(light airy music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, AI and machine learning. "Top Startups Building Generative AI on AWS." This is season three, episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem, talking about AI machine learning. We have three great guests Bratin Saha, VP, Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Services at Amazon Web Services. Tom Mason, the CTO of Stability AI, and Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere. Two practitioners doing startups and AWS. Gentlemen, thank you for opening up this session, this episode. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So the topic is hype versus reality. So I think we're all on the reality is great, hype is great, but the reality's here. I want to get into it. Generative AI's got all the momentum, it's going mainstream, it's kind of come out of the behind the ropes, it's now mainstream. We saw the success of ChatGPT, opens up everyone's eyes, but there's so much more going on. Let's jump in and get your early perspectives on what should people be talking about right now? What are you guys working on? We'll start with AWS. What's the big focus right now for you guys as you come into this market that's highly active, highly hyped up, but people see value right out of the gate? >> You know, we have been working on generative AI for some time. In fact, last year we released Code Whisperer, which is about using generative AI for software development and a number of customers are using it and getting real value out of it. So generative AI is now something that's mainstream that can be used by enterprise users. And we have also been partnering with a number of other companies. So, you know, stability.ai, we've been partnering with them a lot. We want to be partnering with other companies as well. In seeing how we do three things, you know, first is providing the most efficient infrastructure for generative AI. And that is where, you know, things like Trainium, things like Inferentia, things like SageMaker come in. And then next is the set of models and then the third is the kind of applications like Code Whisperer and so on. So, you know, it's early days yet, but clearly there's a lot of amazing capabilities that will come out and something that, you know, our customers are starting to pay a lot of attention to. >> Tom, talk about your company and what your focus is and why the Amazon Web Services relationship's important for you? >> So yeah, we're primarily committed to making incredible open source foundation models and obviously stable effusions been our kind of first big model there, which we trained all on AWS. We've been working with them over the last year and a half to develop, obviously a big cluster, and bring all that compute to training these models at scale, which has been a really successful partnership. And we're excited to take it further this year as we develop commercial strategy of the business and build out, you know, the ability for enterprise customers to come and get all the value from these models that we think they can get. So we're really excited about the future. We got hugely exciting pipeline for this year with new modalities and video models and wonderful things and trying to solve images for once and for all and get the kind of general value and value proposition correct for customers. So it's a really exciting time and very honored to be part of it. >> It's great to see some of your customers doing so well out there. Congratulations to your team. Appreciate that. Aidan, let's get into what you guys do. What does Cohere do? What are you excited about right now? >> Yeah, so Cohere builds large language models, which are the backbone of applications like ChatGPT and GPT-3. We're extremely focused on solving the issues with adoption for enterprise. So it's great that you can make a super flashy demo for consumers, but it takes a lot to actually get it into billion user products and large global enterprises. So about six months ago, we released our command models, which are some of the best that exist for large language models. And in December, we released our multilingual text understanding models and that's on over a hundred different languages and it's trained on, you know, authentic data directly from native speakers. And so we're super excited to continue pushing this into enterprise and solving those barriers for adoption, making this transformation a reality. >> Just real quick, while I got you there on the new products coming out. Where are we in the progress? People see some of the new stuff out there right now. There's so much more headroom. Can you just scope out in your mind what that looks like? Like from a headroom standpoint? Okay, we see ChatGPT. "Oh yeah, it writes my papers for me, does some homework for me." I mean okay, yawn, maybe people say that, (Aidan chuckles) people excited or people are blown away. I mean, it's helped theCUBE out, it helps me, you know, feed up a little bit from my write-ups but it's not always perfect. >> Yeah, at the moment it's like a writing assistant, right? And it's still super early in the technologies trajectory. I think it's fascinating and it's interesting but its impact is still really limited. I think in the next year, like within the next eight months, we're going to see some major changes. You've already seen the very first hints of that with stuff like Bing Chat, where you augment these dialogue models with an external knowledge base. So now the models can be kept up to date to the millisecond, right? Because they can search the web and they can see events that happened a millisecond ago. But that's still limited in the sense that when you ask the question, what can these models actually do? Well they can just write text back at you. That's the extent of what they can do. And so the real project, the real effort, that I think we're all working towards is actually taking action. So what happens when you give these models the ability to use tools, to use APIs? What can they do when they can actually affect change out in the real world, beyond just streaming text back at the user? I think that's the really exciting piece. >> Okay, so I wanted to tee that up early in the segment 'cause I want to get into the customer applications. We're seeing early adopters come in, using the technology because they have a lot of data, they have a lot of large language model opportunities and then there's a big fast follower wave coming behind it. I call that the people who are going to jump in the pool early and get into it. They might not be advanced. Can you guys share what customer applications are being used with large language and vision models today and how they're using it to transform on the early adopter side, and how is that a tell sign of what's to come? >> You know, one of the things we have been seeing both with the text models that Aidan talked about as well as the vision models that stability.ai does, Tom, is customers are really using it to change the way you interact with information. You know, one example of a customer that we have, is someone who's kind of using that to query customer conversations and ask questions like, you know, "What was the customer issue? How did we solve it?" And trying to get those kinds of insights that was previously much harder to do. And then of course software is a big area. You know, generating software, making that, you know, just deploying it in production. Those have been really big areas that we have seen customers start to do. You know, looking at documentation, like instead of you know, searching for stuff and so on, you know, you just have an interactive way, in which you can just look at the documentation for a product. You know, all of this goes to where we need to take the technology. One of which is, you know, the models have to be there but they have to work reliably in a production setting at scale, with privacy, with security, and you know, making sure all of this is happening, is going to be really key. That is what, you know, we at AWS are looking to do, which is work with partners like stability and others and in the open source and really take all of these and make them available at scale to customers, where they work reliably. >> Tom, Aidan, what's your thoughts on this? Where are customers landing on this first use cases or set of low-hanging fruit use cases or applications? >> Yeah, so I think like the first group of adopters that really found product market fit were the copywriting companies. So one great example of that is HyperWrite. Another one is Jasper. And so for Cohere, that's the tip of the iceberg, like there's a very long tail of usage from a bunch of different applications. HyperWrite is one of our customers, they help beat writer's block by drafting blog posts, emails, and marketing copy. We also have a global audio streaming platform, which is using us the power of search engine that can comb through podcast transcripts, in a bunch of different languages. Then a global apparel brand, which is using us to transform how they interact with their customers through a virtual assistant, two dozen global news outlets who are using us for news summarization. So really like, these large language models, they can be deployed all over the place into every single industry sector, language is everywhere. It's hard to think of any company on Earth that doesn't use language. So it's, very, very- >> We're doing it right now. We got the language coming in. >> Exactly. >> We'll transcribe this puppy. All right. Tom, on your side, what do you see the- >> Yeah, we're seeing some amazing applications of it and you know, I guess that's partly been, because of the growth in the open source community and some of these applications have come from there that are then triggering this secondary wave of innovation, which is coming a lot from, you know, controllability and explainability of the model. But we've got companies like, you know, Jasper, which Aidan mentioned, who are using stable diffusion for image generation in block creation, content creation. We've got Lensa, you know, which exploded, and is built on top of stable diffusion for fine tuning so people can bring themselves and their pets and you know, everything into the models. So we've now got fine tuned stable diffusion at scale, which is democratized, you know, that process, which is really fun to see your Lensa, you know, exploded. You know, I think it was the largest growing app in the App Store at one point. And lots of other examples like NightCafe and Lexica and Playground. So seeing lots of cool applications. >> So much applications, we'll probably be a customer for all you guys. We'll definitely talk after. But the challenges are there for people adopting, they want to get into what you guys see as the challenges that turn into opportunities. How do you see the customers adopting generative AI applications? For example, we have massive amounts of transcripts, timed up to all the videos. I don't even know what to do. Do I just, do I code my API there. So, everyone has this problem, every vertical has