colleagues feel appreciated and cared for. I want you both to just give us look into your crystal ball is a little bit and talk about the where you see things 12, 24 months from now. Hopefully there will be a vaccine and we will return to somewhat of a of a new normal. Um, talk a little bit about where you see the Maximus transformation in two years. Absolutely. Yeah. Start with you. >>So s so you know, our cloud migration. We have some hard deadlines through next year, so we have a focus with insight to get that completed by September next year because our data center contracts are up and we've got to get out. You know, one of the the advantages of where we're headed is to move into more of a Dev ops model where you know you're able thio enable groups that have previously not been able to do work just do thio. The infrastructure was set up your now, enabling them to do deployments, get into production and have full stack ownership. That's really where our focus is. Is enablement of the teams that couldn't do the work previously because now you're in a different type of environment. Um, the other thing is being able thio be more agile. So as we move forward into the cloud journey, we as a company are consort contracts quicker. We are part of the, you know, contract tracing on unemployment insurance. We've done a lot of contracts with states that you know previously most of our contracts or anywhere from a 62 120 day startup. These contracts and contact tracing and covert projects. We've had to start them up in three days. That's having 500 employees online on workspaces on Genesis Cloud and fully functional, and it has been a challenge. But it also has introduced a a better way to do business because now we can we can move quicker for our customers and we can get contracts where they come and say, Hey, I need something in the next couple days. If you look further down the road. You know, it's taking the advantage of what Amazon has to offer, you know, moving from arm or monolithic programs like, you know, we sit on Oracle on Lenox today. You know, we could move into Aurora, which opens up the doors and floodgates, because then you manage, er a little differently. You manage your data a little differently. That's really where I think the the market's going and where we can actually transform our business. Even better, Thio, where we could be more flexible. We can start up quicker and, you know, be doom or things for our customers. >>The final word from you >>e I think it's gonna be a hybrid world, right? It's at least in the short term. And you know, we believe it's all about the workload and getting those workloads or applications, you know, in in the right spot, whether it be public or private and helping our customers with that journey, you know, just a pile on with Kevin talked about around Dev ops. Once you get a guy to get once you get all the stuff over there, you still got to manage it, Whether it's in a W. S or, you know, on Prem. You still gotta have a process to do that. So we see a lot of opportunity around the Modern I t operations and helping with that way. We want to continue to be a trusted partner. Thio Maximus. It's been a great relationship, but I want to thank Kevin and his his leadership team for trusting in us. And we look forward, Um, or more success with him in the future. >>Excellent. Thank you both so much. Kevin and Steve, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you. >>I'm your host, Rebecca. Night. Stay tuned. For more of the Cube virtual coverage of AWS reinvent with special coverage of the public sector.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Speece the chief federal technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> Likewise, chief federal technologist, that's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. >> It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So chief federal technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. >> Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake big, biggest software IPO and software history your market cap right now is at 66 billion 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day 250 petabytes of data under management, a lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud, why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? >> Yeah, so great question and the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us and thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere, but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm going to run it on your stuff not mine, into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake. We can't reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there, the underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there, otherwise our customers get left in the dark and we can't can't have that. >> And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry the value of the data is in the insights the ability to extract that data in real time glean insights from it so that businesses can make data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms, right, that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for single source, for stuff like? >> Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is. And trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market, in every region undergoes. And how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud but the data cloud is where we're going. And what I mean by data cloud. If you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City you could go around with a clicker and count everyone, or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here. Going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration, to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enrich data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. >> Absolutely that's critical. That the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find. I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies maybe even just anonymously that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? >> Absolutely. We've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services, for example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for a certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we want to make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California, three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities, and not just trying to do audits but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19, getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. >> It is that's going to be absolutely critical but we're also seeing it, you know, everywhere else, such as for universities and education, suddenly this need, the last few months for real-time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies, you talked about enriching data sets so not just companies sources of data but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions, but from a historical real-time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. >> Yeah, sure. Right. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already use today and connecting it to a data source or platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a model view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot, that was not a promise, but trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question is 80% of these very valuable professionals time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today, we work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in data sets. >> What are some of the things that differentiates Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? >> Yeah. Great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud, we didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future, Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. And I know that sounds really nerdy and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value. If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago we'd have a spreadsheet that if I open that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you'd get locked out. You're told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform and Office 365, object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents. Multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention, that's the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object and give you that source of truth the truth that you absolutely need to make decisions. >> And that's critical these days as we know. We're in living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. You know, all these folks from home accessing corporate networks, you know, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? >> Absolutely. So I'll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage the EC Compute, all of the different entities and end points that AWS already secures Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we've also built and rolled this access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to, we recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter. So there's a lot of different capabilities built in, encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchial model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We got to be good at that which is why it's our top priority. >> I didn't, to ever talk about security as an inherited, I must be a dominant trait if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake, what's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? >> Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS, East commercial, so we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com, you can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. Our security is built into all of our regions although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use, but we always, always always protect our users' data, regardless of where it is. >> You make it sound easy, I got to say. (laughing) >> That's because it is. (laughing) Thank you cloud. >> That's good. And well, that's good and it should be, especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you. As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history, just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever, and our relatives ever witnessed, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? (laughing) >> Well, good vibes is our business model. You know, Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you can look for more functions, but really the evolution of the data cloud, our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. >> One more question I wanted to sneak in, how did you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? >> It's, a lot of it comes down to silos that the customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake there isn't such thing really as a data silo there's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified, you can do queries across databases, that's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an App Store for your phone but instead it's data sets and the data sets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier bringing in everything from housing evaluation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already use today along with weather and population counts, the main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more data sets are being published over every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. >> That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world re, you know, recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that, that there was the power of that behind that, and the smart folks like you chief federal technologists, helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> For next piece, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual. (upbeat music)

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