>>Well, hi everybody, John Walls here, continuing our coverage on the cube of splunk.com 21. And then we talked a lot about data these days of companies and enterprise all the way down to small business and the importance of day to day to security data protection. But the public sector also has those very same concerns and some unique worries as well. And with me to talk about the public sector and its data transformation, and of course what's going on in that space is Jeremy Reesey, who was the group vice president of the public sector at Splunk. Jeremy. Good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. >>Thanks for making time for me, John. You bet. >>Glad to have you. Well, let's, let's just, if first off, let's just paint the picture for those watching who are kind of focused on the private sector a little bit, just share with some general thoughts about the public sector and what's going on in terms of its digital transformation and what kind of concerns or, um, I guess, challenges you think there are broadly speaking first in the public sector around. >>Thanks, John. There's quite a bit of transformation going on right now in our government. And just like in industry, we've seen the pandemic as a catalyst for a lot of that transformation. Uh, you may have seen that Splunk recently released a report on the state of data innovation. And what we found is that, um, a lot of good things are happening, but the government still has a lot of work to do. And so there were pockets of excellence that we saw in the last 18 months where agencies really responded to things like the requirement for vaccinations and the requirement for monitoring, uh, health status in general. Uh, and we saw tremendous, um, speed in rolling out things like tele-health across, uh, the veterans affairs administration. But, uh, we also saw in our report that there were many agencies that haven't yet been able to modernize in the way that they want. And one of the inhibitors to that, frankly, John is their ability to adopt software as a service. And so we've seen a lot of things happening in the last year that, um, moved agency customers towards software as a service, but there's work yet. >>So, and why is that? So when you're talking about SAS, is it, is it, um, bureaucratic, uh, red tape as a regulatory issues? Or is it just about, uh, this is a large, huge institution that makes independent decisions, you know, HHS might make decisions separate from state separate from deity, uh, and then it's fragmented. I mean, what are those challenges? >>Sure. Well, I think there are two sides of a John. I think that our government is inherently designed to move cautiously and to move in such a way that we don't make mistakes. Uh, you use the word re bureaucratic. I'm not a huge fan of that word, but I understand the sentiment. Uh, I think that there are layers to any decision that any part of the government makes and certainly that support of, um, inhibiting speed. But I think the other part of it is our acquisition rules and regulations. And I think we've seen a number of positive changes made, uh, not only in the last administration, but even in this current administration that are helping our government agencies to take advantage of software as a service. Um, but there's still work to do there as well. Uh, we've seen the rise of things like, uh, other transactional authorities, OTAs. Uh, we've seen the establishment of an agile procurement office inside the general services administration, GSA, uh, but uh, other parts have heritage systems, systems that are working really well. And you don't want to change something that's not broken just for the sake of changing it. You want to change it in such a way, uh, that you really do transform and deliver new capabilities. >>Yeah. And I guess, um, you know, it's a matter of obviously of developing an expertise and, and maybe confidence too, right? Because this is, this is a new world, a new tech world, if you will here in the 21st century. And, um, and maybe I misused the word bureaucratic. Um, and I know you said you don't like it, but, but there's a certain kind of institutional energy or whatever you want to call it that kind of prohibits fast changes and, and is cautious and is conservative because, I mean, these are big dollar decisions and they're important decisions to based on security. So, I mean, how do you wrap your arms around that from a Splunk perspective to deal with the government, you know, at large, uh, when they have those kinds of, um, uh, I guess considerations >>Certainly, well, the beauty of where we find ourselves today is that data is incredibly powerful and there's more data available to our agency customers or to any company than ever before. So Splunk is inherently a data platform. We allow our customers be the agency customers, or be the industry customers to ask questions of data that they collect from any source, be it a structured data or unstructured data using Splunk, a customer can say, what's happening. Why is it happening? Where is it happening? And that's incredibly powerful. And I think, um, in this current age where, uh, the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we deliver services and citizen services specifically, uh, having a data platform is incredibly powerful because the way that we're answering questions today is different than the way we answered questions last year. And it may be very different the way we have to ask questions a year from now. Uh, and that's really what Splunk's is delivering to our customers is that flexibility to be able to ask any question of any data set, uh, and to ask those questions in the context of today, not just the context that they knew yesterday. >>Yeah. W w and you mentioned the pandemic, what has that impact then? Um, obviously the need of, uh, I think about, you know, vaccination of disease, monitoring of outbreak monitoring, uh, emergency care, ICU units, all these things, um, critically important to the government's role right now, um, and continue to be, so what kind of impact has the, the pandemic had in terms of their modernization plans? Um, I'm guessing some of these had to be put on hold, right? Because you've, you've got, uh, you've got an emergency and so you can't conduct business as usual. >>Sure. So it's caused a shift in priorities as you know, John, and then it's also caused us to rethink what has to be done in person and what can be done remotely. And when we think about what can be done remotely, we're seeing a proliferation of devices. Um, we're seeing a proliferation of, uh, the, the level of network access, uh, that is enabled and supported. And with that, we see new security concerns, right? We are seeing, uh, uh, really, uh, an intriguing rise of thought around authentication and making sure that the right person is coming in from the right device, uh, using the right applications at the right time, that is incredibly challenging for our agency customers. Uh, and they have to think about what's happening in, in ways that they didn't have to last year. >>Let's talk about certification a little bit, and I know you announced a FedRAMP a couple of years ago, and now you've come out with a new iteration, if you will. Um, I hear about that. So walk me through that a little bit in our audience as well. And then just talk about the value of certification. Why does that really matter? What's the importance of that? >>Thanks, John. We did recently announced that we've received a provisional authority to operate, uh, in aisle five impact level five. And that's incredibly exciting. I've, I've never worked for a software company that had FedRAMP certification previously. And I think it demonstrates Splunk's commitment to this market, the public sector market. Uh, we are absolutely, um, committed to delivering our software in any environment at any level of classification that our customers need, and that allows them to rest assured that they can decide anything they want to about their data without worrying about the sanctity of that data itself, or the platform that they're using to process that data. That's incredibly exciting. I hope, >>Yeah. You mentioned, uh, the current administration just a little bit ago, you know, the Biden administration, um, no executive orders, you know, focusing in on, on, um, use of, of, uh, or I guess taking appropriate measures, right. To protect your data cyber from a cyber security perspective. Um, what exactly has that done to change the approach the government is taking now, uh, to protecting data and then how have you adapted to that executive order to provide the right services for governments looking to, to make sure they meet those standards and that criteria? >>Well, it's an exciting time as you, as you point out on May 12th, president Biden's son and executive order on improving the nation's cybersecurity. So, uh, from the highest levels, we're seeing the government sort of set a baseline for what makes sense. And they went further in a memo just released on August 27th, uh, by releasing what they call an enterprise logging maturity model. And it has four levels. And it, it indicates what sorts of data agencies should be storing from, and in their systems and for how long they should be storing it. And that's incredibly exciting because a lot of agencies are using Splunk, uh, to make sense of that data. And so this gives them sort of a baseline for what data do they need to collect? How long do they need to keep it collected for what questions do they need to ask of it? And as a result, um, we're making some offers to our customers about how they use Splunk, uh, how they take advantage of our cloud-based storage within our product, um, how they take advantage of our services in mapping their data strategy to this enterprise logging maturity model. And it represents a great opportunity to sort of take a step forward in cybersecurity for these agency customers. >>Yeah. I'm kind of curious here. I mean, I, I came from the wireless space and we had an active dialogue with the government in terms of, uh, communications, emergency communications, um, and, um, and also in, in services, the rural areas, that kind of thing. But sometimes that collaboration didn't go as smoothly as we would've liked, frankly. And, and so maybe lessons have been learned from that in terms of how the private sector melds with the public sector and works with the policy makers, you know, in that respect, what, how would you characterize just overall the relationship, you know, the public private sector relationship in terms of, you know, the sharing of resources and of information and collaboration? >>Well at the federal government level, uh, there's always been pretty incredible collaboration between industry and government, but I think, um, we at Splunk have been engaged through organizations like the Alliance for digital innovation, uh, the us chamber of commerce, um, act by act the American council for technology and the industry advisory council. And we're seeing a rise actually in university partnerships as well, particularly at the state level where, uh, let's say local governments are saying, Hey, we don't have the capacity to do some of these things that we now know we need to do. And we know that, uh, some of those things could be done in collaboration with our university partners and with our state partners. Um, and that's exciting. I think that it is an era where everyone realizes there are new threats. Uh, there are threats that are, um, hard to handle in a silo and that the more we collaborate, whether it's government industry collaboration, or whether it's cross government collaboration, or whether it's cross industry collaboration, the better, and the more effectively, uh, we'll solve some of these problems that face us as a nation. >>What do you make a great point too? Because, uh, it is about pulling resources at some point, and everybody pulling together, uh, in order to combat what has become a certainly vaccine, uh, challenge to say the least Jeremy, thanks for the time. Uh, I appreciate it. And, uh, wish you all the success down the road. >>Thanks for having me, John, you >>Bet Jeremy Risa joining us, talking about the public sector and sparks just exemplary work in that respect. You're watching the cube. Our coverage continues here of.com for 21.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector summit online. That's the virtual conference. Public Sector Summit is the big get together for Teresa Carlson and her team and Amazon Web services from the public sector, which includes all the government agencies as well as education state governments here in United States and also abroad for other governments and countries. So we're gonna do an analysis of Teresa's keynote and also summarize the event as well. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. I'm joined with my co host of the Cube, Dave Volante Stew Minimum. We're gonna wrap this up and analyze the keynote summit a really awkward, weird situation going on with the Summit because of the virtual nature of it. This event really prides itself. Stew and Dave. We've all done this event. It's one of our favorites. It's a really good face to face environment, but this time is virtual. And so with the covert 19 that's the backdrop to all this. >>Yeah, so I mean, a couple of things, John. I think first of all, A Z, you've pointed out many times. The future has just been pulled forward. I think the second thing is with this whole work from home in this remote thing obviously was talking about how the cloud is a tailwind. But let's face it. I mean, everybody's business was affected in some way. I think the cloud ultimately gets a tail wind out of this, but but But I think the third thing is security. Public sector is always heavily focused on security, and the security model has really changed overnight to what we've been talking about for years that the moat that we've built the perimeter is no longer where organizations need to be spending money. It's really to secure remote locations. And that literally happened overnight. So things like a security cloud become much, much more important. And obviously endpoint security and other other things that we've talked about in the Cube now for last 100 days. >>Well, Steve, I want to get your thoughts cause you know, we all love space. Do we always want to go the best space events that they're gonna be virtual this year as well? Um, But the big news out of the keynote, which was really surprising to me, is Amazon's continued double down on their efforts around space, cyber security, public and within the public sector. And they're announcing here, and the big news is a new space business segment. So they announced an aerospace group to serve those customers because space to becoming a very important observation component to a lot of the stuff we've seen with ground station we've seen at reinvent public sector. These new kinds of services are coming out. It's the best, the cloud. It's the best of data, and it's the best of these new use cases. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, interesting. John, of course. You know, the federal government has put together Space Forces, the newest arm of the military. It's really even though something it is a punchline. There's even a Netflix show that I believe got the trademark board because they registered for it first. But we've seen Amazon pushing into space. Not only there technology being used. I had the pleasure of attending the Amazon re Marcia last year, which brought together Jeff Bezos's blue origin as well as Amazon AWS in that ecosystem. So AWS has had a number of services, like ground Station that that that are being used to help the cloud technology extend to what's happening base. So it makes a lot of sense for for the govcloud to extend to that type of environment aside you mentioned at this show. One of the things we love always is. You know, there's some great practitioner stories, and I think so many over the years that we've been doing this show and we still got some of them. Theresa had some really good guests in her keynote, talking about transformation and actually, one of the ones that she mentioned but didn't have in the keynote was one that I got to interview. I was the CTO for the state of West Virginia. If you talk about one of those government services that is getting, you know, heavy usage, it's unemployment. So they had to go from Oh my gosh, we normally had people in, you know, physical answering. The phone call centers to wait. I need to have a cloud based contact center. And they literally did that, you know, over the weekend, spun it up and pulled people from other organizations to just say, Hey, you're working from home You know you can't do your normal job Well, we can train your own, we can get it to you securely And that's the kind of thing that the cloud was really built for >>and this new aerospace division day this really highlights a lot of not just the the coolness of space, but on Earth. The benefits of there and one of Amazon's ethos is to do the heavy lifting, Andy Jassy told us on the Cube. You know, it could be more cost effective to use satellites and leverage more of that space perimeter to push down and look at observation. Cal Poly is doing some really interesting work around space. Amazon's worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Labs. They have a lot of partnerships in aerospace and space, and as it all comes together because this is now an augmentation and the cost benefits are there, this is going to create more agility because you don't have to do all that provisioning to get this going spawned. All kinds of new creativity, both an academic and commercial, your thoughts >>Well, you know, I remember the first cloud first came out people talked a lot about while I can do things that I was never able to do before, you know, The New York Times pdf example comes to mind, but but I think what a lot of people forget is you know the point to a while. A lot of these mission critical applications Oracle databases aren't moving to the cloud. But this example that you're giving and aerospace and ground station. It's all about being able to do new things that you weren't able to do before and deliver them as a service. And so, to me, it shows a great example of tam expansion, and it also shows things that you never could do before. It's not just taking traditional enterprise APs and sticking them in the cloud. Yeah, that happens. But is re imagining what you can do with computing with this massive distributed network. And you know, I O. T. Is clearly coming into into play here. I would consider this a kind of I o t like, you know, application. And so I think there are many, many more to come. But this is a great example of something that you could really never even conceive in enterprise Tech before >>you, Dave the line on that you talked about i o t talk a lot about edge computing. Well, if you talk about going into space, that's a new frontier of the edge that we need to talk about >>the world. Glad it's round. So technically no edge if you're in space so again not to get nuance here and nerdy. But okay, let's get into the event. I want to hold on the analysis of the keynote because I think this really society impact public service, public sector, things to talk about. But let's do a quick review of kind of what's happened. We'll get to the event. But let's just review the guests that we interviewed on the Cube because we have the cube virtual. We're here in our studios. You guys were in yours. We get the quarantine cruise. We're still doing our job to get the stories out there. We talked to Teresa Carlson, Shannon Kellogg, Ken Eisner, Sandy Carter, Dr Papa Casey Coleman from Salesforce, Dr Shell Gentleman from the Paragon Institute, which is doing the fairground islands of researcher on space and weather data. Um, Joshua Spence math you can use with the Alliance for Digital Innovation Around some of this new innovation, we leave the Children's National Research Institute. So a lot of great guests on the cube dot net Check it out, guys. I had trouble getting into the event that using this in Toronto platform and it was just so hard to navigate. They've been doing it before. Um, there's some key notes on there. I thought that was a disappointment for me. I couldn't get to some of the sessions I wanted to, um, but overall, I thought the content was strong. Um, the online platform just kind of wasn't there for me. What's your reaction? >>Well, I mean, it's like a Z. That's the state of the art today. And so it's essentially a webinar like platforms, and that's what everybody's saying. A lot of people are frustrated with it. I know I as a user. Activity clicks to find stuff, but it is what it is. But I think the industry is can do better. >>Yeah, and just to comment. I'll make on it, John. One of things I always love about the Amazon show. It's not just what AWS is doing, But, you know, you walk the hallways and you walk the actual So in the virtual world, I walk the expo floor and its okay, Here's a couple of presentations links in an email address if you want to follow up, I felt even the A previous AWS online at a little bit more there. And I'm sure Amazon's listening, talking to all their partners and building out more there cause that's definitely a huge opportunity to enable both networking as well. As you know, having the ecosystem be able to participate more fully in the event >>and full disclosure. We're building our own platform. We have the platforms. We care about this guys. I think that on these virtual events that the discovery is critical having the available to find the sessions, find the people so it feels more like an event. I think you know, we hope that these solutions can get better. We're gonna try and do our best. Um, so, um well, keep plugging away, guys. I want to get your thoughts. They have you been doing a lot of breaking analysis on this do and your interviews as well in the technology side around the impact of Covert 19 with Teresa Carlson and her keynote. Her number one message that I heard was Covad 19 Crisis has caused a imperative for all agencies to move faster, and Amazon is kind of I won't say put things to the side because they got their business at scale. Have really been honing in on having deliverables for crisis solutions. Solving the problems and getting out to Steve mentioned the call centers is one of the key interviews. This is that they're job. They have to do this cove. It impacts the public services of the public sector that she's that they service. So what's your reaction? Because we've been covering on the commercial side. What's your thoughts of Teresa and Amazon's story today? >>Yeah, well, she said, You know, the agencies started making cloud migrations that they're at record pace that they'd never seen before. Having said that, you know it's hard, but Amazon doesn't break out its its revenue in public sector. But in the data, I look at the breaking analysis CTR data. I mean, it definitely suggests a couple of things. Things one is I mean, everybody in the enterprise was affected in some way by Kobe is they said before, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a little bit of a pause and aws public sector business and then it's picking up again now, as we sort of exit this isolation economy. I think the second thing I would say is that AWS Public sector, based on the data that I see, is significantly outpacing the growth of AWS. Overall number one number two. It's also keeping pace with the growth of Microsoft Azure. Now we know that AWS, on balance is much bigger than Microsoft Azure and Infrastructures of Service. But we also know that Microsoft Azure is growing faster. That doesn't seem to be the case in public sector. It seems like the public sector business is is really right there from in terms of growth. So it really is a shining star inside of AWS. >>Still, speed is a startup game, and agility has been a dev ops ethos. You couldn't see more obvious example in public sector where speed is critical. What's your reaction to your interviews and your conversations and your observations? A keynote? >>Yeah, I mean something We've all been saying in the technology industry is Just imagine if this had happened under 15 years ago, where we would be So where in a couple of the interviews you mentioned, I've talked to some of the non profits and researchers working on covert 19. So the cloud really has been in the spotlight. Can I react? Bask scale. Can I share information fast while still maintaining the proper regulations that are needed in the security so that, you know, the cloud has been reacting fast when you talk about the financial resource is, it's really nice to see Amazon in some of these instances has been donating compute occasional resource is and the like, so that you know, critical universities that are looking at this when researchers get what they need and not have to worry about budgets, other agencies, if you talk about contact centers, are often they will get emergency funding where they have a way to be able to get that to scale, since they weren't necessarily planning for these expenses. So you know what we've been seeing is that Cloud really has had the stress test with everything that's been going on here, and it's reacting, so it's good to see that you know, the promise of cloud is meeting that scale for the most part, Amazon doing a really good job here and you know, their customers just, you know, feel The partnership with Amazon is what I've heard loud and clear. >>Well, Dave, one of these I want to get your reaction on because Amazon you can almost see what's going on with them. They don't want to do their own horn because they're the winners on the pandemic. They are doing financially well, their services. All the things that they do scale their their their position, too. Take advantage. Business wise of of the remote workers and the customers and agencies. They don't have the problems at scale that the customers have. So a lot of things going on here. These applications that have been in the i t world of public sector are old, outdated, antiquated, certainly summer modernize more than others. But clearly 80% of them need to be modernized. So when a pandemic hits like this, it becomes critical infrastructure. Because look at the look of the things unemployment checks, massive amount of filings going on. You got critical service from education remote workforces. >>these are >>all exposed. It's not just critical. Infrastructure is plumbing. It's The applications are critical. Legit problems need to be solved now. This is forcing an institutional mindset that's been there for years of, like, slow two. Gotta move fast. I mean, this is really your thoughts. >>Yeah. And well, well, with liquidity that the Fed put into the into the market, people had, You know, it's interesting when you look at, say, for instance, take a traditional infrastructure provider like an HP era Dell. Very clearly, their on Prem business deteriorated in the last 100 days. But you know HP Q and, well, HBO, you had some some supply chain problem. But Dell big uptick in this laptop business like Amazon doesn't have that problem. In fact, CEOs have told me I couldn't get a server into my data center was too much of a hassle to get too much time. It didn't have the people. So I just spun up instances on AWS at the same time. You know, Amazon's VD I business who has workspaces business, you know, no doubt, you know, saw an uptick from this. So it's got that broad portfolio, and I think you know, people ask. Okay, what remains permanent? Uh, and I just don't see this This productivity boom that we're now finally getting from work from home pivoting back Teoh, go into the office and it calls into question Stu, when If nobody is in the corporate office, you know the VP ends, you know, the Internet becomes the new private network. >>It's to start ups moving fast. The change has been in the past two months has been, like, two years. Huge challenges. >>Yeah, John, it's an interesting point. So, you know, when cloud first started, it was about developers. It was about smaller companies that the ones that were born in the cloud on The real opportunity we've been seeing in the last few months is, you know, large organizations. You talk about public sector, there's non profits. There's government agencies. They're not the ones that you necessarily