these use cases. What are the challenges for people getting into this and adopting these applications? Is it figuring out what to do first? Or is it a technical setup? Do they stand up stuff, they just go to Amazon? What do you guys see as the challenges? >> I think, you know, the first thing is coming up with where you think you're going to reimagine your customer experience by using generative AI. You know, we talked about Ada, and Tom talked about a number of these ones and you know, you pick up one or two of these, to get that robust. And then once you have them, you know, we have models and we'll have more models on AWS, these large language models that Aidan was talking about. Then you go in and start using these models and testing them out and seeing whether they fit in use case or not. In many situations, like you said, John, our customers want to say, "You know, I know you've trained these models on a lot of publicly available data, but I want to be able to customize it for my use cases. Because, you know, there's some knowledge that I have created and I want to be able to use that." And then in many cases, and I think Aidan mentioned this. You know, you need these models to be up to date. Like you can't have it staying. And in those cases, you augmented with a knowledge base, you know you have to make sure that these models are not hallucinating. And so you need to be able to do the right kind of responsible AI checks. So, you know, you start with a particular use case, and there are a lot of them. Then, you know, you can come to AWS, and then look at one of the many models we have and you know, we are going to have more models for other modalities as well. And then, you know, play around with the models. We have a playground kind of thing where you can test these models on some data and then you can probably, you will probably want to bring your own data, customize it to your own needs, do some of the testing to make sure that the model is giving the right output and then just deploy it. And you know, we have a lot of tools. >> Yeah. >> To make this easy for our customers. >> How should people think about large language models? Because do they think about it as something that they tap into with their IP or their data? Or is it a large language model that they apply into their system? Is the interface that way? What's the interaction look like? >> In many situations, you can use these models out of the box. But in typical, in most of the other situations, you will want to customize it with your own data or with your own expectations. So the typical use case would be, you know, these are models are exposed through APIs. So the typical use case would be, you know you're using these APIs a little bit for testing and getting familiar and then there will be an API that will allow you to train this model further on your data. So you use that AI, you know, make sure you augmented the knowledge base. So then you use those APIs to customize the model and then just deploy it in an application. You know, like Tom was mentioning, a number of companies that are using these models. So once you have it, then you know, you again, use an endpoint API and use it in an application. >> All right, I love the example. I want to ask Tom and Aidan, because like most my experience with Amazon Web Service in 2007, I would stand up in EC2, put my code on there, play around, if it didn't work out, I'd shut it down. Is that a similar dynamic we're going to see with the machine learning where developers just kind of log in and stand up infrastructure and play around and then have a cloud-like experience? >> So I can go first. So I mean, we obviously, with AWS working really closely with the SageMaker team, do fantastic platform there for ML training and inference. And you know, going back to your point earlier, you know, where the data is, is hugely important for companies. Many companies bringing their models to their data in AWS on-premise for them is hugely important. Having the models to be, you know, open sources, makes them explainable and transparent to the adopters of those models. So, you know, we are really excited to work with the SageMaker team over the coming year to bring companies to that platform and make the most of our models. >> Aidan, what's your take on developers? Do they just need to have a team in place, if we want to interface with you guys? Let's say, can they start learning? What do they got to do to set up? >> Yeah, so I think for Cohere, our product makes it much, much easier to people, for people to get started and start building, it solves a lot of the productionization problems. But of course with SageMaker, like Tom was saying, I think that lowers a barrier even further because it solves problems like data privacy. So I want to underline what Bratin was saying earlier around when you're fine tuning or when you're using these models, you don't want your data being incorporated into someone else's model. You don't want it being used for training elsewhere. And so the ability to solve for enterprises, that data privacy and that security guarantee has been hugely important for Cohere, and that's very easy to do through SageMaker. >> Yeah. >> But the barriers for using this technology are coming down super quickly. And so for developers, it's just becoming completely intuitive. I love this, there's this quote from Andrej Karpathy. He was saying like, "It really wasn't on my 2022 list of things to happen that English would become, you know, the most popular programming language." And so the barrier is coming down- >> Yeah. >> Super quickly and it's exciting to see. >> It's going to be awesome for all the companies here, and then we'll do more, we're probably going to see explosion of startups, already seeing that, the maps, ecosystem maps, the landscape maps are happening. So this is happening and I'm convinced it's not yesterday's chat bot, it's not yesterday's AI Ops. It's a whole another ballgame. So I have to ask you guys for the final question before we kick off the company's showcasing here. How do you guys gauge success of generative AI applications? Is there a lens to look through and say, okay, how do I see success? It could be just getting a win or is it a bigger picture? Bratin we'll start with you. How do you gauge success for generative AI? >> You know, ultimately it's about bringing business value to our customers. And making sure that those customers are able to reimagine their experiences by using generative AI. Now the way to get their ease, of course to deploy those models in a safe, effective manner, and ensuring that all of the robustness and the security guarantees and the privacy guarantees are all there. And we want to make sure that this transitions from something that's great demos to actual at scale products, which means making them work reliably all of the time not just some of the time. >> Tom, what's your gauge for success? >> Look, I think this, we're seeing a completely new form of ways to interact with data, to make data intelligent, and directly to bring in new revenue streams into business. So if businesses can use our models to leverage that and generate completely new revenue streams and ultimately bring incredible new value to their customers, then that's fantastic. And we hope we can power that revolution. >> Aidan, what's your take? >> Yeah, reiterating Bratin and Tom's point, I think that value in the enterprise and value in market is like a huge, you know, it's the goal that we're striving towards. I also think that, you know, the value to consumers and actual users and the transformation of the surface area of technology to create experiences like ChatGPT that are magical and it's the first time in human history we've been able to talk to something compelling that's not a human. I think that in itself is just extraordinary and so exciting to see. >> It really brings up a whole another category of markets. B2B, B2C, it's B2D, business to developer. Because I think this is kind of the big trend the consumers have to win. The developers coding the apps, it's a whole another sea change. Reminds me everyone use the "Moneyball" movie as example during the big data wave. Then you know, the value of data. There's a scene in "Moneyball" at the end, where Billy Beane's getting the offer from the Red Sox, then the owner says to the Red Sox, "If every team's not rebuilding their teams based upon your model, there'll be dinosaurs." I think that's the same with AI here. Every company will have to need to think about their business model and how they operate with AI. So it'll be a great run. >> Completely Agree >> It'll be a great run. >> Yeah. >> Aidan, Tom, thank you so much for sharing about your experiences at your companies and congratulations on your success and it's just the beginning. And Bratin, thanks for coming on representing AWS. And thank you, appreciate for what you do. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, Aidan. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, let's kick off season three, episode one. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (light airy music)

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

(high intensity music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit live in D.C. We're in-person, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube. I'm here with Max Peterson, the Head of Public Sector, Vice President. Max, great to see you in in-person event. >> Great to be here. We're in-person and we're also live streaming. So, we're here, however customers, however partners want to participate. >> I got to say, I'm very impressed with the turnout. The attendance is strong. People excited to be here. We're not wearing our masks cause we're on stage right now, but great turnout. But it's a hybrid event. >> It is. >> You've got engagement here physically, but also digitally as well with theCube and other live streams everywhere. You're putting it everywhere. >> It's been a great event so far. We did a pre-day yesterday. We had great participation, great results. It was about imagining education. And then today, from the executive track to the main tent, to all of the learning, live streaming 'em, doing things in person. Some things just don't translate. So, they'll won't be available, but many things will be available for viewing later as well. So all of the breakout sessions. >> The asynchronous consumption, obviously, the new normal, but I got to say, I was just on a break. I was just walking around. I heard someone, two people talking, just cause I over walk pass them, over hear 'em, "Yeah, we're going to hire this person." That's the kind of hallway conversations that you get. You got the programs, you got people together. It's hard to do that when you're on a virtual events. >> Max: It's hard. The customers that we had up on stage today, the same sort of spontaneity and the same sort of energy that you get from being in-person, it's hard to replicate. Lisa from State of Utah, did a great job and she got an opportunity to thank the team back home who drove so much of the innovation and she did