>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to introduce our next guests to highlight the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Telco Solution, and of course, I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We are now joined by Avishai Sharlin Division President at Amdocs Technology, and Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Let's have the opening question for both of you. You know, but let's first start with Avishai. What has been the highlight to date in the journey of both Amdocs and Vodafone? >> Well, it's a good question. I believe that the highlight was the teaming and getting things done together as partners. Unlike many previous experiences, this time, we understood that success equals us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners. So the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team. We always speak about the hurdles, we negotiate sometimes. But eventually, we're coming to the solution together, and making sure that everything is properly managed and properly done in the right timing, and according to plans. >> Terrific, well, Ralf, let's go to you. What do you see as the highlights of this collaboration. >> Now exactly what Avishai said, but let me add to that. What we are following is a real collaborative approach. Now, there's a lot of strengths in that approach. Because we are using for example, swarm intelligence, we are using elements, which you see in clouds attempts as well, for example, yeah, but you see it in agile attempts and agile working methods. And this is what we applied. And as Avishai said, we are doing that as real partners in the program. And we are pulling a lot of strengths out of that by detecting problems early, we have a high level of transparency, we put everything on the table, and differences that we do not fight about the problems. We work collaborative on the solution. And that's really kind of new to the industry we are working in. And that's kind of game changing for it. At the beginning, we said it will be game changing if it works. Now we see that it does. >> Terrific. Well, why do you think generally speaking, that the Telco industry has been so slow, to you know, embrace these kinds of innovations? Let's start with Avishai. >> Yeah. It's less about I think the actual technology, it's more about a handful of parameters that need to be aligned, once you are trying to address these big transformations. You need to upskill a lot of people, you need to educate your manpower, to new technologies and new ways and processes, how to embrace DevOps, how to work in a cloud environment, how to embrace an agile, safe methodology. So there are many small pockets of things that needs to be changed. Not a single element, actually is the same as like five years ago. So in a way, if the organization as a whole, is not being transformed, it's very tough to embrace all those new technologies and succeed in such a journey. So for us, and I think also to our partners in Vodafone, it was a mutual understanding that we need to not just work together, but also tackle the new technologies and methods and processes all together and change the entire organization and ecosystem in order to succeed. In many other cases in the industry, we see that some pockets are not being changed. And then even if the technology is right, you're missing the upscaling of people, if you upskill the people and you forgot the technology, and so on so forth. >> Perfect now, Ralf, I'd love for you to respond to that question as well. >> So the Telco industry is a quite complex industry, that you look to the product it seems to be quite easy. You pick up a phone and you do a phone call or you go to the internet and so on and so forth. But if you think of all the services, which you're using via your smartphone, for example, yeah, it's far away from just doing a phone call. So at the same time where the Telco industry is producing and selling products, it's producing and selling services. At the same time, while you're using it for leisure, you're also using it for emergency calls. So there's a high level of safety, which we need to bring, and we need to pair it with a lot of innovation elements, right, both together. Now, if you take all this and you think of the complexity, it's not easy to introduce new methods and new ways of working, etc, to such an industry, again you need to take two things into account, you need to make it very safe and stable and educated and controlled. And at the same time, you need to be very fast, because it's a fast moving industry. And both together explains how we adopt it and why sometimes we are a bit slower than others, because the trial and error, yeah, it's not that easy, because the error cannot be allowed in big scale. The more I'm happy that in the approach we're taking together with Amdocs and also AWS, we can apply these new methods while keeping the safety and stability. >> Terrific, well, thank you for outlining that safety methodology. Avishai, I'd like to move this back to you. How are you redefining this operation through DevOps and automation? >> Oh, that's an interesting question. I think that automation, needs to be baked into almost everything that we're doing in such a transformation. It's not from the basic technology stuff, but it goes into all the processes, the way you develop, the way you test. The way you deploy, the way later on, you're making sure that everything run in the right way. So automation is key fundamental element in the end to end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you're going into agile development, and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution. So first, as you rightfully said, it's automation. And DevOps is also key over here, because you need to make sure that what you develop is also something that you deploy in the right way. So you need to put in place all the right mechanism, such as (indistinct), and the cloud frameworks, and the relevant different technologies that are adhering into this end to end solution. >> Perfect, now, Ralf, what are your thoughts? How are you redefining the operation now through DevOps and automation? >> We are trying to solve the paradox. Again, the paradox is we want to have things very stable, that would dictate us to do very detailed plans and to adhere to it and so on this is what we did in the past, it fostered for example, taylorism, and similar things. Now, we want to go a step further, we want to apply agile methods, we want to dismantle the taylorism. And the techniques around DevOps, cloud operation, etc, agile methods help us to do that. Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don't want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before, we want to do a step forward and not at the same time step back. And therefore we are combining things. And automation, for example, is one way to do that. DevOps is another way to do that. We are joining the good thinking of operations and the good thinking of development together, and we are pulling additional strengths out of that, while not taking into account or taking on board the weaknesses of the former approach. So it's a stepwise transformation we are following. Automation helps us to focus on the real problems, and not on the things you can automate by technology. >> Terrific. Well, now Avishai, bringing this back to you, Ralf talks about agility and also DevOps, explain the journey today on such a large program. >> The the journey, in what sense? Can you give me some coloring? >> Yeah tell us about this collaboration and keeping that in mind, keeping in mind agility as well as DevOps. You know, the step by step process in developing such a large collaborative program. >> Thank you for clarification. So I think that the journey as a whole had several components, (indistinct) and myself also the beginning about the nature of being true partners here. But it is also about establishing something very new in the industry. Many of the things that we're working are, you know, the first time that we're doing agile manner of developing software and testing, it's so fast, it's the first time we're implementing the latest and greatest DevOps technologies. The first time, we're adhering into new standards and way and behavior from a modernized technology organization. So in a way, this journey is all about a mixture of innovation, new stuff, on one hand, aligned with a very, very tight in a good way, I would call it German engineering, in the sense of making sure the things are in place and making sure that the processes are well defined. And we're seeing at any given point, the different status we're in, what needs to be improved, what is going well, and what future lies ahead. >> Staying with that topic on the journey opening to both of you, and perhaps Ralf would like to jump in here, first, how have AWS technologies been featured as part of this journey. >> AWS has been chosen wisely by us because of its technology components brought to the table. Now, without now pointing to a particular service, which we are using, we talked about automation, we talked about DevOps, now everyone can itself about how AWS in general helps to foster that, the sheer fact that we can merge the different way of working with a different mindset of people working in our collaboration and technology components coming not only, but also from AWS, this is ensuring our success. If you would pull out one of these elements, yeah, out of the equation, that most probably it would not work. I have problems to rate which element is more important, they are all part of the puzzle and otherwise, you will not see the picture and create the picture. So in a nutshell, we are utilizing the AWS technologies in order to allow the speed of development, lots of first times which we have in our collaboration, and the AWS technologies are an essential part of that. >> Terrific and Avishai, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think that the collaboration with AWS goes in several, in a way different shapes and form. On the technology, pure technology level, we're utilizing native EKS, we're moving with the managed Kubernetes. We're using, you know the latest technology in databases, and many other very, very cool technologies coming from AWS. And on a different level, completely different level, I think that AWS understands the behavior of complex enterprise and are assisting us with programs, looking into well architected framework and how to work in a managed environment and what are the technologies that we need to utilize. And also in, from an Amdocs perspective, something that assisted us a lot in this journey, we have a unique technology which defines an end to end solution to development within a micro service cloud native environment, we'll call it M360. AWS assisted a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud native environments. >> Terrific, now to both of you, what do you see as the next step in your collaboration together? Let's bring this to Ralf. >> There is no distinct next step. And maybe