think of as moving fast. A David just pointing out Also, many of these changes that we're putting into place are going to be with us for a while. So not only remote work, but you talk about telehealth and telemedicine. These type of things, you know, have been on our doorstep for many years, but this has been a forcing function toe. Have it be there. And while we will likely go back to kind of a hybrid world, I think we have accelerated what's going on. So you know, there is the silver lining in what's going on because, you know, Number one, we're not through this pandemic. And number two, you know, there's nothing saying that we might have another pandemic in the future. So if the technology can enable us to be more flexible, more distributed a xai I've heard online. People talk a lot. It's no longer work from home but really work from anywhere. So that's a promise we've had for a long time. And in every technology and vertical. There's a little bit of a reimagining on cloud, absolutely an enabler for thinking differently. >>John, I wonder if I could comment on that and maybe ask you a question. That's okay. I know your host. You don't mind. So, first of all, I think if you think about a framework for coming back, it's too said, You know, we're still not out of this thing yet, but if you look at three things how digital is an organization. How what's the feasibility of them actually doing physical distancing? And how essential is that business from a digital standpoint you have cloud. How digital are you? The government obviously, is a critical business. And so I think, you know, AWS, public Sector and other firms like that are in pretty good shape. And then there's just a lot of businesses that aren't essential that aren't digital, and those are gonna really, you know, see a deterioration. But you've been you've been interviewing a lot of people, John, in this event you've been watching for years. What's your take on AWS Public sector? >>Well, I'll give an answer that also wants to do away because he and I both talk to some of the guests and interview them. Had some conversations in the community is prep. But my take away looking at Amazon over the past, say, five or six years, um, a massive acceleration we saw coming in that match the commercial market on the enterprise side. So this almost blending of it's not just public sector anymore. It looks a lot like commercial cause, the the needs and the services and the APS have to be more agile. So you saw the same kind of questions in the same kind of crazy. It wasn't just a separate division or a separate industry sector. It has the same patterns as commercial. But I think to me my big takeaways, that Theresa Carlson hit this early on with Amazon, and that is they can do a lot of the heavy lifting things like fed ramp, which can cost a $1,000,000 for a company to go through. You going with Amazon? You onboard them? You're instantly. There's a fast track for you. It's less expensive, significantly less expensive. And next thing you know, you're selling to the government. If you're a start up or commercial business, that's a gold mine. I'm going with Amazon every time. Um, and the >>other >>thing is, is that the government has shifted. So now you have Covad 19 impact. That puts a huge premium on people who are already been setting up for digital transformation and or have been doing it. So those agencies and those stakeholders will be doing very, very well. And you know that Congress has got trillions of dollars day. We've covered this on the Cube. How much of that coverage is actually going for modernization of I T systems? Nothing. And, you know, one of things. Amazon saying. And rightfully so. Shannon Kellogg was pointing out. Congress needs to put some money aside for their own agencies because the citizens us, the taxpayers, we got to get the services. You got veterans, you've got unemployment. You've got these critical services that need to be turned on quicker. There's no money for that. So huge blind spot on the whole recovery bill. And then finally, I think that there's a huge entrepreneurial thinking that's going to be a public private partnership. Cal Poly, Other NASA JPL You're starting to see new applications, and this came out of my interviews on some of the ones I talked to. They're thinking differently, the doing things that have never been done before. And they're doing it in a clever, innovative way, and they're reinventing and delivering new things that are better. So everything's about okay. Modernize the old and make it better, and then think about something new and completely different and make it game changing. So to me, those were dynamics that are going on than seeing emerge, and it's coming out of the interviews. Loud and clear. Oh, my God, I never would have thought about that. You can only do that with Cloud Computing. A super computer in the Cloud Analytics at scale, Ocean Data from sale Drone using satellite over the top observation data. Oh, my God. Brilliant. Never possible before. So these are the new things that put the old guard in the Beltway bandits that check because they can't make up the old excuses. So I think Amazon and Microsoft, more than anyone else, can drive change fast. So whoever gets there first, well, we'll take most of the shares. So it's a huge shift and it's happening very fast more than ever before this year with Covert 19 and again, that's the the analysis. And Amazon is just trying to like, Okay, don't talk about us is we don't want to like we're over overtaking the world because outside and then look opportunistic. But the reality is we have the best solution. So >>what? They complain they don't want to be perceived as ambulance station. But to your point, the new work loads and new applications and the traditional enterprise folks they want to pay the cow path is really what they want to dio. And we're just now seeing a whole new set of applications and workloads emerging. What about the team you guys have been interviewing? A lot of people we've interviewed tons of people at AWS reinvent over the years. We know about Andy Jassy at all. You know, his his lieutenants, about the team in public sector. How do they compare, you know, relative to what we know about AWS and maybe even some of the competition. Where do you Where do you grade them? >>I give Amazon and, um, much stronger grade than Microsoft. Microsoft still has an old DNA. Um, you got something to tell them is bring some fresh brand there. I see the Jedi competition a lot of mud slinging there, and I think Microsoft clearly got in fear solution. So the whole stall tactic has worked, and we pointed out two years ago the number one goal of Jet I was for Amazon not to win. And Microsoft looks like they're gonna catch up, and we'll probably get that contract. And I don't think you're probably gonna win that out, right? I don't think Amazon is gonna win that back. We'll see. But still doesn't matter. Is gonna go multi cloud anyway. Um, Teresa Carlson has always had the right vision. The team is exceptional. Um, they're superb experience and their ecosystem partners Air second and NASA GPL Cal Poly. The list goes on and on, and they're attracting new talent. So you look at the benchmark new talent and unlimited capability again, they're providing the kinds of services. So if we wanted to sell the Cube virtual platform Dave, say the government to do do events, we did get fed ramp. We get all this approval process because Amazon customer, you can just skate right in and move up faster versus the slog of these certifications that everyone knows in every venture capitalists are. Investor knows it takes a lot of time. So to me, the team is awesome. I think that the best in the industry and they've got to balance the policy. I think that's gonna be a real big challenge. And it's complex with Amazon, you know, they own the post. You got the political climate and they're winning, right? They're doing well. And so they have an incentive to to be in there and shape policy. And I think the digital natives we are here. And I think it's a silent revolution going on where the young generation is like, Look at government served me better. And how can I get involved? So I think you're going to see new APS coming. We're gonna see a really, you know, integration of new blood coming into the public sector, young talent and new applications that might take >>you mentioned the political climate, of course. Pre Cove. It'll you heard this? All that we call it the Tech lash, right, The backlash into big tech. You wonder if that is going to now subside somewhat, but still is the point You're making it. Where would we be without without technology generally and big tech stepping up? Of course, now that you know who knows, right, Biden looks like he's, you know, in the catbird seat. But there's a lot of time left talking about Liz more on being the Treasury secretary. You know what she'll do? The big tech, but But nonetheless I think I think really it is time to look at big tech and look at the Tech for good, and you give them some points for that. Still, what do you think? >>Yeah, first of all, Dave, you know, in general, it felt like that tech lash has gone down a little bit when I look online. Facebook, of course, is still front and center about what they're doing and how they're reacting to the current state of what's happening around the country. Amazon, on the other hand, you know, a done mentioned, you know, they're absolutely winning in this, but there hasn't been, you know, too much push back if you talk culturally. There's a big difference between Amazon and AWS. There are some concerns around what Amazon is doing in their distribution facilities and the like. And, you know, there's been lots of spotlights set on that, um, but overall, there are questions. Should AWS and Amazon that they split. There's an interesting debate on that, Dave, you and I have had many conversations about that over the past couple of years, and it feels like it is coming more to a head on. And if it happens from a regulation standpoint, or would Amazon do it for business reason because, you know, one of Microsoft and Google's biggest attacks are, well, you don't want to put your infrastructure on AWS because Amazon, the parent company, is going to go after your business. I do want to pull in just one thread that John you and Dave were both talking about while today you know, Amazon's doing a good job of not trying todo ambulance case. What is different today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It used to be that I t would do something and they didn't want to talk to their peers because that was their differentiation. But Amazon has done a good job of explaining that you don't want to have that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So now when an agency or a company find something that they really like from Amazon talking all their peers about it because they're like, Oh, you're using this Have you tried plugging in this other service or use this other piece of the ecosystem? So there is that flywheel effect from the cloud from customers. And of course, we've talked a lot about the flywheel of data, and one of the big takeaways from this show has been the ability for cloud to help unlock and get beyond those information silos for things like over 19 and beyond. >>Hey, John, if the government makes a ws spin out or Amazon spin out AWS, does that mean Microsoft and Google have to spin out their cloud businesses to? And, uh, you think that you think the Chinese government make Alibaba spin out its cloud business? >>Well, you know the thing about the Chinese and Facebook, I compare them together because this is where the tech lash problem comes in. The Chinese stolen local property, United States. That's well documented use as competitive advantage. Facebook stole all the notional property out of the humans in the world and broke democracy, Right? So the difference between those bad tech actors, um, is an Amazon and others is 11 enabling technology and one isn't Facebook really doesn't really enable anything. If you think about it, enables hate. It enables some friends to talk some emotional reactions, but the real societal benefit of historically if you look at society, things that we're enabling do well in free free societies. Closed systems don't work. So you got the country of China who's orchestrating all their actors to be state driven, have a competitive advantage that's subsidised. United States will never do that. I think it's a shame to break up any of the tech companies. So I'm against the tech lash breakup. I think we should get behind our American companies and do it in an open, transparent way. Think Amazon's clearly doing that? I think that's why Amazon's quiet is because they're not taking advantage of the system that do things faster and cheaper gets that's there. Ethos thinks benefits the consumer with If you think about it that way, and some will debate that, but in general Amazon's and enabling technology with cloud. So the benefits of the cloud for them to enable our far greater than the people taking advantage of it. So if I'm on agency trying to deliver unemployment checks, I'm benefiting the citizens at scale. Amazon takes a small portion of that fee, so when you have enabling technologies, that's how to me, The right capitalism model works Silicon Valley In the tech companies, they don't think this way. They think for profit, go big or go home and this has been an institutional thing with tech companies. They would have a policy team, and that's all they did. They didn't really do anything t impact society because it wasn't that big. Now, with networked economies, you're looking at something completely different to connected system. You can't handle dissidents differently is it's complex? The point is, the diverse team Facebook and Amazon is one's an enabling technology. AWS Facebook is just a walled garden portal. So you know, I mean, some tech is good, some text bad, and a lot of people just don't know the difference what we do. I would say that Amazon is not evil Amazon Web services particular because they enable people to do things. And I think the benefits far outweigh the criticisms. So >>anybody use AWS. Anybody