it spontaneously and live. You know, it's a great motivator for everybody. And then Lauren from Air force was phenomenal. And Suchi, our "Imagine Me and You" artist was just dynamite. >> I want to unpack some of that, but I want to just say, it's been a really change of a year for you guys at Public Sector. Obviously, the pandemic has changed the landscape of Public Sector. It's made it almost like Public-Private Sector. It's like, it seems like it's all coming together. Incredible business performance on your end. A lot of change, a lot of great stuff. >> We had customers we talked today with SBA, with VA, with NASA, about how they just embraced the challenge and embraced digital and then drove amazing things out onto AWS. From the VA, we heard that they took tele-health consultations. Get this from 25,000 a month to 45,000 a day using AWS and the Cloud. We heard SBA talk about how they were able to turn around the unemployment benefits programs, you know, for the unemployed, as a result of the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks. And then, scaled their systems up just to unbelievable heights as President Biden announced the news. >> You had a lot of announcement. I want to get to a couple of them. One of them was the health equity thing. What is that about? Take us through that announcement. >> So the pandemic, it was hard. It was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory, but one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else where the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action. And in particular, in the space of health, healthcare equity. We saw simply communities that didn't have access and weren't included in the same sorts of responses that the rest of the community may have been included in. And so we launched this global initiative today to power health equity solutions. It's a $40 million program. Lasts for three years. And it's open to customers or it's open to partners. Anybody who can contribute to three different areas of health equity. It's people who are leveraging data to build more equal, more sustainable health systems. Is people that are using analytics to do greater study of socioeconomic and social situational conditions that contribute to health inequities. And then finally, it's about building systems that deliver more equitable care to those who are underserved around the world. >> So, just to get this right, 40 million. Is that going to go towards the program for three years and are you going to dolo that out or as funding, or is that just a fund the organization? >> It's actually very similar to the development diagnostic initiative that we ran when COVID hit. We've launched the program. We're welcoming applications from anybody who is participating in those three developmental areas. They'll get Cloud credits. They'll get technical consulting. They may need professional services. They'll get all manner of assistance. And all you have to do is put in an application between now and November 15th for the first year. >> That's for the health equity? >> For the health equity. >> Got it. Okay, cool. So, what's the other news? You guys had some baseline data, got a lot of rave reviews from ACORE. I interviewed Constance and Thompson on the Cube earlier. That's impressive. You guys really making a lot of change. >> Well, you're hundred percent right. Sustainability is a key issue from all of our customers around the world. It's a key issue for us, frankly, as inhabitants of planet earth, right? >> John: Yeah. >> But what's really interesting is we've now got governments around the world who are starting to evaluate whether they're not their vendors have the same values and sustainability. And so that the AWS or the Amazon Climate Pledge is a game changer in terms of going carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of most sort of other programs of record. And then with ACORE, we announced the ability to actually start effecting sustainability in particular parts around the world. This one's aim at that. >> But the key there is that, from what I understand is that, you guys are saying a baseline on the data. So, that's an Amazonian kind of cultural thing, right? Like you got to measure, you can't know what you're doing. >> The world is full of good intentions, but if you want to drive change at scale, you've got to figure out a way to measure the change. And then you've got to set aggressive goals for yourself. >> That's really smart. Congratulations! That's a good move. Real quick on the announcement at re:Invent, you've talked about last re:Invent, you're going to train 29 million people. Where are you on that goal? >> Well, John, we've been making tremendous progress and I'm going to use theCube here to make a small teaser. You know, stay tuned for our re:Invent conference that comes up shortly because we're actually going to be sharing some more information about it. But we've done digital trainings, self-training, online skills workshops. We just took a program called re/Start, which serves an unemployed or underemployed individuals. We launched that around the world and we're really excited. Today, we announced we're bringing it to Latin America too. So we're expanding into Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. And the amazing thing about that re/Start program, it's a 12 week intensive program. Doesn't require skills in advance. And after 12 weeks, 90% of the people graduating from that course go right onto a job interview. And that's the real goal, not just skills, but getting people in jobs. >> Yeah. The thing about the Cloud. I keep on banging the drum. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the level up, you don't need to have a pedigree from some big fancy school. The Cloud, you can be like top tier talent from anywhere. >> And you heard it from some of our speakers today who said they literally helped their teams bootstrap up from old skills like COBOL, you know, to new skills, like Cloud. And I will tell you, you know, right now, Cloud skills are still in a critical shortage. Our customers tell us all the time they can use every single person we can get to 'em. >> I'm going to tell my son, who's a sophomore in CS. I'm like, "Hey, work on COBOL Migration to AWS. You'll be a zillionaire." (John and Max laughs) No one knows what the passwords of the COBOL. I love that 80s jazzy jokes from two re:Invents ago. (John laughs) I got to ask you about the National-Local Governments, how they're monetizing Cloud of the past 18 months. What have you seeing at that level? >> Yeah. National and Local Governments, of course, were tremendously impacted first by the pandemic itself and the health concerns around it, but then all of the secondary effects, you know, unemployment. And immediately, you needed to put into action unemployment benefits systems. We work with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 15 other States across the U.S. You know, to have those systems in place in like weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then you saw things progress, to the point where we had States across the country, standing up call centers on Amazon Connect. Instantly, they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce, as opposed to their old call center technology. So, across the U.S. we saw those. And in fact, around the world, as governments mobilized to be able to respond to citizens. But the final thing that I think is really incredible, is though is the way that the AWS teams and partners sprung into action to work with National Governments around the world. Over 26 National Governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The largest to date, being in India, where in a single day, the vaccine management system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations. Which is more than the population of New York State in one week and one day. >> Wow. That's good. That's great progress. I got to say, I mean, that kind of impact is interesting. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier, talking about the Virginia impact with the Amazon $220 million being spread over a few Counties just in one year. The partnership between business... and governments with the Cloud, so much more agility. This really strikes at the core of the future of government. >> Max: I think so. People have talked about private-public partnerships for a long time. I'm really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team is doing around the world in those types of public private partnerships. Whether they're in skilling and workforce with partnerships, like eight different States across the U.S. to deliver skills, training through community college based systems. Whether it's with healthcare systems. Like NHS or GEL over in the UK, to really start applying cloud-scale analytics and research to solve the problems that eventually you're going to get us to personalized healthcare. >> That's a great stuff. Cloud benefits are always good. I always say the old joke is, "You hang around the barbershop long enough, you'll get a haircut." And if you get in the Cloud, you can take advantage of the wave. If you don't get on the wave, your driftwood. >> And States found that out, in fact. You'd have customers who were well on their journey. They were really able to turn on a dime. They pivoted quickly. They delivered new mission systems with customers. Those who hadn't quite progressed to the same state, they found out their legacy. IT systems were just brittle and incapable of pivoting so quickly to the new needs. And what we found, John, was that almost overnight, a business, government, which was largely in-person and pretty high touch had to pivot to the point where their only interaction was now a digital system. And those who- >> John: Middle of the day, they could have race car on the track, like quickly. >> Well, we've got it. We do have race cars on the track, right? Every year we've got the artificial intelligence powered Amazon DeepRacer and Red River on the track. >> I can see it. Always a good showing. Final question. I know you got to go on and I appreciate you coming on- >> It's been great. >> with all your busy schedule. Looking ahead. What tech trends should we be watching as Public Sector continues to be powered by this massive structural change? >> Well, I think there's going to be huge opportunity in healthcare. In fact, this afternoon at four o'clock Eastern, we're talking with Dr. Shafiq Rab from Wellforce. He and folks at Veterans Affairs to tell you telehealth and telemedicine are two, the areas where there's still the greatest potential. The number of people who now are serviced, and the ability to service a population far more broadly dispersed, I think has dramatic potential in terms of simply making the planet more healthy. >> Like you said, the pandemics have exposed the right path and the wrong path. And agility, speed, new ways of doing things, telemedicine. Another example, I interviewed a great company that's doing a full stack around healthcare with all kinds of home, agents, virtual agents, really interesting stuff. >> It is. I