this is the consequence of the way of working we have established. There are many small steps we will pursue and most probably, if you want to know, which are the next steps, you need to talk to our teams. This is another aspect of this new way of working, which we apply. The people working in that approach, they tell us how they construct, how they structure this approach. If I would summarize it, we are constantly tearing down the walls between the companies, between silos, between departments working in that collaboration, and we are getting more close together every day. And solving problems quicker, we are getting them quicker on the table, we are getting them quicker, and softer, faster, soft, and AWS, Amdocs are part of this. And this is really nice to see and be part of, that this is really happening. So the next step is, foster the collaboration. >> Avishai do you have any thoughts? >> Yeah, on a personal level, I think the next step would be to glide together in Europe. But on a more serious note, I think that this is becoming like a true partnership. And I think that I see a lot of empowerment coming from both sides, allowing the team to develop together, to think together and to start to create new stuff, that even if you plan ahead, you will never achieve without true collaboration. So this empowerment, the fact that the teams feel that they can do things on their own, and make one and one equals three, two, or you know, or seven, is the big change that I see in front of us. And I really feel it in the air. And I also feel it in in the way we act and we move forward. >> Yeah, so Ralf, how do you see that this program will enable continuous innovation? >> Oh, it does already. So if you're looking to big transformation programs of the past, (indistinct) beside the fact that lots of them actually did not achieve what they are, what they were asked to achieve. Usually big programs, do big plans, and then you have a very long period of preparation. And then usually you have a rather big bank or life and then everything shall be fun. That sometimes work but not most times, it's difficult. Now within our program, we are doing that in collaboration, but step by step by step. And it's more an evolution than a revolution, which we are doing. At least in the way we deploy things, again, we are back to DevOps, continuous integration, continuous deployment and so on all these elements, which you can see in these approaches. And this is where the wheel spinning slice. So it's evolving step by step. And it's bringing benefits step by steps. So the benefits are already in place into to a certain extent, and they're constantly growing. >> Terrific, Avishai, what are your thoughts? How do you see the innovation of being able to continue and even further? >> In a way we're in a world that everything is in continuum, so it's continuous delivery, and continuous development and also continuous innovation. As long as you know, the ecosystem of ours continues to innovate as a whole, we are part of it. And inevitably, we are part of the larger ecosystem on one hand, and also players within it on a smaller scale in this project and as organization. So I think innovation is baked into everything we're doing today. Sometime it's small incremental steps, sometimes it's big, innovative moves, but all in all, it's something that is currently part of our DNA. >> And how is this system helping you both you know, be more proactive? Either one of you who would like to go first? >> No, I started first. >> Avishai? Okay. So, we are data driven, we are way more data driven. And by knowing exactly what is happening, we can be faster, we can be more innovative, we can be more productive. So, in cases where we either discover a problem or we discovering opportunity, we are much faster in analyzing whether it's really one, how should we redirect on that? How can we solve it or utilize it? And that's really working well. >> Perfect. And, you know, Avishai, feel free to join in on that too. >> In the digitized economy, I think that productivity comes a lot from the business side. If there is something that completely changed lately is the fact that business people are driving many, many changes on one end, and technology is here to adhere on one end and flexible to to move forward. So many of the productive concepts are coming from non technology savvy people, and the ability of what we're doing together to adjust and support different business behaviors and business models, and also, you know, business initiatives is thought of as being productive and being able to adapt into the digitalized economy. >> Let me join in on that one, what Avishai said, Let's think of a business person who wants to change something, and you don't know whether it's a white way as a corporation. Now you bring in the technology bits and pieces from different angles, and all of a sudden, you can combine it with a data driven approach, then, you know much better how to react on this business demand and how to bring it to life by using technology. Yeah, that might be a very high level of example of what we're doing here. Again, collaboration, get it done together with is the theme of that, technology is a very important part of that, paired with the business. >> Yeah, we talked on some very broad terms like themes, collaboration, innovation, I just want to focus a bit now on automation. Why do you think it is so critical to the vision of this program, Avishai. >> First of all, because it ends with ation, and everything that has this, but what I think that we started with this, automation is fundamental to everything that needs to be nimble, everything that needs to be fast. You cannot do it manually. And if you want to react either to a business demand or to a data driven decision, analytic decision, if you want to adopt new technology, if you want to test a new business scenario or technology scenario, you need automation to be part, inevitable part of everything that you're doing. So automation is a key element in everything that we're doing. And it's critical part of also the way to look into the future and to make sure that everything is working the right way. >> Perfect Ralf, any quick thoughts on that? >> Actually, nothing, nothing to add. >> All right, terrific. Well, it's been so wonderful to have you on the program. I know people are coming in from all over the world to join us. Really fantastic opportunity to highlight this important innovation in the Telco sector. Glad to have you here. Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany, as well as Avishai Sharlin, the Division President at Amdocs Technology. we're highlighting the award that they won as part of the AWS, Global Public Sector Partner Awards. So great to have you on the show. And I'm your host Natalie Erlich, do stay tuned for more coverage. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to present our special guests for today's program and they are Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., chief of the Cherokee Nation. Welcome to the program, gentlemen >> Thank you. >> Terrific, well, delighted to have you here, we're going to discuss the key award of best partner transformation, most impactful nonprofit partner, of course now highlighting some of the technologies now being technology now being leveraged to help preserve the Cherokee language as well as its culture. Now, Chuck, I'd like to start with you and if you could describe some of the challenges that the Cherokee nation is now faced with in terms of preserving the language and its culture and how you see technology being able to really help preserve it. >> Well, thank you, Natalie. It was really good to be with you all today. The Cherokee language and culture is what makes us unique as a people. It's the link that links us back to time and immemorial through generations. And over those generations, there've been many threats to our language and culture. There's been disease after European contact, there's been dispossession, there's been our forced removal on the trail of tears. Other pressures in more modern times have continued to erode our language and culture, including, boarding schools, the public school system through most of the 20th century as Cherokee Nation has gotten back on its feet, that is to say when the govern the United States has allowed Cherokee Nation to do what we've always done well which is to govern ourselves, chart our own destiny, and preserve our life ways, we've been able to make preservation efforts but those generations of eroding our language and culture had coming to steep costs. We're the largest tribe in the country, 392,000 citizens and by the way we're mostly in Northeast, Oklahoma but we have Cherokees living all over the country even all over the world. And we only have 2000 fluent speakers left. So it's a great challenge to save a language that's truly endangered. And if we don't save it generations from now we may do a number of things exceedingly well as we do today, business, providing education and housing, creating a great healthcare system, but we will have lost that thing that makes us a unique people, that thing that links us back to our past. And so what we're doing today, working with great partners like Presidio is just indispensable to what's really our most important mission. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, thank you so much for those insights. I'd like to switch it over to Kyle and hear about the technologies now being utilized to preserve the Cherokee language and culture. >> Sure, happy to Natalie and thanks for having us this morning. So yeah, when we started to work with the Cherokee Nation, it was very clear to us that, there's obviously a higher power or a higher mission here. And so it's really been an honor to work with the chief and the nation and what we've been able to do is is take what the Cherokee Nation is trying to do in terms of language and cultural preservation and build solutions in really a very modern way. So between Inage’i, the 3D mobile open-world game and the virtual classroom platform, it's entirely a cloud native serverless solution in AWS, using a lot of the most modern tools and technologies in the marketplace. For example, in the mobile game, it's built around unity and the virtual classroom platform is built around the Amazon chime SDK, which allows us to really build something that is very clean and light and focused on what the nation is trying to achieve and really cut out a lot of the baggage and the other sort of plumbing and various other technologies that this would have, this type of solution would have taken just a few short years ago. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, Kyle, staying with you, what do you think were some of the factors behind the development of this solution? >> Yeah, so I think flexibility was key. Was maybe the biggest design goal in building these solutions because you learn a lot when you originally set out to build something and it starts to impact real users, and in this case, speakers of the Cherokee Nation, you learn a tremendous amount about the language and how it's used and how people communicate with each other. And so the main design goal of the solutions was to allow a sort of flexibility that lets us adapt. And every time we learn something and every time we find something that works or perhaps doesn't work quite as well as was imagined, we have the flexibility to change that and kind of stay nimble and on our toes. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, now switching over to you, why do you think that some of these, platforms like the virtual classroom are so effective with Cherokee speakers? >> Well, a couple of reasons, one pandemic related, during COVID the worst public health crisis the world seen in living memory, we have had to adapt quickly to continue on our mission to save this language. We couldn't afford a year off in terms of pairing speakers, by the way, most of our fluent speakers are over the age of 70, with young people who need to learn the language and be the new generation of speakers. So it's been really important that during those difficult times we could connect virtually and the technology we've been using has worked so effectively, but the other is really irrespective of what's going on in terms of having to isolate, and social distance and things of that nature during COVID, and that is just making sure we can make this language accessible, particularly to young people in a manner in which they are becoming accustomed to learning things throughout the rest of the world. And so using platforms that they're familiar with is very important but it also has to be something that an older generation of these fluent speakers, as I say most of them are over 70, can use. And that's what really has been so effective about this platform. It's so usable. Once you introduce it to people whether it's a young person who can adapt pretty quickly 'cause they're growing up immersed in it, or it's someone who has not been familiar with that technology, with just a little bit of showing them how to use it, suddenly this classroom becomes just like you're in person. And that makes all the difference in the world in terms of connecting these young people with their elders. As the other thing is Cherokees are by nature very much part of a big extended family. And so that personal connection that you can maintain through this platform is really important. I think it's going to be the key to how we save this language, because as I say we have Cherokees all over the country, even all over the world and we're going to harness our numbers, the large population we have and find those with the interest and aptitude to learn the language, we must use this technology and so far it's worked well. >> Yeah, terrific, and now switching over to Kyle, we'd love to hear from you how your team developed this technology. How they really thought out, what kinds of methods are really going to drive the interaction and the immersion and engagement among these disparate demographics of, elderly Cherokees and also the young generation. So, how did your team go about developing that? >> Yeah, it's a very good question because in a situation like this, there is no shortage of different ways that you could have built a solution like this. There are a lot of different ways that it could have been done. So the tax that we took was a rigorous focus on the user experience and on the experience of the speaker. And that allowed us to detach ourselves to a large degree from what were the exact technology choices that were implemented in terms of AWS services, other open source packages that run on AWS, it's being able to focus completely on what the nation was trying to achieve with their speakers, both through the game and the virtual classroom platform. It let us take a lot of other design decisions and technology choices sort of into the background and behind a level of abstraction. And so there's always quite a bit of rigorous testing and really making sure you understand how something's going to perform in the wild, but the reality of the situation was, the whole reason for doing it was the experience of the speakers, both in the game and in the classroom platform. So we stayed very focused on that and made technology decisions sort of second fiddle or lower priority. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, how do you think that these kinds of innovations could be applied to other areas of the Cherokee school system? >> Well, our greatest challenge is preserving language and culture, but we also have as part of our mission to educate this new generation of Cherokees coming up. For years and years, really generations, Cherokees who were able to get a good education many of them left our tribal lands for new opportunities. And so we lost a great deal because of the economic pressures here in Northeast, Oklahoma, particularly on our Cherokee lands. So the task now is to generate opportunity for a new generation coming up. Education is key to that and so if we want to create a pipeline of young Cherokees who want to get into the healthcare fields, want to get into aerospace, want to get into other professions, we've got to create an education system that is steadier and modern. We have a school that is K through 12th grade, K through the senior year, and so we have an opportunity really to do that. And I think for the first time in our history, in this era, I'm talking elect the last few decades, we are able to really craft education in a way that works for us and using technology and making choices about what that technology is, is important to us. It's a bygone era in which the federal government or the state is sort of imposing on us what choices we make. Now we can reach out with great partners all over the world like Presidio and say what solution can work for our classroom? When we can identify what the great demands are on the reservation in terms of jobs. And one of the great demands we have is healthcare. So how can we use technology to inspire little Cherokee boys and girls to grow up and be doctors and nurses here in just a few decades when we're building this great health system? Well, we're going to use technology to do it. So the possibilities are really unlimited and they need to be because we think our potential here in Cherokee Nation is unlimited. >> Yeah, I mean that's terrific to hear how technology is really encouraging younger generations to study, learn and really push themselves further. Kyle, I'd like to switch over to you and hear a little bit about the benefits of launching this kind of platform on AWS. >> Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to building this on AWS. And I think that it spans a couple of categories, even. I mean, from a technological perspective there was every tool and every service that we needed to build both of the solutions that we built right there in AWS. And when there was a, when there was a time where we needed to jump out and use a project outside of AWS, running on AWS such as the unity engine, AWS makes that very easy. So I would say that the choice was easy because there are technological realities and the breadth and the depth of the technological portfolio in AWS combined with the partnership that we get from them, It's really, you know, there's a lot of support when it comes to, Hey we're working with the Cherokee nation on something that's extremely important. We need your help. We need you to help us figure this out. It's never been hard to get that partnership. >> Terrific, and also following up on that, love to hear how AWS really helped with flexibility and also the cost effective effectiveness of this kind of platform. >> Yeah I would take those questions backwards or in reverse order because the cost-effectiveness of the solution is really, it's really something to make note of because when we build something in the way that we built these platforms they're serverless and event driven. Meaning that the Cherokee Nation is not paying for a solution constantly as we would in lives past running things in data centers and such. It really, the services in AWS allow us to say, Hey, let's spin up certain pieces of functionality when they're needed as they're being used. And the meter is running during that time, and the cost is occurred during the time it's being used and not all of the time. So that really has a dramatic impact on cost effectiveness. And then from a flexibility standpoint, as we learn new things, as we evolve the platform as we grow this out to more and more speakers and to more and more impact to the Cherokee Nation, we have all kinds of different technology choices that we can make and it's all contained within AWS. >> Yeah, and I'd like to open this now to both of you, starting with Chuck, how do you think this kind of technology could be applied to other cultures or languages that re seeking to preserve themselves? There's so many languages in the world that are now dying out because most of us are only speaking, just a few like English, Spanish, just a few others, what steps can be taken so that humanity can preserve these important languages? >> Well, you're right. There are so many endangered languages around the world and indigenous languages are unfortunately dying all over the world all the time, even as we speak, they're slipping away. The United nations is dedicated the next decade to the preservation of indigenous languages. That's gotten many leaders around the world thinking about how we can save languages here in this era. And I would encourage any tribal leader in particular in the United States, but I think it certainly applies around the world to seek out this technology. I mean, Cherokee Nation's in a position now where we can seek out the best in the world in terms of partnerships. And we've found that in Presidio. And of course they're using AWS which means they're using the best in the world and so the technology exists, and the willingness to work together exist. And I think generations ago that would have been not something we could have connected well on in terms of partnering with companies that were doing cutting edge things. So if you're looking to connect generations in terms of learning and sharing the language, which is just I cannot stress enough how indispensable that is to language preservation, this type of technology will do it. There are some, I think that may think, and I don't have a technology background, that if you're using this cutting edge technology, I mean this is the best in the world that you're going to speak only to this young generation coming up, and maybe it's inaccessible to an older generation. It's just not the case. This is so user-friendly that we we've been able to connect elders with young people. And if anyone in the world interested in preserving languages could see this in action, could see a young person sitting next to an elder talking about the technology or connecting virtually, it would change their whole perspective on what technology means for language reservations because I