can go in there and swipe the credit card and spin up compute storage AI database so they could sell the problems. >>The problems, whether it's covert problems on solving the unemployment checks going out, are serving veterans or getting people getting delivering services. Some entrepreneurs develop an app for that, right? So you know there's benefits, right? So this you know, there's not not Amazon saying Do it this way. They're saying, Here's this resource, do something creative and build something solve a problem. And that was the key message of the keynote. >>People get concerned about absolute power, you know, it's understandable. But if you know you start abusing absolute power, really, I've always believed the government should come in, >>but >>you know, the evidence of that is is pretty few and far between, so we'll see how this thing plays out. I mean, it's a very interesting dynamic. I point about why should. I don't understand why AWS, you know, gets all the microscopic discussion. But I've never heard anybody say that Microsoft should spend on Azure. I've never heard that. >>Well, the big secret is Azure is actually one of Amazon's biggest customers. That's another breaking analysis look into that we'll keep on making noted that Dave's do Thanks for coming to do great interviews. Love your conversations. Final words to I'll give you What's the big thing you took away from your conversations with your guests for this cube? Virtual coverage of public sector virtual summit >>so biggest take away from the users is being able to react to, you know, just ridiculously fast. You know it. Talk about something where you know I get a quote on Thursday on Friday and make a decision, and on Monday, on up and running this unparalleled that I wouldn't be able to do before. And if you talk about the response things like over nine, I mean enabling technology to be able to cut across organizations across countries and across domains. John, as you pointed out, that public private dynamic helping to make sure that you can react and get things done >>Awesome. We'll leave it there. Stew. Dave. Thanks for spending time to analyze the keynote. Also summarize the event. This is a does public sector virtual summit online Couldn't be face to face. Of course. We bring the Cube virtual coverage as well as content and our platform for people to consume. Go the cube dot net check it out and keep engaging. Hit us up on Twitter if any questions hit us up. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. This is theCUBE Virtual with our quarantine crew going out and covering the latest posts of the Virtual Summit where our next guest is Matthew Cornelius, Executive Director for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Matthew, thanks for joining me today for part of AWS virtual Public Sector Summit. >> That's great, thanks, John. Appreciate you having me. >> I know that John Wood and I have been talking about this organization and some of the ambition and the relevance of it. So I think it's a super important story. I want to get your thoughts on this in an unpack kind of the mission but for starters, tell us what is the Alliance for Digital Innovation? When were you formed? What's the mission? What do you do? >> Sure. Yeah, so ADI was formed about two years ago, to create a new advocacy group that could focus explicitly on getting cloud forward, commercial, highly innovative companies into the public sector. So the government technology space has traditionally been dominated by a lot of legacy vendors, folks that are very happy with vendor lock-in, folks that have an outdated business model that would not suffice in the commercial sector. So why does it have to be that way for government and ADI started with about eight members has since grown. We're approaching two dozen now. So we've had a lot of growth and I think a lot of the response that you've seen in the public sector, especially to the COVID crisis, and the response and relief efforts have made this organization and our mission more relevant now than ever. There's no way that you can go back to the previous way of doing business, so adopting all these commercials technologies, changing your business model, changing your operating model, and really use an emerging technology to deliver all these missions services is critical. >> You know, one of the things that I've been reporting on for many, many years is this idea of modernization. Certainly on the commercial side with cloud, it's been really important and Amazon has done extremely well, from a business standpoint. We all know that where that's going. The issue that's happening now is the modernization is kicking in. So the government has started to move down this track, we've seen the procurement start to get more modernized. Move from buying manuals to actually having the modern stuff and in comes COVID-19. You couldn't have accelerated, you couldn't have pulled the future forward fast enough to an already struggling federal government, in my opinion, and I've talked to many people in DC and the young crowd saying, "Hey, old government get modern", and then this comes. It's almost like throwing the rock on your back and you're sinking. This is a problem. What's your take on this? Because you're trying to solve a problem with modernizing, but now you got COVID-19 coming in, it compounds the complexity and the challenge. What's your chosen reaction to that? >> Yeah, so it there's a multifaceted response to this. So part of it is what I like to say is the government's done more in the past four months than it's done in the past 14 years when it comes to modernization and adopting commercial capabilities. I think with individual agencies, you've seen those those agencies, I will name a couple like the Small Business Administration, the General Services Administration, where I used to work, folks that were already heavily invested in cloud, heavily invested in modern digital tools and modern digital processes, they were able to weather this storm and to deal especially in SPS case, with a dramatic increase in their mission. I mean, running the paycheck Protection Program is something unlike an organization that size has ever seen. And from a technology standpoint, they have a lot of good stories that are worth telling and I think it's because they were so cloud forward. I think one of the other interesting points that as really come to light over the past four months is so many of the issues around modernization were cultural. Now, of course, there are some that are legal, there's acquisition, there's the way agencies are appropriated and financed and the way they can spend their money, but by and large, all of these agencies had to move to maximum telework, they had to get rid of all of these outdated on premise processes, these paper based processes that they had. And although surely there were some bumps in the road, and that was not easy, especially for these folks working around the clock to keep their agencies operational to make sure citizens are getting the services, they need, especially during this crisis, I think there's a lot of great success stories that you see there and because of this, no one even if they're allowed to go back into the office or when they're allowed to go back in the office, people are going to understand how much more productive they are, how much more technologically capable they are. And that's not just CIO officers that's people on programs in the front lines delivering services that mission response. We've really seen it powerful word over the last four months. >> You know, Matthew, I've been very vocal given that I'm kind of the old guy, get off my lawn kind of commentary. (Matthew laughs) I've seen that the waves and I remember coming in when I was in my late 20s and 30s old school enterprises, the commercial business wouldn't do business with startups, you had to be approved or you were in entrenched vendors supporting those things and then in comes the web, in comes the 90s, and then the web came there's more agile, you had startups that were more open and working with commercial vendors. It seems like we're seeing that movie play out in public sector where you have the entrenched incumbents, they got the town wired, who knows what's going on. It's been called the Beltway bandits for years and Tris and Curson and I talk about that all the time, but now the government can be agile, and startups need to be product to these new solutions, like whether it's video conferencing or virtual events, things like we do. New solutions are coming that need to come in, it's hard. Can you share how a company whether it's a startup or a new solution can come in and work with the government? Because the perception is, it's impossible. >> Yeah, and part of why ADI exist is to break that down. One to recruit more members to join us to really help drive commercial innovation in the government. And we have some very large companies like AWS and others that do an awful lot of work with the government. And we have a lot of smaller startups that are interested in dipping their toe in there. And so we try to help them demystify how it is that you go about working with the government. I think there have been again, some good success stories on this one. I think that there are lots of places like the Department of Defense, a lot of the folks in the intelligence community, some other agencies, they have authorities, they have partnership programs that make it easier for folks to adopt commercial innovation. They have unique authorities like other transaction authorities or commercial solutions offerings that really lowers the barrier for new technologies to be piloted and potentially scaled inside government. But that's not the case across lots of agencies, and that's why we advocate broadly for getting the acquisition process to move at the speed of technology. If there are good authorities that work in some agencies, let's get into everybody, let's have everybody try it because the people in the agencies, the acquisition professionals, the technical professionals, they have to be committed to working with industry, so the industry is committed to working with them. And as a former federal employee, myself, I worked at the Office of Management and Budget and the General Service Administration, I always was upset at the fact that the government is very good at speaking to industry, but not very good at working with industry and listening, and so we see a lot more of that now and I think part of that is a response to COVID, but it's also the recognition that you can't do things the way you used to do it, the traditional butts in seats contracting business model where everybody in between a federal employee and that outsourced service provider. You don't need all those people there, you can do it yourself and be just as effective and get all the real outcomes you're looking for with commercial innovation. >> It sounds like ADI your priorities is to make things go fast and be modernized. So I have to ask you, the question that's on my mind, probably on everyone's mind is, what are the key conversations or messages you provide to the agencies, heads or members of Congress to get them excited about this, to take action to support what you're doing? Because let's face it, most of these guys up on the Hill are girls now, most of them have a law backgrounds, they don't have a tech background. So that's a complaint that I've heard in the hallways in DC is, the guy making all the decisions doesn't know jack about tech. >> No, it's it's a great point. When we advocate up on the Hill there's a law that I don't think a lot of folks pay in awful lot of attention to. Everybody likes the nice new things that are coming from Capitol Hill but there's a great piece of legislation from 1994 for the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. We actually did some tremendous original research at ADI, about a year ago and released an interesting report that got a lot of uptick here. And most people don't even understand that the law requires you to do market research and see if there's a commercial product or service that meets your need before you go down building any sort of specific requirements or building out some sort of long procurement process. And so a lot of what we're doing is educating folks, not just on what the law says, but on why these can lead to better outcomes for agencies. I mean, I truly believe that most of the folks in government whether they're technical folks or not want to do the best thing, but if you're a company trying to do business with the government, you have to go through what is often a five or six or sometimes 10 person human supply chain. There's someone in government who wants your solution because it addresses a particular problem, and between them, and you the company, there's all sorts of additional bureaucratic overlays and folks that are not technical, that have other incentives and other priorities that don't always lead to the most optable procurement outcome. So there's an educational component, there's a cultural component. We need more champions inside government. We need not just better technology that's wanting to work with the government but we also need smarter, better people inside that understand the technology and can get to it the way they need to get to it so that they can deliver mission. >> As someone like me who's in the technology business, who loves entrepreneurship, loves business, loves the impact of technology, I'm not a public servant, and I'm not at that up to speed on all the government kind of inside baseball, so I kind of look at it a little bit differently. I've always been a big proponent of public private partnerships that's been kicked around in the past. It's kind of like digital transformation, kind of cliche, but there's been some pockets of success there, but look at the future. The role of influence and the commercial impact just China, for instance, just riffing the other day with someone around China doesn't actually go through government channels for how they deal with the United States. There's a little commercial, they have intellectual property issues going on, people saying they're