think it's going to change the world. >> John: Max Peterson, Head of Public Sector. Thank you for coming on theCube, as always. >> John, it's my pleasure. Love the cube. We've always had a good time. >> Yeah. Great stuff. >> Peter: We'll keep on making this difference. >> Hey, there's too many stories. We need another Cube here. So many stories here, impacting the world. Here at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>from around the globe. It's the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS Amazon Web services published. Public Sector Summit Online I'm John for your host with a great Gas Cube alumni Kate Goodall, Healthy in co founder and CEO, also known as the Halsey in house in the D C area. Kate, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Virtually >>you, too. Thanks for having me, John. >>We can't be there in person. Normally, we're in person by rain going to these events. We can't do it this year because of Cove in the Pandemic. But this topic that I'm proud to talk to you about is Bahrain Women intensive program and just diversity in the global tech scene in general. So first tell us what's going on with the 2021 by Rain. Women's initiative Intensive initiative. >>Yeah, absolutely. As you know, Housing Incubator has been running for about seven years now. We've welcomed during that time over 150 entrepreneurs through a full time fellowship program which you were there, John, you saw, you know It is a really unique program that includes residents in a ah house in Georgetown s O that people really get to sort of former community. But the full time residential program isn't the right fit preneurs. So we also offer these intensive housing incubator programs for early stage social entrepreneurs from different parts of the world in different industries and sectors. Um, a W s been an amazing partner both for the full time fellowship program on for many of these intensive, including one that was focused earlier this year on entrepreneurs, an opportunity zones in our very own city. Um, but this new intensive partnership is designed specifically to support tech oriented social enterprise startups that are founded by women and based in Bahrain s. So it's It's really nicely at this intersection of calcium goal off supporting entrepreneurs who are often underserved or underrepresented. And AWS is very clearly stated goal of diversifying leadership in tech. >>I was there last year in person Bahrain, and, uh, I went to the women's diversity um, breakfast and I'm like, This is exciting and I had to give up my seat. There was so many people, there was high demand eso I >>wanna >>ask you what >>is >>this program hoping to achieve the intensive initiative? >>Yeah. I mean, there's certain things that we're always seeking to achieve in supporting and serving sort of the brightest minds and the best ideas in social enterprise. On in many ways, this one is no different. Um, but we're really looking Thio Thio, find some incredible startups in Bahrain. Um, applications for the program start today. Andi will be measuring. You know, the success of the program on a number of factors, Aziz, we always do. You know, ultimately, it's the number of jobs that get created theme the quality and quantity of the impact of the startups Onda And ultimately, you know, revenue and dollars raised all of the things that you would measure a successful business by, um uh, s so we're just really excited to find some incredible ventures that fit really well in this in the selection criteria. Andi, we'll be looking thio. Everyone's help spread the word about this great opportunity. >>Congratulations on your new program. I wanna ask you specifically, if you could give some examples of the kinds of startups you're hoping to attract, so as you look at the candidates. What's gonna be the criteria you mentioned is a criteria What jumps off the page in your mind. >>Yeah. So we want people that really understand that. Why, you know, why are they starting that business on bond? Ideally, people that have a really good idea for a rapidly scaling tech startup that also has a double bottom line attached to it. So something whereby the business models succeeds and scales and achieves eso to with the impact that is inherent in that in that model, you know, some some examples from just passed cohorts at healthy. And, you know, we've had most recently, um, incredible entrepreneur that came out off the US prison system and was really interested in reducing recidivism and worked on a tech startup that allows families to communicate with incarcerated loved ones where through a tech platform where you can convert your text to a loved one into a postcard that then could be sent into the system because obviously people aren't allowed to communicate through cell phones when they're incarcerated s Oh, that's a good example of something where you know the profit and impact really scale themselves. Um, you know, similarly from just this. You know, recent cohorts, we had a, uh, founder who herself suffered from pulmonary pulmonary hypertension. And she created a really great wearable device that can attach to your ear. Looks just like an earring. It's quite fashionable, actually. I want one. And, um, it lets you know how your oxygen level is because she just didn't have access to something that was that easy and wearable, but needed to monitor her oxygen level. Turns out, that's actually really, ah, useful piece of technology during covert. So, you know, we're looking for people that are thinking about healthcare, thinking about the environment, thinking about education on decree, ating a sustainable business model that that will help them to scale that idea. >>I wanna get into the whole social entrepreneurship conversation. It's really great when I wanna unpack that, But let's stay on this program. Um, it's super exciting. How do people get involved? It's open, but there's some criteria. Um, you mentioned startups. You're looking for changing world double Bottom line. How do people get involved? >>Really excited. You asked that because I you know, I have some people that are watching can help us um certainly, uh, going to the home page of our website housing house dot or GTA. If anyone knows any great social entrepreneurs in Bahrain, please let them know and help us spread the word. Really happy to be working with AWS and startup Borane to do so. But we we want to, you know, make it as far and wide as possible. So both for people that are interested in applying to the program and also people that are interested in helping because we always pull together a vast network of mentors and advisors and investors to really make the programmers robustas possible, they should I would encourage everyone to reach out and get in touch either through the website or, uh at housing inspires on Social Media said that our team can get back to you >>for the question is how, um What? How will the selection process work and when will they be >>partnering with AWS and start up by rain? Thio select the best start up ventures. They'll be notified in December on by The program will begin virtually in January. >>And what are the winners get? They get money. Do they get mentoring? What can you talk >>about package, so every in computer program is a little bit different. But generally they all get, uh, some serious training and assigned mentor a specific skill. Siri's that's bespoke to that intensive, and those founders needs. But more than likely, this one will include, as as they all do, you know ways to plan Thio, acquire customers ways to improve your business model and make good projections ways to think about investment and how to understand. Um, investment bond, get investment should you need thio eso. It'll have all of that along with marketing and branding and how to measure impact. But then also some bespoke things. You know, once we know exactly what the founders needs are on but then very bespoke advisors and mentors in accordance with those needs >>and really nurturing that start up in that project to getting some traction, then hopefully track into some funding vehicles. I imagine right? >>Absolutely, absolutely, and access to D. C. S. You know, great landscape when it comes to this kind of thing, both in terms of sort of three institutions that air here and the investment that is here on do all of them will also, of course, receive a ws cloud computing credits and technical support, which we found to be profoundly helpful for all of our, um, tech startups or tech enabled startups. >>Yeah, I think that's one of the things that people don't realize that some free credits out there as well take advantage of those That's awesome. And I love how this ecosystem nurturing here. When I was in Bahrain, I noticed that very young demographics changing demographics. Diversity is huge. But like here in North America and all around the world, the lack of diversity in the tech sector has been a big conversation is always happening. Thes, impact driven businesses actually consult two things you're doing. A program that impacts the diversity as well as solves the problem for diversity. Talking about double Bottom line. Can you talk about this diversity? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, e think you know, it's interesting because we all know that diverse teams out perform. We all understand the imperative to do that, but you're right, it's it's not just a US problem or Bahrain problem. It's a global problem, you know. And I think one of the ways to solve it is to go early because we know that women founders and founders of color and other marginalized founders, you know, start businesses roughly at the same rate. But they generally don't grow as big, and they don't, um, uh often get us much investment. In fact, the investment numbers are quite stark. In terms of who receives venture capital eso. We know that there's a lot left to disrupt, but we also know that if we're going to solve the problems that we all face right now that we need the whole population involved in solving it. So we're really interested in in in creating a much better ecosystem everywhere for for women. Founders on DWI know that that requires the support of everyone, regardless of gender and background and lived experience. Eso it is it is an imperative. But it's also a tremendous opportunity, you know, to get more people involved on Bahrain's got some incredible women and some great, uh, resource is and pieces of the ecosystem already in place. Thio, I think really be a leader in this area. >>Yes. Start up our rain to you mentioned that they have a great program. They're they're really there to help the entrepreneur, and I think the key here and I want to get your reaction to this is that not only is that important to get off the ground and having someone to be around and being a community that fosters the kind of innovation, thinking and getting started, great. But you've had a very successful program. The Halsey in house housing house dot org's as you mentioned, the u R L. You've had success, but you've been physically in D. C. What have you learned from the house? Your house