promise you all over the world the great challenges you have this group of older generations of people who know the language. They have it in their hearts, they have it in their minds and they're slipping away just from the passage of time. Connecting them with the generation coming up is just what we need to do. This technology allows us to do it. >> Yeah, Chuck following up on that when I hear about elderly people being able to connect with the younger generations in this way and share their history and their culture I'm sure that also, It must have a positive mental effect for them. Right, so elderly are often isolated. Do you have any insight on that? Any quality of insight what you've heard from people using this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think the last year has proven how valuable it is. I mean, we lost over 50 fluent Cherokee speakers and I mentioned earlier in the program, that we only have 2000 left. 50 to COVID and more to just the passage of time and old age. But we have many that are active and engaged in language preservation and they have said to me how valuable it's been to be able to be at home and yet still feel like they're part of this great mission that we have at the Cherokee Nation. Understand that this mission that we have is on par with what any nation in history has set as a goal to shoot for whether it's the United States wanting to land a man on the moon, we're trying to save the language. This is that level of importance. And so for an elder to feel like they're connected and still contributing during this past year difficult times, that makes all the difference in the world. And even as I say, as the pandemic recedes and we hope it continues to recede, there is still a need for elders to stay connected. And in many cases they cannot due to poor health, due to the lack of transportation, this knocks down those barriers and so there's a great deal of joy that has been gained from using this technology. And honestly, just talking to elders about young people getting the opportunity to play this video game even some elders that were voice actors in this game, that Presidio helped us develop. I mean, I can't tell you how important that is for somebody to use their language, to make a living. And that's part of how you preserve a language. Presidio has showed us a way that we can do just that. So we're not only training new speakers, we're giving this opportunity many cases to elders to do something that is very productive with the wonderful gift they have, which is the Cherokee language. >> Terrific, well that is really inspiring because potentially this technology could be utilized by generations to come. The current young people that are using this will one day be the elderly. So, Kyle, how do you see this technology potentially on this platform being evolved? What's the next step to keep it really up to date for future generations as it's evolving. >> Yeah, there's a lot of plans on where to take this I can tell you, honestly. From the perspective of the mobile game, you're building on a platform of an open world game means that the imagination is the limit quite honestly. So there are a lot of new characters and new levels and new adventures that are plans to further immerse the speakers in the platform. And I think that will, that will help with reach and it will help with the amount of connection that's built to the chief's point about bridging the older generations into the younger generations over that common bond of the language and the culture that keeps those connections alive. And so we want to expand the mobile game Engage, the navigate to be as accessible and as wide reaching and immersive as it possibly can, and there are a lot of plans in the works for that. And then with the virtual classroom platform, we started with a various focused constituency within the nation of the language immersion school. And there are many other educational services and even healthcare to the chief's earlier point again where I think there's a lot of potential for that one as well. >> All right, well, terrific gentlemen. Thank you so much for your insights, really fantastic hearing how this platform is really a difference in the lives of people in the Cherokee Nation. Of course, that were our guests, Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation. And that's all for today's session at the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. Thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session at the 2021, AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, for the award for the best, Think Big for Small Business Partner. I'm your host Natalie Erlich, and we are now joined by our very special guest, Lisa Brunet, a managing Partner and President of the DLZP Group. Welcome to today's session. Now, I'd love to talk with you about how you got to partner with AWS. >> Sure, I think Natalie, thank you so much for your time today. So we started a journey with AWS back in 2012, we ran into an AWS rep at another conference, and he was talking about how he would love to do some innovative technology, because one of my reps were actually wearing gold glass, and he's like, I need something creative, I need something different. Because right now AWS, Amazon is just known for selling online books, while the cloud is only known for storing photos. So we spent a little bit of time working with them, and we came up with this idea of doing creating the test drive, where people could actually go and try a different product, like we actually did PeopleSoft on AWS. So we were able to prove that large ERP applications could run on the cloud. And that was actually faster and more resilient than having it on premise, and from there, it's been a whirlwind journey with AWS. >> Now terrific, well, how does TBSP open doors for companies and help them understand all of the tools available to them through AWS, as well as APN. >> With the Think Big for Small Business program, what it does, it gives us the opportunity to play with the big guys. So a lot of small businesses have the capabilities, they're very agile, and they have the connections, they have the capabilities. But because of our size, we have limitations on getting the number of certifications, getting the network competencies. So with this program, it evens the playing field for everybody. So now I'm able to like... I've been turned away projects because of my size, because they're like, well you're not certified by AWS at this level. But now I'm at the same level, as some of my some of the larger primes, and I'm able to compete with them head to head now. >> So has this kind of like democratizing effect. >> Yes, it does. >> Terrific. Well, to expand a bit more on how, the Think Big program has helped us overcome other kind of obstacles. >> For us, a big obstacle was always with the competencies and the certifications. So before, we would never eligible to get a competency, even though we were the ones that proved that PeopleSoft could run on the clouds. So we had the competency for Oracle Applications, we had the competency from Microsoft, but we could never, we're never eligible to actually get the competency because we were not advanced partner. And then also with the training, we were always being hindered, because we couldn't get all the discounts available at a certain level for the trading, so we had to pay full retail price. Now we get a discount, so I can send everybody for training to make sure that everybody is up to date on their certifications. >> And how do you assess your experience as an AWS partner? >> I love it, I love being an AWS partner, and that's I think what really makes the difference is the employees at AWS, they stand by us for everything. We know, of course we do give a lot of benefits to them, but anytime I have a need, I have everybody's number, I can reach out to anybody on their team and say, I need assistance with this, I'm looking to try to accomplish this, and they'll do anything they can to help us. >> And do you have any advice for other companies who might be interested in moving in that direction as well. >> For any small business, I think that Think Big for Small Business program is a great idea, just as long as you're willing to put the hard work in, and you can prove to AWS that you're willing to work hard, they'll reciprocate and work with you to create this great, to make you a great partner. >> And I'd love to hear more about your company, DLZP Group, tell us about your core market. >> So we actually were split between three different main markets. We try to be equal between public sector, private sector and federal. We are just starting our federal journey. We recently became AA certified, so we're looking to expand in the federal journey, but for us, we try to make sure that we are, we don't have too strong, we don't have more than like 33% of our income coming from any one sector, just because if there's a crisis like with the federal, when they shut down for six months, I don't want to have to layoff my employees, I value my employees too much have to say, I'm sorry, I have to lay you off. So we made sure we're resilient, and we're able to handle any customer at any given time. >> Well, let's talk about resilience, I mean, how do you ensure that you're resilient? Obviously, you've had some really tough time, in the last year or so with a pandemic, I mean, what's your advice for companies that are looking to become even more resilient in the years ahead? >> For us, I think a big thing is we've always worked hard to make sure that we offer a quality product for our customers. So that really helped us on the downtime's. When everybody was struggling, keep the doors open, our customers stood by us, because we've had a proven track record to make sure that we offer them the best solution, were there for them when they need us. So they came to rely on us and they would use this with during the past year during the pandemic. >> And if you could outline just in further detail your business model for our viewers. >> So we actually are 100% remote, and I have staff around the world. We purposely, strategically, like have everybody around the world, because some of our customers are global. We have to offer 24/7 support for them, especially nowadays. But another part was because of disaster recovery. I'm based in Houston, Texas. So we're known for getting hurricanes, that means sometimes I can be without power for three weeks. But I don't want that to affect my customers, I don't want them to feel that they can't come to us, but knowing that if a hurricane comes through, I might know my employees are going to be able to work. So we made sure that we have a great disaster recovery plan, we have where no matter what happens, manmade or natural disaster, we're able to support our customers, without any with any without a pause. And then we also make sure that all of our employees, they have a quality work life balance, and I think that also helps because that shows the clients, that we value our employees, and it makes