>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm 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. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)