success that you're applying that could be applied for others? Toe learn. >>Yeah, there's there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, we've had a Zai mentioned about 150 you know, Fellows come through our doors and they've gone on to create over 1800 jobs around the world. Received $150 million in funding, which for early stage social social ventures is a really good mark of success. Andi have gone on to impact the lives of more than 2.5 million people around the world, so I hope that this program is that you know will be able to help empower these founders, um, in Bahrain to do exactly those things and to be able to scale the adventures to create that impact. You know, we've learned a lot about you know what these startups need. Um, you know, that goes beyond just sort of the the office space and sort of traditional incubator offerings that they need a really strong community around them to celebrate their successes and also to help them with their lows. Entrepreneurship is a very rocky journey, and so that community becomes really, really important. Eso we know a lot about building, you know, supportive, nurturing community. We also know that you know, women when they go to get investment, are going to receive 70% mawr prevention questions. And this is even from women venture capitalists, right? They just venture capitalists are creatures of habit, and they generally will just look at the patterns, successes and trends that they've had and repeat those. So they're going to be looking for the same types of people. Are they funded in the past, which are traditionally young white males and eso? We know that just by virtue of the system that we all live in on DWhite. It's implanted in all of us that women are going to receive more questions about the risk of their business many, many more than they will about the opportunity. So how do we train women for that landscape? You know, how do we train them to answer the questions about the risk realistically and fairly but pivot so that they get the same opportunities as a male entrepreneur, perhaps to answer questions about the ceiling as well as the floor. >>Yeah, and addresses trade up and understand the criteria and having that confidence. And I think that the great news is that we're all changing and we're all open to it. And there's more funds now like this and your >>leadership. E love that point, John. I think, you know, I think that everyone's eyes are open right, and I can say that sort of it with a really strong sense of conviction. That, like 2020 is is a great year for acknowledging this problem and for I think a lot of joint motivation to really properly address it. So I'm actually feeling really optimistic about it, >>and we're at a cultural crossroads. Everyone kind of knows that you're seeing it play out on the big stage of the world on again. Your leadership has been doing this, and I want to get your thoughts on this because you mentioned entrepreneurship, the ups and downs. Some call it a rollercoaster highs and lows. You have great days, and you have really, really bad days. And it's even compounded when you're not in the pattern matching world of what people are seeing. If you're a woman or under verse, a minority or group, I gotta ask you the question around mental health because one of the things, especially with co vid, is having that community. Because the ups and downs swings are important that people maintain their confidence, and mentors and community add value there. Can you talk about that important piece of the equation because it's it plays a big role, often not talked about much? Um, it is tough now more than ever than ever before, but still not enough. This community there, it's >>having support. We can, you know, we talk about it a lot of healthy and what people need to prioritize their mental health as they grow a business. And ultimately, if you're not doing a good job of that. Your business will not succeed because your team would be healthy and you're just it compounds. Um, so it's really imperative. And it does take a toll on founders on entrepreneurs, I think in in higher degrees. And it does in the general population because a small crack can become a chasm if people are not careful. Andi, everyone knows even if you're super passionate about something, putting in 20 hours a day, every day continuously is eventually going to catch up with you, right? So you have to create healthy habits from the beginning for you and your team on board. And certainly during covert we've seen some of those things exacerbated due to isolation. So that community peace becomes really, really important. I don't think she would mind me saying so. I'm going Thio mention that one of our previous entrepreneurs and Yang brilliant, brilliant woman actually did a great piece. Uh, you can just google and Yang entrepreneur depression, mental health and and it will come up for you, but just a really candid expose on what it is like. Thio be an entrepreneur that perhaps struggles with with mental health >>Yeah, it's super important. And I gotta say, I really love your work. I've always been an admirer of the Halsey in Mission and the people behind it, the halcyon house. And now you're taking it to buy rain under with an intensive kind of program. It's a global landscape. Final word, Kate. What should people know about this program? Summarize it real quick. >>We're just super happy to be reaching out and supporting a greater number off talented founders from the Middle East with Although Bahrain on our partners started, Borane and AWS have to offer. You know, we we love to expand our work to serve more and more entrepreneurs. And we couldn't be more excited to support these women. >>We're an upward better time now than ever. It's gonna be a big change happening. Big cultural change. Your part of it. Thank you for joining me. >>Thank you, John. >>Great to see you >>really appreciate it. >>Thank you. I'm John for your here. The cube. Virtual covering A W s public sector online. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's coverage virtually of the AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit Online. Normally we're face to face in Bahrain or Asia Pacific, or even down in New Zealand and Australia, but we have to do it remotely. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, we've got a great segment here with a great guest, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion Health, talking about the Global Healthcare Industry with Cloud Technology because now more than ever, we all know what it looks like, before COVID and after COVID, has upending the health care business, we're seeing it play out in real time, a lot of great benefits to technology. Ian, thank you for coming remotely from New Zealand and we're here in Palo Alto, California, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> You're the Founder and CEO of Orion Health global, award-winning provider of health information technology, supports the delivery of optimized healthcare throughout New Zealand, but now more than ever around the world, congratulations. But now COVID has hit, what is the impact of COVID because this is changing healthcare for the better and speed agility, is the services up to snuff, is it up to par? What is the situation of the post-COVID or the current COVID and then what we'll post-COVID look like for healthcare, what's your opinion? >> So, sir, I've never seen such a dramatic change in such a short time, as has happened over the last nine to 10 months. And you know what we're seeing is before COVID, a lot of focus on automating hospitals, probably primary care, et cetera, now all the focus is on putting medical records together, digital front doors giving patients access to their medical records, and much of the same way you have access to your bank records, when you travel you go into well, we don't travel now actually, but when you go into the lounges, the airline apps are very, very user friendly and the healthcare sector has been a laggard on this area, that's all about to change. And patients will be wanting, they don't want to go when they're feeling ill, they don't want to go down to their local physician practice because, well, there are other sick people there, they want to get the right care, at the right time, and the right place. And usually when they're not feeling well, they want to go online, probably symptom checking, if they need to have a consult they would like to do it there and then and not two or three days later, and they'd like to it virtually, and you know, there are definitely some things that can be done remotely and that's what people want. >> One of the things that comes up in all my interviews around innovation and certainly around AWS and cloud is the speed of innovation, and we were talking before we came on camera about I'm in Palo Alto, California, you're in Auckland, New Zealand, I don't have to fly there, although it's been quarantined for 14 days in New Zealand and summer is coming. but we can get remote services, we're talking and sharing knowledge right now. And when you were also talking before we went on about how healthcare is taking a trajectory similar to the financial industry, you saw our ATM machines, what an innovation, self service, then you got apps and then, you know, the rest is history just connect the dots. The same kind of thing is happening in healthcare, can you share your vision of how you see this playing out, why is it so successful, what are some of the things that need to be worked on and how does cloud bring it all together? >> Just on the banking front, I haven't been to the bank for many years because I understood all online, I had to go to the bank the other day, it was a novel experience. But you know I have a lot of, when I discussed with our developers and they say, well what are the requirements, I said, well, hold on, you're a patient you know what you want, you want your medical record pulled together, right, you want everything there, you can have easy access to it, perhaps you might like the computer to make some suggestions to you, it may want to give you warnings and alerts. And you know what we're also getting is a lot more data, and historically a medical record will be your lab, your radiology, your pharmacy, few procedures, maybe, but what we're getting now is genomic data getting added to its social determinants, where do you live, where do you work, behavioral and lots of other things are getting entered onto the medical record and it is going to get big. Oh, actually I forgot device data as well, all sorts of data. Now, within that vast amount of data, there will be signals that can be picked up, not by humans, but by machine learning and we need to pick the right suggestions that I give them back to the patients themselves, or the circle of care, be it their doctors, physicians, or maybe their family. So the picture I'm trying to paint here is health is going to, historically it's been all seated around physicians and hospitals, and it's all about to change. And it's going to happen quickly, you know normally health is very slow, it's a