them want to work with us more, because our employees are happy, they're happy to work with us, because they know that well (crackling drowns out speaker) >> And describe to us in greater detail, the core technology and its key benefits. >> Well, a lot we do is around AWS. So, when we first started with them, as I mentioned, we started with them with the test drive and ERP applications, but then we expanded our services, we started working with serverless, when we first heard about serverless, we were like this is a game changer. We can do almost anything on serverless and save so much money. So we years ago, we went and built our website, so it's 100% serverless. So it costs us a couple pennies a month to run, versus if you think about a traditional website, that's a couple hundred dollars a month to run, and then we started playing with machine learning. So we're now developing internal projects, where we're using machine learning for a number of applications, and we're going to keep expanding, where we're going to have a full suite of applications to give to our customers that will be run at 100% serverless using machine learning. >> Yeah, really terrific. What are your goals for the next year? What is your vision for 2021? >> My goal is to do a little bit more than federal, we're actually expanding to Canada as well. So we have officially launched there, we have employees in Canada that are working in different areas in different provinces and with the federal government to try to help AWS grow there. >> Terrific, and I thought it was just so fascinating, how you're mitigating disaster, and you know, really pushing your business forward, you know, thinking geographically, and that's something that we kind of had to all figured out with a pandemic. So in a way your business has been like a bit of step ahead of the others, and what other ways are you trying to kind of be a step ahead of the curve from the competition. >> So we're looking to stay ahead of the curve by making sure we have the right resources in place, so we do a lot, making sure that when we bring somebody on, we make sure that they're aware that this is a team based company, you're not going to be working individually on one project. We were very big on spec, so we're always making sure that, no matter what level you come in, even if you're just an intern here for the summer, you're running a project, you're getting that real world experience, you're going to even have times where I'm reporting to you, when you have to make sure I'm a accountable for the work. And that helps also build respect amongst the peers, because they know what it takes to run a project, and they're going to make sure that they do a good job, because nobody wants to see their peers if you fail. >> Yeah, well excellent insights, I agree with you. Lisa Brunet, a managing partner and president of the DLZP Group. That's all for this session, I'm your host Natalie Erlich, thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.

>>Mhm Hello and welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS amazon web services, Global public Sector partner awards program. I'm john for your host of the cube here we're gonna talk about the best covid solution to great guests. Benham or with healthcare and life sciences lead at palantir Ben welcome to the cube SAm Michaels, Director of automation and compound management and Cats. National Center for advancing translational sciences and Cats. Part of the NIH National sort of health Gentlemen, thank you for coming on and and congratulations on the best covid solution. >>Thank you so much john >>so I gotta, I gotta ask you the best solution is when can I get the vaccine? How fast how long it's gonna last but I really appreciate you guys coming on. I >>hope you're vaccinated. I would say john that's outside of our hands. I would say if you've not got vaccinated, go get vaccinated right now, have someone stab you in the arm, you know, do not wait and and go for it. That's not on us. But you got that >>opportunity that we have that done. I got to get on a plane and all kinds of hoops to jump through. We need a better solution anyway. You guys have a great technical so I wanna I wanna dig in all seriousness aside getting inside. Um you guys have put together a killer solution that really requires a lot of data can let's step back and and talk about first. What was the solution that won the award? You guys have a quick second set the table for what we're talking about. Then we'll start with you. >>So the national covered cohort collaborative is a secure data enclave putting together the HR records from more than 60 different academic medical centers across the country and they're making it available to researchers to, you know, ask many and varied questions to try and understand this disease better. >>See and take us through the challenges here. What was going on? What was the hard problem? I'll see everyone had a situation with Covid where people broke through and cloud as he drove it amazon is part of the awards, but you guys are solving something. What was the problem statement that you guys are going after? What happened? >>I I think the problem statement is essentially that, you know, the nation has the electronic health records, but it's very fragmented, right. You know, it's been is highlighted is there's there's multiple systems around the country, you know, thousands of folks that have E H. R. S. But there is no way from a research perspective to actually have access in any unified location. And so really what we were looking for is how can we essentially provide a centralized location to study electronic health records. But in a Federated sense because we recognize that the data exist in other locations and so we had to figure out for a vast quantity of data, how can we get data from those 60 sites, 60 plus that Ben is referencing from their respective locations and then into one central repository, but also in a common format. Because that's another huge aspect of the technical challenge was there's multiple formats for electronic health records, there's different standards, there's different versions. And how do you actually have all of this data harmonised into something which is usable again for research? >>Just so many things that are jumping in my head right now, I want to unpack one at the time Covid hit the scramble and the imperative for getting answers quickly was huge. So it's a data problem at a massive scale public health impact. Again, we were talking before we came on camera, public health records are dirty, they're not clean. A lot of things are weird. I mean, just just massive amount of weird problems. How did you guys pull together take me through how this gets done? What what happened? Take us through the the steps He just got together and said, let's do this. How does it all happen? >>Yeah, it's a great and so john, I would say so. Part of this started actually several years ago. I explain this when people talk about in three C is that and Cats has actually established what we like to call, We support a program which is called the Clinical translation Science Award program is the largest single grant program in all of NIH. And it constitutes the bulk of the Cats budget. So this is extra metal grants which goes all over the country. And we wanted this group to essentially have a common research environment. So we try to create what we call the secure scientific collaborative platforms. Another example of this is when we call the rare disease clinical research network, which again is a consortium of 20 different sites around the nation. And so really we started working this several years ago that if we want to Build an environment that's collaborative for researchers around the country around the world, the natural place to do that is really with a cloud first strategy and we recognize this as and cats were about 600 people now. But if you look at the size of our actual research community with our grantees were in the thousands. And so from the perspective that we took several years ago was we have to really take a step back. And if we want to have a comprehensive and cohesive package or solution to treat this is really a mid sized business, you know, and so that means we have to treat this as a cloud based enterprise. And so in cats several years ago had really gone on this strategy to bring in different commercial partners, of which one of them is Palin tear. It actually started with our intramural research program and obviously very heavy cloud use with AWS. We use your we use google workspace, essentially use different cloud tools to enable our collaborative researchers. The next step is we also had a project. If we want to have an environment, we have to have access. And this is something that we took early steps on years prior that there is no good building environment if people can't get in the front door. So we invested heavily and create an application which we call our Federated authentication system. We call it unified and cats off. So we call it, you know, for short and and this is the open source in house project that we built it and cats. And we wanted to actually use this for all sorts of implementation, acting as the front door to this collaborative environment being one of them. And then also by by really this this this interest in electronic health records that had existed prior to the Covid pandemic. And so we've done some prior work via mixture of internal investments in grants with collaborative partners to really look at what it would take to harmonize this data at scale. And so like you mentioned, Covid hit it. Hit really hard. Everyone was scrambling for answers. And I think we had a bit of these pieces um, in play. And then that's I think when we turned to ban and the team at volunteer and we said we have these components, we have these pieces what we really need. Something independent that we can stand up quickly to really address some of these problems. One of the biggest one being that data ingestion and the harmonization step. And so I can let Ben really speak to that one. >>Yeah. Ben Library because you're solving a lot of collaboration problems, not just the technical problem but ingestion and harmonization ingestion. Most people can understand is that the data warehousing or in the database know that what that means? Take us through harmonization because not to put a little bit of shade on this, but most people think about, you know, these kinds of research or non profits as a slow moving, you know, standing stuff up sandwich saying it takes time you break it down. By the time you you didn't think things are over. This was agile. So take us through what made it an agile because that's not normal. I mean that's not what you see normally. It's like, hey we'll see you next year. We stand that up. Yeah. At the data center. >>Yeah, I mean so as as Sam described this sort of the question of data on interoperability is a really essential problem for working with this kind of data. And I think, you know, we have data coming from more