stealing, they're investing in the United States. So there's a commercial influence. So as the government has to look at these commercial influences, they then have to modernize their workforce, their workloads, their applications, their workplaces. The work is not just workloads, it's workplace, workforce. So if you had your way, how would you like to see the landscape of the federal technology piece of this look like in five years? Because there's now new influence vectors coming in that are outside the channels of federal purview. >> No, it's a great question, and I appreciate you bringing up the other complexities around nation state actors in China and everything else. Obviously, supply chain security and being able to deal with legitimate security threat is critical when you're inside government. I mean, your first sort of purpose is to do no harm and to make sure that you're keeping citizen data, whether it's classified or unclassified secure. We think at ADI that there's a great balance to be heard there and part of that is if you're working with American companies, and you're adopting the best and most agile and most innovative commercial technology that America has to offer, that's going to make our industry more competitive and position it better in the commercial market and it's also going to make government agencies more effective. They're going to be able to meet their mission faster, they're going to be able to lower costs, they're going to be able to shift what are going to be tighter and tighter budgets over the next four or five or 10 years to other areas because they're not wasting so much money on these old systems and this old business processes, this old way of doing business. So you that is one of the balances that we have to take from an advocacy standpoint. We have to understand that supply chain security, cybersecurity are real issues, but security can also be an enabler to innovation and not an impediment and if a lot of the commercial capabilities that are coming out now and a lot of these companies like the ones ADI represents, want to do business with the government, and their commercial products can inherently be more secure than a lot of these old bespoke systems or old business practices. That's good for not just federal agencies, that's good for citizens and that's good for our national defense and our economy. >> You know, I look at our landscape and being an American born here, looking at other emerging countries, certainly China's one example of becoming very world digital native, even other areas where 5G and then telecom has made great internet access, you're seeing digital native countries, so as we modernize, and our lawmakers have more tech savvy and things become digital native, the commercial enabling piece is a huge thing, having that enabling technology, because it creates wealth and jobs and other things so you got three things, digital native country, enabling technologies to promote good and wealth and engine of economic value, and then societal impact. What's your take on those three kind of pillars? Because we're kind of as a country coming into this world order and look at the younger generation, they're all screaming for it, we're digital native, and all kinds of arbitrage there, fake news, misinformation, then you got enabling technology with the cloud, and then you get societal benefits, future of elections and everything else. So what's your thoughts? 'Cause it sounds like you're thinking about these things in your Digital Innovation Alliance. >> Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I will say and as someone that was a former federal employee, the one thing we need more of whether you're on the executive branch or in Congress, we need more people that like you said, are digital natives that understand technology that also want to be inside government either running programs or dealing with policy issues. We need as many good new ideas and folks with real, legitimate, necessary and current skills in there. Because if you don't understand the technology, you don't understand, like you said the societal impacts, you don't understand the business impacts of government decision making and the government can drive markets. I mean, especially in the middle of Coronavirus, we're spending trillions of dollars to keep folks afloat and we're using technology primarily as a way to make that happen. So the first thing I would say is, we need, we continue, need to continue, sorry, we need to continue to recruit and retain and train the best and the brightest to go into government service because it is a joy and a privilege to serve government and we've got to have better smarter technical people in there or we're going to keep getting these same outcomes, like you've mentioned over the past 30 plus years. >> I think we're in a JFK moment where John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for your country". Moment in the modern era and that was the 60s, that we saw the revolution of that happen there, we're kind of having a digital version of that now where it's an opportunity for people to get involved, younger generations and make change rather than arguing about it. So I feel fairly strongly about this so I think this is an opportunity. Your reaction to that? >> No, that's a fantastic point. I hadn't really thought about the JFK resemblance. From an industry standpoint, I think that is what is happening with these emerging technology companies and even some of the large companies. They understand that this is their way to contribute to the country whose R&D dollars and these public private partnerships helped a lot of these folks to grow and become the companies they are now. At least started them down that road. And so for us at the Alliance for Digital Innovation and the companies that are a part of us that is sort of purposeful to who we are. We do what we do and we want the government to build stronger relationships and to use this technology, because it does serve mission. I mean, we exclusively focus on the public sector. Focus of these companies and it's tremendously valuable when you see a federal agency who spent five or 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and still not solving a problem and then they can pick up the commercial off the shelf technology from a company that we represent, and can solve that problem for $5 million and do it in six months. I mean, that's truly rewarding and whether you're inside government or out, we should all celebrate that and we should find ways to make that the norm and not the exception. >> And take all that hate and violence and challenge it towards voting and getting involved. I'm a big proponent of that. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time. I'll give you the last word. Take a minute to put a plug in for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Who are the charter members, who's involved? I know John Wood from Telos is a charter member. Who's involved, how did it all start? >> Yeah. >> Give it taste of the culture and who's involved. >> Yeah, thanks, John. So, yeah, like you mentioned, we have tremendous members, AWS is obviously a great partner. We have a lot of big companies that are involved, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks. We also have great midsize and small companies. You think of Telos, you think of SAP NS2 and Iron Net, you think of Saildrone. We've got companies that whose technology product and service offerings run the range for government needs. We all come together because we understand that the government can and should and must do better to buy and leverage commercial technology to meet mission outcomes. So that is what we focus on. And, frankly, we have seen tremendous growth since COVID started. I mean, we are 24 members now we were at 18, just four months ago, but I like to say that ADI is an organization whose mission is more important and more resonant now, not just in the technology, parts of government, but at the secretary level at the Chief Acquisition Officer level, in Congress. We are folks that are trying to paint the future, we're doing a positive vision for change for what government can and should be. And for all of those other technology companies that want to be a part of that, that understand that the government can do better, and that has ideas for making it work better and for getting commercial innovation into government faster, to solve mission outcomes and to increase that trust between citizens and government, we want you. So if folks are interested in joining you got people that are watching out there, you can go to alliance4digitalinnovation.org. We're always accepting interested applicants and we look forward to continuing this message, showing some real outcomes and helping the government for the next year, five years, 10 years, really mature and modernize faster and more effectively than it has before. >> Great mission, love what you're doing. I think the future democracy depends on these new models to be explored, candidly and out in the open, and it's a great mission, we support that. Thanks for taking the time, Matthew. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. Have a great Public Sector Summit. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Virtual Summit. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Virtual. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more coverage. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello and welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Summit online. Virtual. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm your host, John Furrier with the Cube with the quarantine crew. We got a great guest Cube alumni. Shannon Kellogg, vice president of Amazon Web Services AWS Public Policy Shannon, Great to see you. >>Hey, John, it's great to be back. I do feel like I'm a bona fide alumnus of the Cube, so thanks for having me. >>It's always great to have you on. You know, we've had many kind of conscious about policy and modernization of government. That's been the big trend kind of waves in your world. Now, with Cove in 19 you cannot ignore this. This was no longer an adjunct of physical spaces or physical realities. This reality is about virtualization, of of data, workloads, work, workforces, workplaces, workloads, work flows, you name it, it's impacted, and certainly this is a tough time for everyone to do work. More importantly, that it shows all the problems with modernization people aren't modern are really suffering. So I want to get your thoughts about as we go through this pandemic and look at stabilizing and coming out of it. A lot of reinvention and a lot of growth strategies that are changing in real time. So I want to get your thoughts on that real quick. >>Yeah, well, John, we've seen more innovation and migration to the cloud in the last few months than we have over the last few years. And, you know, things have been steady the last few years. You know, you've seen organizations continually migrate, Cloud and AWS, but organizations now accelerating, we're seeing at every level of government. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing, of course, in healthcare. And so organizations are trying to transform fast. One of the first problem sets that we were tackling in the early days of the code 19 response was to work with states here in the US as they were trying to set up their unemployment response efforts. And, ah, their you know, their unemployment insurance portals in places where citizens could go in and apply for those benefits. And you had a lot of states that were dealing with some very, um, old legacy systems that had to move quickly. And we, uh, you know, partnered with many of them and in several of our providers service providers to get them set up fast. And so that was one of the first, um, uh, things that we saw, you know, during the early stages of code 19 >>one of the big means going around the Internet, Obviously past couple months, as you know, the cliche of digital transformation or directional mission and then just being celebrated by covert, kind of like, ah, wrecking ball kind of hitting that digital transformation theme. Really kind of exposing people to the reality of it has to happen faster. I want to get your thoughts on this because you published an op ed piece today around the code 19 response on how the federal government should respond to this. And it's titled Rethinking Government Services in the wake of covert 19. You really make some strong points there, and I want to get your thoughts on that. Can you give a quick highlights of the key thoughts on that? Opted? What are you trying to say there? What's the positioning. What's the message? >>Yeah, well, as I mentioned, governments at every level have already started to accelerate their digital transformation effort. And one of the things that I was trying to really emphasize in the op ed today was that there is an opportunity to continue to do that certainly in the federal government, but also at state and local levels. And, um, you know, there have to be some investment in order to continue to enable that transformation, and there has to be continued leadership and focus on it. And, of course, it doesn't end just with government digital transformation. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing it in the health, their sector. And so, uh, what I am trying to emphasize now is that we've come a long way even in a few months, in helping organizations through this transformation provide better citizen services, provide emergency response efforts including, you know, as I mentioned at the state level, getting these unemployment insurance portals set up fast in the virtual call centers organized around those, uh, and certainly at the federal government. We've seen some large scale programmes rolled out without cloud computing. That would not have been successful in several cases. When you think about the billions of dollars and really trillions of dollars that's rolled out through these federal, uh, government relief efforts, uh, I t. Has been a very important part of that. And so now we need to continue to move forward and accelerate this digital transformation across the board. It we owe it, quite frankly, to citizens. And, um, you know, I think that there are a lot of lessons learned that we can draw from covered 19 responses. >>So are you making a case for Congress to allocate money for modernization of these services? >>Yeah, The good news is, John is that Congress for years in a bipartisan way, has been supporting federal I t. Modernization. And now they have an opportunity, especially as you look at what's happening out of the states and again thinking about how some of these old legacy systems really delayed or hurt some of the covered 19 response efforts. The states need funding in order to modernize some of these systems, or it's not every federal agency as the funding that they need either. And there's an opportunity for Congress also to provide some of that funding. I saw that you spoke with my colleague Matt Cornelius over at the Alliance for additional Innovation and talked a lot about the modernizing technologies on it, some of those efforts and how important it is for Congress in a bipartisan way to make sure that the mighty modernization in federal agencies fully funded. And I support that. And I know that many other not only companies but trade associations like the Alliance for Additional Innovation do as well. >>And tomorrow >>I'm and I'm talking about up Skilling, of course, which is an important part. >>Well, I mean, you look at that. Look at the attic being the systems. They're antiquated, their old, you've got unemployment. That's just new jobs need to be filled re Skilling of existing jobs because the cloud is part of it. And then just the local economy is going to be impacted. Just online education, new roles and new responsibilities. So I got to ask you with with what you're seeing, what are the lessons? Have you learned that can keep up the momentum in the government? Because I see this is an accelerant. This pandemic. What lessons? >>In addition to what I was saying earlier on the funding side, having a focus on training and upscaling and re Skilling is really critical. Um, we have a lot of work worse development programmes here at Amazon and AWS that we're rolling out and providing a service or or our public sector customers and colleagues. We're also doing a lot in terms of helping, um, various parts of the population retrain and get involved in the digital economy. One of the I think really great examples of how we've been doing that for several years are the military assistance programs that we have been involved in where we're working with partners, community college level four year education institutions, Teoh provide training and certification for workers that are coming out of the military and or their spouses. That's something that we leave were both again the community college level, but even have partnered with the federal government, the Department of Labor in some of those programs. And we have to continue to do that we and others to accelerate what we're doing in terms of the workforce development effort. Um, you know, across every level of government, right? Frankly, >>you know, I've been doing a lot of virtual cube virtual events covering them, building software for them. Um, and then this is big focus on the remote workers work from home. I get that. That's an I T kind of paradigm. Companies have a focus of their workers, but also there's a remote customer, remote prospect or remote user. So the stakeholders of all these systems now are exposed in the It's pretty obvious who's winning and who's got a good solution. So I got to ask you, What's the learnings? Are you you're seeing over the past few months around this remote worker or remote consumer, because people have to do their jobs. But they also have suppliers in respect to how the Internet has evolved the ecosystem of partners and companies and and stakeholders. There's a lot of learnings here. What would you share the past couple months? >>So John is probably obvious to you that Kobe, 19 has transformed how people are working, obviously, and that's no different here at Amazon. Many of us are working remotely and have been for several months. Certainly, we're seeing, um, a huge transformation in the public sector around remote work. The federal government is you know, for years has had initiatives around Tele work. Uh, champions, like Gerry Connolly, a U S representative from Virginia, have been very focused on trying to move the federal government in that direction. And thank goodness, because I think if if those efforts weren't already in place, you would not have seen a So many people will be able to work from home as fast as they did during covered 19. But still, there's a lot more work to do in our federal agencies to adopt. Hello, work and, um, remote working. Uh, we're seeing that at the state level. We're seeing that in educational institutions, there's a ton more work there to do. And, you know, I think there's an opportunity. Teoh continue through these digital transformation efforts, enabling remote work and tele work. But we also have to have bipartisan collaboration to continue to push forward those efforts at the federal level. >>You know, it's interesting and I want to get your reaction is you're a veteran not only of technology, but also policy. And as I was saying earlier in an interview I was doing this morning around your event, is that on the commercial side. We saw Amazon. I mean, I was a history of Amazon developers. I t enterprise, commercial and now public sector. It's the same movie. Inadequate old systems need to be modernized cloud, certainly helping there. But you look at that. Look at the flywheel of Amazon, infrastructures of service, platforms of service and sass. A lot of people in the public sector are laying down the foundational things around infrastructure, getting on auditing, compliance system that's agile and then building a platform on top for a new workload. So I got to get your reaction to the three things that we're seeing. Changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are happening right now at an accelerated level. All three of those theaters are exploding and change. What's your thoughts and reaction? >>Well, one of the things that I've seen over the years, as you know, you saw first movers in the cloud and you saw organizations adopt these technologies is that sometimes you know when you look at federal workers, for example, or you even look across the public sector. People were a little apprehensive sometimes adopting these new technologies and practices, because they, um you know were adverse the risk or felt that if they did, you know, service a first mover, do something bold that it might come back to potentially, um, you know, hurt them in some way in terms of the risks that they took if something went wrong. And so now, over the last several months, I've seen that apprehension in every organization that we're working with basically not be there, because people recognize that they have to move now, move quickly and adopt these new technologies. Adopt these new practices in order to do their jobs to provide. If you're in government, the right services do your citizens into the people who need those services. If you're in the private sector to move faster, to be able to provide more services more quickly to your customers, I mean, think about a company like ours where we had to scale up very, very fast. We were already scaling rapidly, but we had to scale even more wrap and and so it's really, really important. I think that, you know, we draw on these lessons over the last few months, especially in relation to the public sector, where it's okay to take a risk. It's okay to adopt new technologies and practices. And it's okay to move fast, because you know what? In a situation like over 19 sometimes you're gonna have to move very, very quickly to that remote working environment, or you're gonna have to move very quickly to set up a you know, a digital or virtual call center in order to provide basic services that people need to survive. So it's just a really interesting transformation that I'm seeing out there. >>Yeah, it was interesting out to share some commentary from myself and I want to get your reaction to that is that in the hundreds of people that I've talked to in the DC area, covering public sector of the past many years is has been this younger audience and this younger workforce. And then now look at the pandemic. You look at the impact on education, unemployment in the citizenship of in the communities, not just state, but local. You're seeing an uprising. You're seeing a silent revolution from the younger constituents was saying, you know Hey, I don't care what it takes. Just go faster. Support me. Deliver the kind of serve, Be agile I mean, they're kind of speaking Dev ops in their own way. So a silent revolution is happening and I want to get your thoughts. But I know you and I have talked about this briefly and I use the word summit revolution. But people were younger generation like What are you talking about? Manuals like shipping old procurement methods. What's the problem? What's the blocker? Why is that? There is really no answer to that. So I want to get your thoughts to that cause that's something that we're seeing in this silent revolution is emerging in this I t modernization the government because people will expect faster services. They're >>unemployed. I wanted to be a lot more of the startup mentality. And, you know, I don't think it's, ah, even age restrictive. You know, every organization that we're working with, we have workers at every in every age group, and, you know, we're seeing people just shift to this mentality of okay, I need this service now. I need to move faster, and you know, we have to get access to this remotely in order to do this or to do that. And so to me, it's not you know, necessarily, just in a certain part of our population and everybody is starting. I think that way in every organization that we're working with and they're throwing out some of the, you know, some of the, um uh, old practices or old way of thinking. I mean, I can't tell you how many state officials I've had Call me during this covered 19 response who were asking for help. Like, we've got to do this now. How can we get your help to do this now And and to me, that's just, you know, that start up mentality like we've got to figure this out. No matter if our procurement practices aren't where they should be or our systems aren't where they should be. We have to figure this out. And to me, that's sort of a startup mentality. A you know, a transformational approach that we're seeing across the board. >>I would I would agree with that. Also add that a lot of people want to have a mission and they want to get involved in public service and see a way to contribute. So I see an inward my inbound migration for people getting involved, assault on these public sector problems cause it's a societal impact, and I think you're going to start to see people realizing that they can just taken protest. They can vote, but they also get involved. And I think you're going to see developers. I think it will be a tsunami of of new creative work loads or applications coming quickly. I think that's gonna be very >>interested. John. I I couldn't agree more. I think I think, you know, we're seeing transformation not just in the public sector and how services are providing are provided, but also in our economy and how we interact with people and how we socialize. And, you know, it's just a complete transformation in different way of thinking. And organizations and individuals are out there creating right now, much of it in the cloud, trying to figure out how to innovate, trying to figure out how you know, to come up with new business models and approaches. And so it's It's very exciting, you know, to see some of that also the top there in to talk to people as they're thinking about new ways to do things, you know, it's it's unfortunately very tragic given, You know, the circumstances around Kobe 19. But when things get difficult like this and people, you know, base, uh, challenges like this, you know, they tend to and we all tend to figure out how we can help, how we can maybe think differently, how we can help with the transformation. And we're certainly seeing that in the public sector and through some of these digital transformation efforts. But to your point, we're also seeing it in the private sector. >>What's great about the economy. People solve problems together. And that's one of the best things about America and Free States nations out there. So I want to shift a little bit. As I know this is something that's close to you, your heart as well as mine. You wrote a block post this past year earlier in the year, so we're supporting veterans to get into stem programs. How are you thinking about that and getting them back into the workforce? Certainly for and after the pandemic? >>Yeah, we're really passionate about this area, John. I'm glad you asked. I mentioned a little bit before some of the training that we're doing with colleges and universities and even directly with the government for, um uh, you know, military members that are transferring out. Our folks are already veterans or their spouses. You know. It's also important to remember the families who have been there right at the side of our veterans and those that air service a providing service in the military for the country. And so we're super passionate about that at every level of Amazon and every level, certainly of AWS. We have a lot of programs across Amazon to hire veterans to train veterans, including in above basic skills as well as advanced cloud skills. And we're super excited about all of those programs. I mentioned many of those in the block bus that you're referring to, and I would encourage folks toe look on our AWS public sector blawg for more information on those efforts, we're constantly updating and providing more insight and how those programs are being conduct >>well, Shannon, one of the things that's interesting and just to kind of close out our chat here is sustainability because you look at the carbon footprint, a lot of cars on the road, you see and seeing people being happy about that. But this points to what