leg out it takes forever and forever to change, what we're seeing right across the world, I'm talking from Europe, Middle East, Asia, the North America, right across the world, the big health systems looking to provide firm or far richer services to their populations. >> Big joke in Silicon Valley used to be about a decade ago when big data was hitting the scene, we have the smartest data engineers, working on how to make an ad, be placed next to for you and on a page, which in concept is actually technically a challenge, you know, getting the right contextual, relevant piece of information in front of you, I guess it's smart. But if you take that construct to say medicine, you have precision needs, you also have contextual needs so if I need to get a physician, why not do virtually? If that gives me faster care, I got knowledge based system behind it, but if I want precision, I then can come in and it's much efficient, much more efficient. Can you share how the data, 'cause machine learning is a big part of it and machine learning is a consumer of data too, not just users, you're consuming data, but the results are still the same, how are you seeing that translate into value? >> I think the first thing is that if you can treat patients earlier more accurately, you can ultimately keep them healthier and using less health resources. And, you know, you notice around the world, different health systems take a different approach. The most interesting approach we see is when a payer also happens to own the hospitals, their approach changes dramatically and they start pouring a lot of money into primary care so they have to have less hospital beds, but, with data information, you can be more precise in the way you treat the patient. So I've had my genome done, probably quite a few times actually, I just one of the care pair, the different providers so I have avian called CYP2C19, I'm pretty sure I've got it right, and that means I hyper metabolize suite on drugs, so you give them to me they won't work. And so there's information in our medical records, with machine-learning, if you can keep a Tesla on the road, we must be able to use the same, in fact we're, we have a very big machine learning project here on this company, and to not only get the information out of the medical records but save it back up, this is the hard part, save it back up to the providers, and to the patients in a meaningful useful way, an actionable way, not too much, not too little and that's usually the challenge, actually. >> You're a customer in your business, and you guys are in New Zealand, but it's global, you've a global footprint, how are you leveraging cloud technology to address your customers? >> It's usually useful because we end up with one target platform so when we come to deploy in any part of the world, it's the same platform. And you know from a security point of view, if we're trying to secure all these on-prem installations, it's very, very hard so we have a lot of security features that are provided for us, there are lots of infrastructure tooling, deployment and monitoring all the stuff is just inherent within the cloud and I guess what's most important we have a standard platform that we can target right across the world. >> And you're using Amazon Web Services, I mean, I'd imagine that as you go outside and look at the edge, as you have to have these secure edge points where you're serving clients, that's important, how're you securing that edge? >> Well, fortunately for us as Amazon is increasingly getting right across the world so there are still some regions which, this tool are working on, but over time, we would be expecting officially every country in the world to have all sorts of services available. >> You see the future of health care going from your standpoint, I mean, if you had to throw a projectile in the future to say, you know, five years from now, where are we on the progress and innovation wave, how do you see that Ian, playing out? >> So, certainly last 30 years, we've had various ways of innovation on healthcare, I think this pandemic is going to transform healthcare in such a major way in such a short time, and we'll see it totally transform within two to four years. And the transformation will be just like your bank, your airline, or lots of other buying stuff actually via Amazon actually, we'll see that sort of transformation of healthcare. We have talked a lot about healthcare, historically being patient centric, it is really not true, our healthcare today and most parts of the world has been geared around the various healthcare facilities, so this change we're going to see now, it'll be geared around the patients themselves, which is really intriguing but exciting. >> Position, I want to get my genome done, you've reminded me, I got to get that done. >> Finding that out, you know, you know--- >> I want to know, (laughs) I want to kind of know in advance, so I can either go down the planes, have a good time or low the loam games. >> I find out I had the positivity gene, you know, I kind of knew that and you know, I'm the fairly positive individual, so (laughs). >> Yeah, well, so as you I'm going to get my, I've to go through that process. But you know, again, fundamentally, you know that I agree this industry is going to be right for change, I remember the old debates on HIPAA and having silos, and so the data protection was a big part of that business and privacy as a huge, but one area, I'll get to that in a second, but the one area I want to touch on first is that really an important one, for everyone around the world is how does technology help people, everywhere get access to healthcare? How do you see that unless there's one approach that the government do it all, some people like that, some people don't, but generally speaking technology should help you, what's your view on how technology helps us, get accessible healthcare? >> What it means no matter where you live or what you do, most people have access to the internet either via our phone or a computer. And so what you want to be able to do, what we need to do, as a society, is give everybody access, just like they have access to their banking records, have a similar access to their medical records. And again, you know, the standard features, you know, symptom checking for patients who have chronic conditions, advice, help, medication charts are really important, the ability to go online and do internet consult or the conditions that don't require a physical examination, be able to message your circle of care, it's basically the automation of healthcare, which, you know, sadly has legged other industries. >> It is a critical point, you mentioned that early, I want to get back on the date and we'll get to privacy right after. You mentioned AI and machine learning, obviously it's a huge part of it, having data models that are intelligent, I know I've covered Amazon SageMaker and a bunch of other stuff they're working on, so they're getting smarter and they're doing it by industry, which I think is smart. But I want to ask you about data, I was just having a conversation this morning with a colleague, and we hear about AI and AI and machine learning, they're consumers too, (chuckles) so if machines are going to automate humans, which they are, the machines are consuming data so the machine learning is now a consumer, not just a technology. So when you're consuming data, you got to have a good approach. You guys are doing a lot with data, how should people think about machine learning and data, because if you believe that machine learning will assist humans, then machines are going to talk to other machines and consume data, and create insights, et cetera, and spoil another systematic effects. How should people think about data who are in healthcare, what's your insight there? >> Well, the tricky thing with machine learning and healthcare is not so much the algorithms, the algorithms are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere, and the big problem that we have found, and we've been working on this for some time and have a lot of people working on it, the big problem we have is first of all marshaling, getting all the data together, wrangling the data, so and then there's a fun part where run the algorithms and then the next big problem is getting the results back into the clinical workflow. So we spent all our time upstream and downstream and a bit in the middle, which is the fun bit, takes a very small amount of time. And so it's probably the hardest part is getting it back into the clinical workflow, that's the hardest part, really, it's really difficult. >> You know, I really appreciate what you do, I think this is going to be the beginning of a big wave of innovation, I was talking with Max Peterson about some areas where they saw, you know, thousands and thousands of people being cared, that they never would have been cared for virtually with the systems and then cloud. Again, just the beginning, and I think this is a reconfiguration of the healthcare value chain and--- >> Configuration, I mean, at pre-COVID we as a company spend so much time on planes, traveling all over the world, I've hardly traveled this year and zoom and all the other technologies, I've quite enjoyed it to be fair. So, and I think that there's a reconfiguration of how business is done, it's started to happen in healthcare and--- >> If tell my wife, I'm coming to New Zealand, I get quarantined for 14 days. >> That's right. >> Yeah, I'm stuck down under summertime. >> You get one of those hotels with the view of the Harbor, very nice. >> And final question and just close it out here in the segments, I think this is super important, you mentioned at the top, COVID has upended the healthcare industry, remote health is what people want, whether it's for, you know, not to being around other sick people, or for convenience, or for just access. This is a game changer, you got iWatches now, I was just watching Apple discuss some of the new technologies and processes that they have in these things for heartbeat, so, you know how this signals. This is absolutely going to be a game changer, software needs to be written, it has to be so far defined, cloud is going to be at the center of it. What's your final assessment, share your partying thoughts? >> We are definitely, in a major reconfiguration of healthcare that's going to happen very quickly, I would've thought that 24 months, maybe no more than 36 and what we're going to end up with is a health system, just like your bank and the big challenge for our sector is first of all, the large amounts of data, how do you store it, where do you store, and the cloud is ideal place to do it, then how do you make sense of it, you know, how do you give just the right advice to an elderly patient versus a millennial who is very technology aware? So these, there's lots of innovation and problems to be solved and lots of opportunities I believe for startups and new innovative companies, and so it's interesting times. >> I think time's short, you know, it's just so much to do, great recruitment opportunity in Orion