than 60 different sites and one of the reasons were able to move quickly was because rather than saying oh well you have to provide the data in a certain format, a certain standard. Um and three C. was able to say actually just give us the data how you have it in whatever format is easiest for you and we will take care of that process of actually transforming it into a single standard data model, converting all of the medical vocabularies, doing all of the data quality assessment that's needed to ensure that data is actually ready for research and that was very much a collaborative endeavor. It was run out of a team based at johns Hopkins University, but in collaboration with a broad range of researchers who are all adding their expertise and what we were able to do was to provide the sort of the technical infrastructure for taking the transformation pipelines that are being developed, that the actual logic and the code and developing these very robust kind of centralist templates for that. Um, that could be deployed just like software is deployed, have changed management, have upgrades and downgrades and version control and change logs so that we can roll that out across a large number of sites in a very robust way very quickly. So that's sort of that, that that's one aspect of it. And then there was a bunch of really interesting challenges along the way that again, a very broad collaborative team of researchers worked on and an example of that would be unit harmonization and inference. So really simple things like when a lab result arrives, we talked about data quality, um, you were expected to have a unit right? Like if you're reporting somebody's weight, you probably want to know if it's in kilograms or pounds, but we found that a very significant proportion of the time the unit was actually missing in the HR record. And so unless you can actually get that back, that becomes useless. And so an approach was developed because we had data across 60 or more different sites, you have a large number of lab tests that do have the correct units and you can look at the data distributions and decide how likely is it that this missing unit is actually kilograms or pounds and save a huge portion of these labs. So that's just an example of something that has enabled research to happen that would not otherwise have been able >>just not to dig in and rat hole on that one point. But what time saving do you think that saves? I mean, I can imagine it's on the data cleaning side. That's just a massive time savings just in for Okay. Based on the data sampling, this is kilograms or pounds. >>Exactly. So we're talking there's more than 3.5 billion lab records in this data base now. So if you were trying to do this manually, I mean, it would take, it would take to thousands of years, you know, it just wouldn't be a black, it would >>be a black hole in the dataset, essentially because there's no way it would get done. Ok. Ok. Sam take me through like from a research standpoint, this normalization, harmonization the process. What does that enable for the, for the research and who decides what's the standard format? So, because again, I'm just in my mind thinking how hard this is. And then what was the, what was decided? Was it just on the base records what standards were happening? What's the impact of researchers >>now? It's a great quite well, a couple things I'll say. And Ben has touched on this is the other real core piece of N three C is the community, right? You know, And so I think there's a couple of things you mentioned with this, johN is the way we execute this is, it was very nimble, it was very agile and there's something to be said on that piece from a procurement perspective, the government had many covid authorities that were granted to make very fast decisions to get things procured quickly. And we were able to turn this around with our acquisition shop, which we would otherwise, you know, be dead in the water like you said, wait a year ago through a normal acquisition process, which can take time, but that's only one half the other half. And really, you're touching on this and Ben is touching on this is when he mentions the research as we have this entire courts entire, you know, research community numbering in the thousands from a volunteer perspective. I think it's really fascinating. This is a really a great example to me of this public private partnership between the companies we use, but also the academic participants that are actually make up the community. Um again, who the amount of time they have dedicated on this is just incredible. So, so really, what's also been established with this is core governance. And so, you know, you think from assistance perspective is, you know, the Palin tear this environment, the N three C environment belongs to the government, but the N 33 the entire actually, you know, program, I would say, belongs to the community. We have co governance on this. So who decides really is just a mixture between the folks on End Cats, but not just end cast as folks at End Cats, folks that, you know, and I proper, but also folks and other government agencies, but also the, the academic communities and entire these mixed governance teams that actually set the stage for all of this. And again, you know, who's gonna decide the standard, We decide we're gonna do this in Oman 5.3 point one um is the standard we're going to utilize. And then once the data is there, this is what gets exciting is then they have the different domain teams where they can ask different research questions depending upon what has interest scientifically to them. Um and so really, you know, we viewed this from the government's perspective is how do we build again the secure platform where we can enable the research, but we don't really want to dictate the research. I mean, the one criteria we did put your research has to be covid focused because very clearly in response to covid, so you have to have a Covid focus and then we have data use agreements, data use request. You know, we have entire governance committees that decide is this research in scope, but we don't want to dictate the research types that the domain teams are bringing to the table. >>And I think the National Institutes of Health, you think about just that their mission is to serve the public health. And I think this is a great example of when you enable data to be surfaced and available that you can really allow people to be empowered and not to use the cliche citizen analysts. But in a way this is what the community is doing. You're doing research and allowing people from volunteers to academics to students to just be part of it. That is citizen analysis that you got citizen journalism. You've got citizen and uh, research, you've got a lot of democratization happening here. Is that part of it was a result of >>this? Uh, it's both. It's a great question. I think it's both. And it's it's really by design because again, we want to enable and there's a couple of things that I really, you know, we we clamor with at end cats. I think NIH is going with this direction to is we believe firmly in open science, we believe firmly in open standards and how we can actually enable these standards to promote this open science because it's actually nontrivial. We've had, you know, the citizen scientists actually on the tricky problem from a governance perspective or we have the case where we actually had to have students that wanted access to the environment. Well, we actually had to have someone because, you know, they have to have an institution that they come in with, but we've actually across some of those bridges to actually get students and researchers into this environment very much by design, but also the spirit which was held enabled by the community, which, again, so I think they go they go hand in hand. I planned for >>open science as a huge wave, I'm a big fan, I think that's got a lot of headroom because open source, what that's done to software, the software industry, it's amazing. And I think your Federated idea comes in here and Ben if you guys can just talk through the Federated, because I think that might enable and remove some of the structural blockers that might be out there in terms of, oh, you gotta be affiliate with this or that our friends got to invite you, but then you got privacy access and this Federated ID not an easy thing, it's easy to say. But how do you tie that together? Because you want to enable frictionless ability to come in and contribute same time you want to have some policies around who's in and who's not. >>Yes, totally, I mean so Sam sort of already described the the UNa system which is the authentication system that encounters has developed. And obviously you know from our perspective, you know we integrate with that is using all of the standard kind of authentication protocols and it's very easy to integrate that into the family platform um and make it so that we can authenticate people correctly. But then if you go beyond authentication you also then to actually you need to have the access controls in place to say yes I know who this person is, but now what should they actually be able to see? Um And I think one of the really great things in Free C has done is to be very rigorous about that. They have their governance rules that says you should be using the data for a certain purpose. You must go through a procedure so that the access committee approves that purpose. And then we need to make sure that you're actually doing the work that you said you were going to. And so before you can get your data back out of the system where your results out, you actually have to prove that those results are in line with the original stated purpose and the infrastructure around that and having the access controls and the governance processes, all working together in a seamless way so that it doesn't, as you say, increase the friction on the researcher and they can get access to the data for that appropriate purpose. That was a big component of what we've been building out with them three C. Absolutely. >>And really in line john with what NIH is doing with the research, all service, they call this raz. And I think things that we believe in their standards that were starting to follow and work with them closely. Multifactor authentication because of the point Ben is making and you raised as well, you know, one you need to authenticate, okay. This you are who you say you are. And and we're recognizing that and you're, you know, the author and peace within the authors. E what do you authorized to see? What do you have authorization to? And they go hand in hand and again, non trivial problems. And especially, you know, when we basis typically a lot of what we're using is is we'll do direct integrations with our package. We using commons for Federated access were also even using login dot gov. Um, you know, again because we need to make sure that people had a means, you know, and login dot gov is essentially a runoff right? If they don't have, you know an organization which we have in common