technology can do to help. Sustainability has had some announcements here at the summit. Can you share highlights on that? >>Yeah. So we have lots going on in sustainability across Amazon. Amazon Web services, or AWS, has been a big part of that. We have, ah, long term goal of being 100% renewable and eventually carbon carbon neutral. Our initial renewable energy goal is in 2025 s. So we've been, um, you know, enabling the availability of a lot more utility scale. Renewable energy is part of that effort just across the river in Virginia. We have multiple solar projects that we've been putting in place and backing financially now for several years as part of that effort. And we're doing that across the country as well as across the world. And that's something that we believe very strongly in. And, you know, the company Amazon just announced a $2 billion climate fund last week that focuses on startups and technology, a new technologies and new companies in this space. And that is also something that we're very proud. So we believe very strongly about this area. I you have been involved for a number of years in sustainability efforts in the in the company and in particular in AWS. Tonight I have the pleasure of also serving on the American Council for Renewable Energy, which does one of the leading non profits and organizations in this space. And there's, you know, there's a lot of momentum for, you know, renewable energy. And even with some of the challenges around code 19 and the economic challenges that industry is is moving forward. And, you know, we as a company are very, very committed to enabling more renewable energy to be available, including right across the river in Virginia. >>Well, Shannon, you got your hands full as the vice president of AWS public policy in d. C. Not only do we have the pandemic, we just got them sea change of massive innovation coming a digital. I know you've got the world down. They're evolving really quickly. Congratulations. And, you know, stay with it and keep keep plugging away for that innovation strategy. Appreciate it, >>John. We appreciate it. Thanks so much for including me and AWS on the queue began during the public sector summit. >>Michael, >>always good to see >>my pleasure. Always. Great societal changes coming. Real impact. This is the focus. Digital technology's going to make a difference. Change the economics. Changing experiences and outcomes for public services. Public in societal change. Kellog Shannon Kellogg, vice President of public Policy here in the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(technology music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to VMworld, we are live on theCUBE, day two of our continuing coverage here. We've had a great day and half so far. I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost Keith Townsend. We're excited to be joined by two guests from HPE, who are new to theCUBE. We have Leslie Maher, the VP of North American Enterprise Servers and Converged Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Satya Vardharajan, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances, from HPE. Welcome to you as well. >> Oh thank you, Lisa. Thanks for inviting us here. >> Absolutely. So guys, let's talk to each of you, Leslie we'll start with you. Tell us about your role, especially in the converged side for HPE, and what you're doing with VMware. >> Great. So, my role at HPE is I'm responsible for enterprise servers and converged systems. What that means is, really our value products. A couple of my key responsibility, one is our HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure, I'm you've probably heard, people talk about here at the event. We also have converged products around offerings like SAP Hana, and some of the more mission critical servers. So here a lot of the focus has been on Synergy, and our relationship once with VMware, but also solutions around vSan and vCloud Foundation, where Synergy provides some really unique capabilities. >> Yes. And Satya tell us about your role in alliances, and your GTM strategy with VMware. >> Sure, so I manage the VMware Alliance globally, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and this is a very strategic relationship for each HPE. We have a long history with VMware, over 15 years. We've had a great run with VMware. And we continue to innovate everyday. My role at HPE is to make sure that we keep the customer trends in our radar as we copartner and innovate together, with VMware. At VMworld 2017, we've got lots of great and exciting announcements. And we're more than happy to share with them as we get to the discussion today. >> Fantastic >> A big question around converged systems, you guys will have the hyper-converged guys on shortly, but converged systems have kind of gotten a bad rap over the past couple of years. Like, "Oh, that's the legacy." But as you mentioned, SAP Hana systems, what's the relationship between converged systems and Vmware? >> To your point, about seven years ago the industry tried to simplify IT operations by doing converged systems. And that was putting together servers, storage, and networking fabric; and putting it all together for our customers. Where the industry has moved to now, is more software defined capabilities, where not just putting those hardware pieces together but enabling them through software. So hyper-converged as one flavor of that, and we're hearing a lot about that here in the conference, and then at HPE, what we did is we innovated around the best of converged and hyper-converged. Put them together into a new category of infrastructure, called composable. Fully software defined, it does compute, storage, and fabric. And the essential idea here is that you can have any combinations of these elements, through a software defined capability. So it really extends the ability of hyper-converge to multiple workloads. We use this term Composable Infrastructure, in addition to supporting through other products we have hyper-converged. That's where we're seeing the market trend. >> So Leslie, that's a unique concept. This composable concept. It sounds a lot like virtualization. How does the two relate? Can I run virtualization on top of these Synergy systems? >> Great questions. Absolutely. In fact one of the key things with hyper-converged or composable, is the ability to really have virtualized workloads. In addition to that, with our composable infrastructure, we let you also run bare metal, as well as containerized workload. So you have a real range of workloads you can run in one set of infrastructure. And so we can support lots of workloads, different kinds of storage in the environment in fabric. So you have a real range of opportunity. >> Let's talk a little bit about composable and your target market. What is the key message? A lot of, sounds like, flexibility and agility within the technology. What's the key message to your VMware customers that are using the VMware software? >> Sue, with customers who are using VMware software, it's the flexibility. For example, with vSan, we've talked a lot about here at the conference, our relationship with VMware. And vSan is the ability to have software defined storage. And what our HP offerings allow you to do, is to have the ability to scale, compute, and storage independently. So giving you this very flexible environment, to grow your capacity. And then you manage it with this virtualized vSan, software defined storage from VMware. Very simple for our customers to really have a simple operations, and really flexible scale; is what these new applications are requiring. >> As you guys have been talking from a VMware and HPE perspective to customers. How are they receiving this message? >> From a customer standpoint it's very clear. They need to move to the hybrid IT model. And that's kind of the mandate that's coming. They see it on the horizon. But they also want to do it in a very cost effective manner. They want to do it in a very scalable, efficient, and automated manner. And that's when customers look to HPE and VMware to solve the problem for them. And that's where our flagship composable platform Synergy comes in to play. Marrying the benefits of Synergy with VMware's Cloud Foundation Software, which is a very seamless and automated way of consuming a software-defined stack. You bring those two together, what you get is industry's first composable platform, that lets you set up your private cloud, in less than minutes. There also gives you the ability to allocate and reallocate. Again, compute, storage, and networking resources independent of each other, at will. Creating this very flexible platform for traditional workloads, cloud native workloads, private cloud workloads. That's what we're hearing from the customers, they want us to step in, solve this problem. But also give them the visibility on top. We were at a partner panel earlier today, and one of the partners got up and said, "Look. This is all fantastic. You're making the right moves, "You're building the right solutions for us, "But help us understand how you're going to build "That uber layer of visibility, "and more detailed predicative analytics. "To help us get the whole picture. "Because I don't want to use third party tools." And those are the frontiers that HPE and VMworld will continue to work on together, and create new solutions for our customers. >> One of the things this morning that Michael Dell mentioned when he was onstage with Pat Gelsinger, was that Dell EMC and VMware where like peanut butter and chocolate. (Satya laughs) Such a good combination. (Leslie laughs) So one year post combination, has that strengthened the HP VMware partnership with this now umbrella under Dell Technologies? In the last minute or so, talk to us about how that's helped you maybe differentiate. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, right from the beginning, as soon as the acquisition was announced, there was a lot of skepticism. And that was industry wide. Everybody said, "Hey. How is this going to impact "The rest of the ecosystem?" VMware made it a point, and Michael as well, made it a point to come outright and say, "Look. We don't want to mess with the ecosystem. "The neutrality is very important to us." To make VMware not only thrive, survive, all of the above. So we've seen that in the market. We don't see any material change in the relationship with VMware. Just a few proof points I want to throw out there, we are still the largest OEM for VMware from a product perspective. We have over 500,000 customers together, who make demands on running workloads. Our channel overlap is over 80%. All of this continues to be recognized. We won a lot of awards in the past, the last two years, we won the OEM Innovation Award of the Year. Partner of the Year Award. >> I saw it. I think I may have a photo with you. >> Yeah >> To talk about synergy, pun intended. (group laughs) >> No it is. >> It sounds like it's only a strengthening. >> It is strengthening. 'Cause we took it upon ourselves at HPE, as a challenge to say, "Hey, look. "I know there's a new owner. "But this shouldn't materially change your business, "Because there's so much business at stake." And we cannot ignore the customers. The demand for our joint products is stronger than ever. >> Absolutely. Great, you guys. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing what's new, what's going on, and the commitment to customers. Outstanding Leslie and Satya. Thank you so much. You're now in the category of CUBE alumni. >> Alright, thank you so much. >> That's great. >> We look forward to having you back. >> Thank you. >> And for my cohost, Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You've been watching live continuing coverage by theCUBE of VMworld 2017, day two. Stick around, we'll be right back. (technology music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City. It's the Cube, covering the Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are wrapping up the Cube's day two coverage of conference here in New York City at Inforum. My name is Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dan Barnhardt. He is the Infor Vice President of Communications. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here two days in a row. >> It's been a lot of fun. We've had a great time. So yeah, congratulations, it's been a hugely successful conference, a lot of buzz. Recap it for us, what's been most exciting for you? >> Sure, this was our second year having a forum in New York, which is our home town. I think it was a more exciting conference than last year. We unveiled some incredible development updates, led by Coleman, our AI offering, which is an incredible announcement for us, as well as Networked CloudSuites, which takes the functionality from our GT Nexus commerce network, and bakes it into our CloudSuites, the mission critical industry CloudSuites, that we offer on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Those were really exciting developments, as well as some other announcements we made with regard to product. And then, in addition to product, we had a lot of customer momentum that we shared. Last year, we had customers like Whole Foods and Travis Perkins up here. We continued the momentum with big enterprise customers making big bets on Infor, led by Koch Industries who invested more than two billion dollars this year at Infor, and are now modernizing their human resources and their financial operations with Infor CloudSuites. Moving to the cloud HR for 130,000 employees at Koch Industries which is an incredible achievement for the product, and for cloud HR. And, that's very exciting, as well as other companies like FootLocker, which were recognized with the Innovation Award for our Progress Makers Award. They're using talent science, data science to power their employees, not to power their employees, but to drive their employees towards greater productivity and greater happiness, because they've got the right people in the right fit for FootLocker, that's very exciting. And, of course, Bank of America, our Customer of the Year, which uses our HR solutions for their workforce, which obviously is exceptionally large. >> Yes, there was a great ceremony this morning, with a lot of recognition. So, let's talk a little bit more about Coleman, this was the big product announcement, really the first product in AI for Infor. Tell us a little bit about the building blocks. >> For certain. We have a couple of AI offerings now, like predictive hotel pricing, predictive demand and assortment planning in retail, but we have been building towards Coleman and what we consider the age of networked intelligence for multiple years. Since we architected Infor CloudSuite to run mission critical ERP in the cloud, we developed the capability of having data, mission critical data that really runs a business, your manufacturing, finance, distribution core functions, in the cloud on AWS, which gives us hyper-scale compute power to crunch incredible data. So, that really became possible once we moved CloudSuite in 2014. And then in 2015, we acquired GT Nexus, which is a commerce network that unites, that brings in the 80 percent of enterprise data that lies outside the four walls, among suppliers, and logistics providers, and banks. That unified that into the CloudSuite and brought that data in, and we're able to crunch that using the compute power of AWS. And then last year at Inforum, we announced the acquisition of Predictix, which is a predictive solutions for retail. And when building those, Predictix was making such groundbreaking development in the area of machine learning that they spun off a separate group called Logicblox, just to focus on machine learning. And Inforum vested heavily, we didn't talk a lot about Logicblox, but that was going to deliver a lot of the capabilities along with Amazon's developments with Lex and Alexa to enable Coleman to come to reality. So we were able then to acquire Birst. Birst is a BI program that takes, and harmonizes, the data that comes across CloudSuite and GT Nexus in a digestible form that with the machine learning power from Logicblox can power Coleman. So now we have AI that's pervasive underneath the application, making decisions, recommending advice so that people can maximize their potential at work, not have to do more menial tasks like search and gather, which McKenzie has shown can take 20 percent of your work week just looking for the information and gathering the information to make decisions. Now, you can say Coleman get me this information, and Coleman is able to return that information to you instantly, and let you make decisions, which is very, very exciting breakthrough. >> So there's a lot there. When you and I talked prior to the show, I was kind of looking for okay, what's going to be new and different, and one of the things you said was we're really going to have a focus on innovation. So, in previous Inforums it's really been about, to me anyway, we do a lot of really hard work. We're hearing a lot about acquisitions, certainly AI and Coleman, how those acquisitions come together with your, you know, what Duncan Angove calls the layer cake, you know the wedding cake stack, the strategy stack, I call it. So do you feel like you've achieved those objectives of messaging that innovation, and what's the reaction then from the customer base? >> Without a doubt. I wouldn't characterize anything that we said last year as not innovative, we announced H&L Digital, our digital transformation arm which is doing some incredible custom projects, like for the Brooklyn Nets, essentially money balling the NBA. Look forward to seeing that in next season a little bit, and then more in the season to come. Some big projects with Travis Perkins and with some other customers, care dot com, that were mentioned. But this year we're unveiling Coleman, which takes a lot of pieces, as Duncan said sort of the wedding cake, and puts them together. This has been a development for years. And now we're able to unveil it, and we've chosen to name it Coleman in honor of Katherine Coleman Johnson, one of the ladies whose life was told in the movie Hidden Figures, and she was a pioneer African-American woman in Stem, which is an important cause for us. You know, Infor years ago when we were in New Orleans unveiled the Infor Education Alliance program so that we can invest in increasing Stem education among young people, all young people with a particular focus on minorities and women to increase the ranks of underrepresented communities in the technology industry. So this, Coleman, not only pays honor to Katherine Johnson the person, but also to her mission to increase the number of people that are choosing careers in Stem, which as we have shown is the future of work for human beings. >> So talk a little bit more about Infor's commitment to increasing number to increasing, not only Stem education, but as you said increasing the number of women and minorities who go into Stem careers. >> Certainly. We, you know Pam Murphy who is our chief operating officer, this has been an incredibly important cause to her as well as Charles Phillips our CEO. We launched the Women's Infor Network, WIN, several years ago and that's had some incredible results in helping to increase the number of women at Infor. Many years ago, I think it was Google that first released their diversity report, and it drew a lot of attention to how many women and how many minorities are in technology. And they got a lot of heat, because it was about 30, 35 percent of their workforce was female, and then as other companies started rolling out their diversity report, it was a consistent number between 30 to 35 percent, and what we identified from that was not that women are not getting the jobs, it's that there aren't as many women pursuing careers in this type of field. >> Rebecca: Pipeline. >> Yes. So in order to do that, we need to provide an environment that nurtures some of the specific needs that women have, and that we're promoting education. So we formed the WIN program to do that first task, and this year on International Women's Day in early March, we were able to show some of the results that came from that, particularly in senior positions, SVP, VP, and director level positions at Infor. Some have risen 60 percent the number of women in those roles since we launched the Women's Infor Network just a couple of years ago. And then we launched the Education Alliance Program. We partnered with institutions, like CUNY the City University of New York, the New York Urban League, and universities now across the globe, we've got them in India, in Thailand and China, in South Korea to help increase the number of people who are pursuing careers in Stem. We've also sponsored PBS series and Girls Who Code, we have a hack-athon going on here at Inforum with a bunch of young people who are building, sort of, add-on apps and widgets that go to company Infor. We're investing a lot in the growth of Stem education, and the next generation. >> And by the way, those numbers that you mentioned for Google and others at around 30, 34 percent, that's much better than the industry average. They're doing quote, unquote well and still far below the 50 percent which is what you would think, you know, based on population it would be. So mainly the average is around, or the actual number's around 17 percent in the technology business, and then the other thing I would add is Amazon, I believe, was pretty forthcoming about its compensation, you know. >> Salesforce really started it, Marc Benioff. >> And they got a lot of heat for it, but it's transparency is really the starting point, right? >> It was clear really early for companies like Salesforce, and Amazon, and Google, and Infor that this was not something that we needed to create talking points about, we were going to need to effect real change. And that was going to take investment and time, and thankfully with leadership like Charles Phillips, our CEO, and Marc Benioff were making investments to help make sure that the next generation of every human, but particularly women and minorities that are underrepresented right now in technology, have those skills that will be needed in the years to come. >> Right, you have to start with a benchmark and then know where you're moving from. >> Absolutely, just like if you're starting a project to transform your business, where do you want to go and what are the steps that are going to help you get there? >> Speaking of transforming your business, this is another big trend, is digital transformation. So now that we are at nearing the end of day two of this conference, what are you hearing from customers about this jaunting, sometimes painful process that they must endure, but really they must endure it in order to stay alive and to thrive? >> Without a doubt. A disruption is happening in every industry that we're seeing, and customers across all of the industries that Infor serves, like manufacturing, healthcare, retail, distribution, they are thinking about how do we survive in the new economy, when everything is digital, when every company needs to be a technology company. And we are working with our customers to help first modernize their systems. You can't be held back by old technology, you need to move to the cloud to get the flexibility and the agility that can adapt to changing business conditions and disruptions. No longer do you have years to adapt to things, they're happening overnight, you must have flexible solutions to do that. So, we have a lot of customers. We just had a panel with Travis Perkins, and with Pilot Flying J, who was on the Cube earlier, talking about how their, and Cook Industries our primary investor now, talking about how they're re-architecting their IT infrastructure to give them that agility so they can start thinking about what sort of projects could open up new streams of revenue. How could we, you know, do something else that we never thought of, but now we have the capability to do digitally that could be the future of our business? And it's really exciting to have all the CIOs, and SVPs of technology, VPs of technology, that are here at Inforum talking about what they're doing, and how they're imagining their business. It's really incredible to get a peek at what they're doing. >> You know, we were talking to Debbie earlier. One of the interesting things that I, my takeaway is on the digital transformation, is you know, we always say digital is data and then what we talked about was the ability to traverse industry value change, not just vertically but horizontally. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a perfect example, Amazon's a content company, Apple's getting into financial services. I wonder if you could comment on your thoughts on because you're so deep into micro-verticals, and what Debbie said was well I gave a consumer package good example to a process manufacturing company. And they were like what are you talking about, and she said look, let me connect the dots and the light bulbs went off. And they said wow, we could take that CPG example and apply it, so I wonder when we talk about digital transformation, if you see or can foresee your advantage in micro-verticals as translating across those verticals. >> Without a doubt. We talk about it as adjacent innovation. And Charles points back to an example, way back from the creation of the niche in glass, and how that led to additional businesses and industries like eyeglasses and fire preparedness, and we look at it that way for certain. We dive very deep into key industries, but when we look at them holistically across and we say oh, this is happening within the retail industry, we can identify key functionality that might change the industry of disruption, not disruption, distribution. Might disrupt the distribution industry, and we can apply the lessons learned by having that industry specialization into other industries and help them realize a potential that they weren't aware of before, because we uncovered it in one place. That's happening an awful lot with what we do with retail and assortment planning and healthcare. We run 70 percent of the large hospitals in the US, and we're learning a lot from retail and how we might help hospitals move more quickly. When you are managing life and death situations, if you are planning assortment or inventory for those key supplies within a hospital, and you can make even small adjustments that can have huge impact on patient care, so that's one of the benefits of our industry-first strategy, and the adjacent innovation that we cultivate there. >> I know we're not even finished with Inforum 2017, but we must look ahead to 2018. Talk a little bit about what your goals for next year's conference are. >> For sure. You're correct, we're not finished yet with Inforum. I know everyone here is really excited about Bruno Mars who's entertaining tonight, but we are looking forward to next year's conference as well, we're already talking about some of the innovative things that we'll announce, and the customer journeys that are beginning now, which we'd like to unveil there. We are going to be moving the conference from New York, we're going to move to Washington DC in late-September, September 24th to 27th in Washington DC, which we're very excited about to let our customers, they come back every year to learn more. We had seven thousand people attending this year, we want to give them a little bit of a variety, while still making sure that they can reach, you know, with one stop from Europe and from Asia, cause customers are traveling from all over the world, but we're very excited to see the growth that would be shared. This year, for instance, if you look at the sponsors, we had our primary SI partner Avaap was platinum partner last year. In addition to Avaap this year, we were joined by Accenture, and Deloitte, Capgemini, Grant Thorton, all of whom have built Infor practices over the last 12 months because there's so much momentum over our solutions that that is a revenue opportunity for them that they want to take advantage of. >> And the momentum is just going to keep on going next year in September. So I'll see you in September. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys being here with us for the third year, second year in a row in New York. >> Indeed, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum 2017 in a bit.