or a Federated access to generate a login dot gov account but they still are whole, you know beholden to the multi factor authentication step and then they still have to get the same authorizations because we really do believe access to these environment seamlessly is absolutely critical, you know, who are users are but again not make it restrictive and not make it this this friction filled process. That's very that's very >>different. I mean you think about nontrivial, totally agree with you and if you think about like if you were in a classic enterprise, I thought about an I. T. Problem like bring your own device to work and that's basically what the whole world does these days. So like you're thinking about access, you don't know who's coming in, you don't know where they're coming in from, um when the churn is so high, you don't know, I mean all this is happening, right? So you have to be prepared two Provisions and provide resource to a very lightweight access edge. >>That's right. And that's why it gets back to what we mentioned is we were taking a step back and thinking about this problem, you know, an M three C became the use case was this is an enterprise I. T. Problem. Right. You know, we have users from around the world that want to access this environment and again we try to hit a really difficult mark, which is secure but collaborative, Right? That's that's not easy, you know? But but again, the only place this environment could take place isn't a cloud based environment, right? Let's be real. You know, 10 years ago. Forget it. You know, Again, maybe it would have been difficult, but now it's just incredible how much they advanced that these real virtual research organizations can start to exist and they become the real partnerships. >>Well, I want to Well, that's a great point. I want to highlight and call out because I've done a lot of these interviews with awards programs over the years and certainly in public sector and open source over many, many years. One of the things open source allows us the code re use and also when you start getting in these situations where, okay, you have a crisis covid other things happen, nonprofits go, that's the same thing. They, they lose their funding and all the code disappears. Saying with these covid when it becomes over, you don't want to lose the momentum. So this whole idea of re use this platform is aged deplatforming of and re factoring if you will, these are two concepts with a cloud enables SAM, I'd love to get your thoughts on this because it doesn't go away when Covid's >>over, research still >>continues. So this whole idea of re platform NG and then re factoring is very much a new concept versus the old days of okay, projects over, move on to the next one. >>No, you're absolutely right. And I think what first drove us is we're taking a step back and and cats, you know, how do we ensure that sustainability? Right, Because my background is actually engineering. So I think about, you know, you want to build things to last and what you just described, johN is that, you know, that, that funding, it peaks, it goes up and then it wanes away and it goes and what you're left with essentially is nothing, you know, it's okay you did this investment in a body of work and it goes away. And really, I think what we're really building are these sustainable platforms that we will actually grow and evolve based upon the research needs over time. And I think that was really a huge investment that both, you know, again and and Cats is made. But NIH is going in a very similar direction. There's a substantial investment, um, you know, made in these, these these these really impressive environments. How do we make sure the sustainable for the long term? You know, again, we just went through this with Covid, but what's gonna come next? You know, one of the research questions that we need to answer, but also open source is an incredibly important piece of this. I think Ben can speak this in a second, all the harmonization work, all that effort, you know, essentially this massive, complex GTL process Is in the N three Seagate hub. So we believe, you know, completely and the open source model a little bit of a flavor on it too though, because, you know, again, back to the sustainability, john, I believe, you know, there's a room for this, this marriage between commercial platforms and open source software and we need both. You know, as we're strong proponents of N cats are both, but especially with sustainability, especially I think Enterprise I. T. You know, you have to have professional grade products that was part of, I would say an experiment we ran out and cast our thought was we can fund academic groups and we can have them do open source projects and you'll get some decent results. But I think the nature of it and the nature of these environments become so complex. The experiment we're taking is we're going to provide commercial grade tools For the academic community and the researchers and let them use them and see how they can be enabled and actually focus on research questions. And I think, you know, N3C, which we've been very successful with that model while still really adhering to the open source spirit and >>principles as an amazing story, congratulated, you know what? That's so awesome because that's the future. And I think you're onto something huge. Great point, Ben, you want to chime in on this whole sustainability because the public private partnership idea is the now the new model innovation formula is about open and collaborative. What's your thoughts? >>Absolutely. And I mean, we uh, volunteer have been huge proponents of reproducibility and openness, um in analyses and in science. And so everything done within the family platform is done in open source languages like python and R. And sequel, um and is exposed via open A. P. I. S and through get repository. So that as SaM says, we've we've pushed all of that E. T. L. Code that was developed within the platform out to the cats get hub. Um and the analysis code itself being written in those various different languages can also sort of easily be pulled out um and made available for other researchers in the future. And I think what we've also seen is that within the data enclave there's been an enormous amount of re use across the different research projects. And so actually having that security in place and making it secure so that people can actually start to share with each other securely as well. And and and be very clear that although I'm sharing this, it's still within the range of the government's requirements has meant that the, the research has really been accelerated because people have been able to build and stand on the shoulders of what earlier projects have done. >>Okay. Ben. Great stuff. 1000 researchers. Open source code and get a job. Where do I sign up? I want to get involved. This is amazing. Like it sounds like a great party. >>We'll send you a link if you do a search on on N three C, you know, do do a search on that and you'll actually will come up with a website hosted by the academic side and I'll show you all the information of how you can actually connect and john you're welcome to come in. Billion by all means >>billions of rows of data being solved. Great tech he's working on again. This is a great example of large scale the modern era of solving problems is here. It's out in the open, Open Science. Sam. Congratulations on your great success. Ben Award winners. You guys doing a great job. Great story. Thanks for sharing here with us in the queue. Appreciate it. >>Thank you, john. >>Thanks for having us. >>Okay. It is. Global public sector partner rewards best Covid solution palantir and and cats. Great solution. Great story. I'm john Kerry with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm. >>Mhm

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

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

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

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS, Amazon Web Services @Sandy_Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and great leader. Sandy, great to see you again. And congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming out for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing. So we had to be part of it. >> Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector we talked to us before is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, is becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done amazing work, just want to give you props for that and say, congratulations, and what a great time to talk about the winners. Because everyone's been working really hard in public sector, because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break. And everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solve some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them. Give us an overview of what it is. The criteria and all the specifics. >> Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually, and it's for our public sector partners overall, to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we'd like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backwards from the customer, having a bias for action, they've engaged with AWS and very unique ways. And as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. >> That's awesome. Hey, can we put up a slide, I know we have slide on the winners, I want to look at them, with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners. I see a nice little stars on there. Look at the gold star. I knows IronNet, CrowdStrike. That's General Keith Alexander's company, I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times, got Palantir in there. And is there another one, I want to take a look at some of the other names here. >> In overall we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards we did, a big focus on mission. So things like government, education, health care, we spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs, like think big for small business and PTP as well. >> Yeah, well, great roundup, they're looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I have to ask you, because this always comes up, we're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously, we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress, theCUBE, back in physical form, again, (indistinct) will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission? >> Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships, they've got great skills, and they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at Reinvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Collibra and Databricks as best lead migration for data as well as Datacom for best data lead migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations, which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise, in particular around that mission that you're talking about. So for instance, GDIT won best Mission Solution For Federal, and they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agencies deployment process, from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P to P, Partnering to Partner which is a really big element of ecosystems, but it was won by four points and in quizon, and they were able to work together to implement a data, implement a data lake and an AI, ML solution, and then you just did the startup showcase, we have a best startup delivering innovation too, and that was EduTech (indistinct) Central America. And they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert and risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners, >> I know you're going to talk for an hour, we have to cut you off a little there. (indistinct) love your partners so much. You have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. Why is that the case? >> Well, you know, IDC, said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology. But it's around the industry, healthcare, space that we talked about earlier, or government. So those are really important. So for instance, New Reburial, they won Best Emission for Healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for Best Amazon Connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had pre existing conditions, and really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID. Really exciting and big, strong focus on mission. >> Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this, people want to work for a company that has purpose, and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success when this came up, I love asking this question, because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it, as you're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas, obviously, large scale value creation mission. These are points we're hearing and keep conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these parties? I mean, obviously, it's indirect for Amazon, I get that, but they're also have their customers, they're your customers, customers. That's been around for a while. But there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? you know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this, because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution. And they work backwards from the customer and how to modernize that, or Pariveda, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two, is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area. We see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education cloud, (indistinct) one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture won, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response. Very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on, CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise, and then building a repeatable solution, leveraging your skill sets. >> That's a great formula for success. I got you mentioned IronNet, and cybersecurity. One of things that's coming up is, in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve, like, ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right. So (indistinct) seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cybersecurity kind of national security defense issue, but also, it's a technical one. And also public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems and I'd love to get your thoughts on my concern is with Jeff Bar yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the the news and he is a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared to the going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing. He does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more, because the pandemic forced these problems, and they forced new opportunities to be creative, and to build. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner, Executive Council yesterday, we had 900, executives sign up from all of our partners. And we asked some survey questions like, what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John, and, you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI&ML was Kablamo And what they did was they use AI&ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about #techforgood. Presidio, I love this award that they won for best nonprofit, the Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out like no one being able to speak yet. And so they came to Presidio, and they asked how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation, so they don't you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere, we're seeing them use artificial intelligence, Container, security. And we're even starting with quantum, so it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. >> I think the partner equation is just so wide open, because it's always been based on value, adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And, again, I just love riffing on this, because Dave and I talked about this on theCUBE all the time, and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock in isn't proprietary technology anymore, its value, and scale. So you starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points. Great best practice. And I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, and people do it right, flat upside. I got to ask you, though, going forward, because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on theCUBE about this, you know, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to be, they want to have a tail win, they want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be in the losing end of all this. So last year in 2021 your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them, 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy? What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, we're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's mission, migration and modernization. But we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top, Smart Cities now that everybody's going back to work and (indistinct) down, operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. I mean, think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-lead migration. You know, we have been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on premises to the cloud so that now they can make real time business decisions. And then on modernization. You know, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now, provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just moved everything they're doing to ECS our Container strategy. And then we're also seeing, you know, crippin, quantum blockchain, no code, low code. So the same big focus, mission migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. >> That's great stuff. And you know, you have first of all people don't might not know that your group partners and Amazon Web Services public sector, has a big surface area. You talking about government, health care, space. So I have to ask you, you guys announced in March the space accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the accelerated program. So, I mean, this is this is a space centric, you know, targeting, you know, low earth orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's say the tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through, what's this all about? How's that going? What's the selection, give us a quick update, while you're here on this space accelerated selection, because (indistinct) will have had a big blog post that went out (indistinct). >> Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this. But when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through (indistinct), one of our partners reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together, and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help both from us, as well as a partner Sarafem on space. And so we announced it, everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John, they came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter, and we took them through this six week, classroom education. So we had our General Clint, you know, helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life, we provided them with AWS credits, they had mentoring by our partner, Sarafem. And we just down selected to 10 startups, that was what Vernors blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do, from, you know, farming asteroids to, you know, helping with some of the, you know, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles, when we all get to space. It's very exciting. Very exciting, indeed, >> You have so much good content areas and partners, exploring, it's a very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern? Well, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again, is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem? You know, whether its business model, or team makeup, or more mindset, or just how they're organizing that that's been successful? Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing, then I've got the working backwards thing, I get that. But like, is there any other observations? Because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager, when you know, people are going to be working remotely more? We're seeing more of that. And there's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events, the world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? >> Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, I focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you will. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission. Because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about #techforgood, with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been reevaluating who they are, and what do they stand for, and people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn. And I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what, reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose driven mission, that's going to come out as well. >> Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events, and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal, like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This seem to be the new mission. >> Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right. Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves, personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too, was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things I never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence Containers, low code, no code blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. >> Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value, again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success, your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great, like the Global Public Sector Partner Awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021, Global Public Sector partner Awards. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Okay, the Global Leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission, modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)