Health. Thank you for spending time, Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion health, an award winning provider of health information global based out of New Zealand, thank you for taking the time to come on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We're not face to face, normally we'd be in person, but we're doing it remotely due to the pandemic, thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I wish we could be there in person, but we're doing remote because of the COVID and the pandemic. We've got a great guest, Paul Grist. Worldwide Public Sector, Head of Education International for AWS. Paul, thank you for coming on remotely. >> Great to be here, John. >> There's a lot of disruption in the education space this year with universities and schools still uncertain about what the future will look like. What are some of the biggest trends you're seeing? >> John, what we've seen is the rapid adoption of technology and the growth of flexible online learning, learning that can take place anytime, anywhere. What we've seen is universities, national education systems, and schools rapidly migrating systems and content to the cloud, spinning up new applications. And we've seen companies that provide technology and content and platforms, the ed techs and publishers of the world, increasing their capacity, increasing their capability to deliver new applications to education. >> What is some of this research that you're finding out there? >> Yeah. You know, a time of much change and things happening very, very fast. We responded fast to the changes, John. Got a load of customer conversations together, looking at speeches by educationalists who were responding to the changes at some of the online events that spun up very quickly at places like the University of Buckingham, ASU, JSV, Inside Higher Education, places like Blackboard World. And really just talked to those leaders about their responses to the change, what kinds of things they were doing, and brought that together into the research. It's underpinned by some in-depth research and insights from education reports and articles too. >> Thanks Paul, really appreciate it. Having that research is critical. I know you guys do a lot of work on that. I know you got some news, take a quick plug for the new research that's coming out. You guys just put out today, just take a minute to quickly explain what it's about and how to find it. >> We're publishing today some new research that shows the seven key emerging trends in this new world of education. Check it out on the AWS website. Two key trends, flexible learning and the new world of employability. >> So you guys got a lot of data. It's great with Amazon, got a lot of customers. Good to see you guys getting that research. The question I have for you Paul is, what amount of the research shows really the COVID situation? Because there's before COVID, there's kind of during, and then there's going to be a post-COVID mode. Was that prior research in place with COVID or after COVID? Can you share kind of the update on the relevance of your research? >> Yeah, I think the sector has changed. The sector has gone through the fastest change it's ever gone through. And undoubtedly most of the issues, most of the challenges and opportunities in the sector, predate the pandemic. But what we've seen is COVID accelerate many of the challenges and the opportunities, but also bring new opportunities. >> Yeah, one of the things we've seen with education is the disruption, and the forcing function with COVID. There's a problem, we all know what it is. It's important, there's consequences for those. And you can quantify the disruption with real business value and certainly student impact. There's been downsides with remote education. More teacher-parent involvement and students having to deal with isolation, less social interaction. How do you guys see that? Or what is Amazon doing to solve these problems? Can you talk about that? >> Yeah. I think you know, education is very much a people business. And what we've been trying to do is partner with organizations to ensure that the people are kept at the center of the business. So working with organizations such as LS, sorry, Los Angeles United School District in the US to spin up a call center to allow students to contact their tutors. And parents to interact with tutors, to get questions answered. >> So one of the challenges these academic institutions are facing is speed, it's pace of change. What's going on with competition? How are they competing? How are universities and colleges staying relevant? Obviously there's a financial crisis involved. There's also the actual delivery aspect of it. More and more mergers. You're starting to see ecosystem changes. Can you talk about what's going on in the educational ecosystem? >> Yeah I mean, educational institutions are being forced to rethink their business models. It's an international marketplace in higher education. It's been a growing marketplace for many, many years. That suddenly stopped overnight, so every university has had to rethink about where their revenues are coming from, where the students are coming from. There's been some surprises too. I mean in the UK, actually international enrollments are up post-COVID because one of the strange side effects of COVID is without being able to travel, there's actually a cost saving for students. And so we've seen universities in the UK benefit from students who want to study, perhaps travel and the cost of study was too high previously. Now being able to study remotely. It's an unexpected and unintended consequence. But it kind of shows how there are opportunities for all organizations during this time. >> Many countries had to cancel exams altogether this year, which has been a big, huge problem. I mean people are outraged and people want to learn. It's been, you know, the silver lining in all this is that you have the internet (laughs). You have the cloud. I want to get your thoughts. How are universities and schools dealing with this challenge? Because you have a multi-sided marketplace. You've got the institutions, you've got the students, you got the educators, they all have to be successful. How are universities dealing with this challenge? >> Yeah I think, you know, teaching and learning has been online for 20, 30 years. And I think a lot of organizations have adopted online teaching and learning. But I think assessment is the one big area of education that remains to be made available at scale at low cost. So most assessment is still a pen-and-paper-based. There's big trust and identity issues. And what we're seeing through this COVID change is organizations really getting to grip with both of those issues. So, having the confidence to put assessment online, to make it available at scale, and then also having the confidence to tackle trust and identity questions. So who is taking the exam, where are they sitting? Can we be sure that it's actually that person taking that exam? So you know, the rise of things like proctoring technologies giving organizations the opportunity to assess remotely. >> How has this crisis affected research at academic institutions? Because certainly we know that if you need a lab or something, certainly we're seeing students need to be physically in person. But with remote and all those changes going on with the scale and the pace of change, how has research at academic institutions been impacted? >> Yeah I mean, research has always been a really collaborative activity, but we've seen that collaboration increase. It's had to increase. Researchers have had to go remote. Many of them work in labs. They haven't been able to do that. They've needed to spin up applications and new technologies in the cloud to continue working. But what we're seeing is governments taking an increased interest in the research being applicable, making sure that it leads to innovation which is meaningful. Getting much more involved and insisting that the research is made available now. And of course there's no place that that's clearer than in health research and trying to find a cure for COVID. And then secondly, we're seeing that research is becoming much more collaborative not just across institutions but also countries. So one of the great projects we're involved in at the moment is with the University of Adelaide who are collaborating with researchers from the Breeding and Acclimatization Institute in Poland on a project to study the increase in crop yield of wheat. >> One of the things that's coming out of this, whether it's research or students is open online courses, virtual capabilities. But a concept called stackable learning. Can you explain what that is? >> Yeah. We're in a global marketplace in education and there's increased competition between universities and education providers to make new types of certificates and online badges available. We know that employers are looking for ever more agile methods of scaling and upskilling. And stackable learning is a concept that's been around for a couple of decades now, where learning is broken down into smaller chunks, put together in a more personalized way from a number of different providers. Spun up very, very quickly to respond to need and then delivered to students. We're seeing some of the big providers like edX and Coursera who, again have been around for over a decade become really prominent in the provision of some of these stackable credentials. Their systems run on the cloud. They're easy to access, in many, many cases they're free. We're seeing an increasing number of employers and education institutions adopt and embed these types of delivery systems into their curriculum. >> Totally a fan of stackable learning, it's called the Lego model, whatever I call it. But also online brings the nonlinear progressions. The role of data is super important. So I'm very bullish on education being disrupted by cloud providers and new apps. So you know, I wanted to call that out because I think it's super important. Let me get to a really important piece that it has to be addressed, and I want to get your thoughts on. Cyber security. Okay, cyber attacks and privacy of students are two areas that are super important for institutions to address. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I mean the use of more technology becomes, you know again, a target for cyber attack and unfortunately it's an increasing phenomenon. Simply put, every organization needs to put security first. Needs to operate as a security-first organization. They need to adopt technologies, people and processes that can protect their investments. And work with data management vendors, cloud vendors who've got the compliances and the common privacy and security frameworks such as GDPR in place to make sure that they provide secure services. AWS's security offerings include auditing, login and identity management, data encryption capabilities that offer more transparency and control, to allow institutions protect student data. >> Super important, thanks for sharing. Finally, what's the steps institutions can take to close the digital divide because now some people are taking gap years. Research is changing. People might not even have PCs or internet connections. There's still, this exposes the haves and have nots. What steps can institutions take to do their part? >> Yeah, digital learning is here to stay, John. We've learned that many learners do not have access to technology necessary for online learning. Whether those are devices or a reliable internet connection. But again, you know governments, states, educational authorities have all turned their attention to these issues over the last few months. And we're seeing organizations partner with technology providers that can provide internet connections. Partners in AWS, such as Kajeet who've installed hotspot devices on buses to deploy in areas with no connectivity. You know whether that's a place like Denver, Colorado or whether it's a place, you know, in Nigeria in Africa, remote connection remains a problem everywhere. And we're seeing everybody addressing that issue now. >> Paul, great to have you on theCUBE and sharing your insights on what's going on in international education. Final question for you. In your own words, why is this year at the AWS Public Sector Summit Online important? What's the most important story that people should walk away in this educational industry? >> The most important story, John, is it's a time of incredible change but also incredible opportunity. And we're seeing organizations who have wanted to change, who've wanted to deliver more to their students, who want to deliver a greater experience, who want to access more students and have much greater reach. Now with the appetite to do that. re:Invent is a great opportunity to work with AWS, to understand what's going on with our partners, with our customers. And look at some of the common solutions for the challenges that they're looking to solve. >> Paul Grist, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Worldwide Head of Education for International AWS. Thank you for sharing. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Remote, virtual, this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Oven Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of Amazon Web services. Eight. Of his public sector summit online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Curry. Your host of the Cube got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California about social impact, transforming, teaching and learning with cloud technology. Got three great guests. You go. Richard is the CEO and co founder of Guys Tech and Jean Te'o, CEO and founder of Solve Education Founders and CEOs of startups is great. This is squad was the AIPAC regional head. Education, health care, not for profit and research. Ray Ws, he head start big program Vincent. Thanks for coming on, Janine. And you go Thank you for joining. >>Thanks for having us, John. >>We're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever, social change is happening. Um, this next generation eyes building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems there. Today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually digitally and also in person. So the world's changing. So, um, I gotta ask you, Vincent, we'll start with you and Amazon. Honestly, big started builder culture. You got two great founders here. CEO is doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on. A pack, >>A lot of >>activity. I mean, reinvent and some it's out. There are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >>Thank you. Thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they are always looking for help and support in many off the innovation that they're trying to develop the second area off observation that we had waas, that they are always alone with very limited resources, and they usually do not know where to look for in terms, off support and in terms off who they can reach out to. From a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called A W s. At START. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they join the program. Aws ed start. Yeah, three specific areas. First one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges off A W S services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community off like minded education technology founders and linking them also to investors and VCs and lastly, off course, in supporting innovation. We support them with a bit off AWS cop credits promotional credits for them so that they can go on experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >>That's great stuff. And I want to get into that program a little further because I think that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides actually free credits or no one is gonna turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Um, Jean, I want to get your thoughts. How would solve education? Born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story? >>Thank you so much for the question. So, actually, my co founder was invited to speak at an African innovation forum a couple of years back on the topic that he was sharing with. How can Africa skip over the industrialization face and go direct to the knowledge economy? Onda, the discussion went towards in orderto have access to the knowledge economy, unique knowledge. And how do you get knowledge Well through education. So that's when everybody in the conference was a bit stuck right on the advice waas. In order to scale first, we need to figure out a way to not well, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the successful education initiated. So and that's was what pain walk away from the conference. And when we met in in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries on the problem that we're trying to solve this. It might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million Children and you are not learning on. That is a big number globally right on out of all the SDG per se from U N. Education. And perhaps I'm biased because I'm a computer engineer. But I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming bites. But since the other stg is like, you know, poverty or hunger, right, actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very, um, interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smartphones, becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very, uh, interesting. Fortunately for us to disseminate education through about technology. So we in self education elevate people out of poverty, true, providing education and employment opportunities live urging on tech. And we our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we do an open platform that provides everyone effected education. >>You could How about your company? What problem you're you saw And how did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >>Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started. We have a joke. One of the co founder, Matthew, had a has a child with severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having another one of them that would support those those kids on Duh. I took the joke seriously, So we're starting sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we could make this happen. Um, so it turns out that the dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world, with an estimated 10 to 20% off the worldwide population with the disorder between context between 750 million, up to 1.5 billion individual. With that learning disorder on DSO, where we where we sort of try and tackle. The problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for Children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dislikes. Yeah, many being assessed. And the second is so what? What do we do about it? And so given or expertise in data science and and I, we clearly saw, unfortunately off, sort of building something that could assess individual Children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U. S. Specifically who paid up to 6000 U. S. Dollars for for diagnosis within educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. Eso What we so clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading and everyone has a smartphone and you're smart. Smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. Eso We started collecting order recording from Children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia, and we then trying a model to recognize the likelihood of this lecture by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed, dyslexic being being diagnosed. So we have now an algorithm that can take about 10 minutes, which require no priors. Training cost $20. Andi, anyone can use it. Thio assess someone's likelihood off dyslexia. >>You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning progressions that air nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube. You got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Johnny and you mentioned, you know making the bits driver and changing technology. So Jeannine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, Okay? You got the idea. You're kicking the tires. You're putting it together. Now you gotta actually start writing code >>for us. We know education technology is not you. Right? Um, education games about you. But before we even started, we look at what's available, and we quickly realize that the digital divide is very real. Most technology out there first are not designed for really low and devices and also not designed for people who do not have Internet at hope so way. So with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need toe do something about on board, but something that that that problem is one eyes just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices, And then the second thing is motivation it again. It's also really obvious, but and people might think that, you know, uh, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral changes really hard right. I would love to work out every day, but, you know, I don't really get identity do that. So how do we, um, use technology to and, um, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that date, so that we can help support the motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we >>welcome? >>Yeah. And then the motivated community even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going and it's powerful, Hugo, your reaction to you know, you got the idea you got, You got the vision you're starting to put. Take one step in front of the other. You got a W s. Take us through the progression, understand the startup. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, what Jane said is very likely Thio what we're trying to do. But for us, there's there's free key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, that is free things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility, and the other one is affordability. Eso the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how we're going to make this work. And so we have. We have a couple of scientific publications on Do we have to collect data and, you know, sort of published this into I conferences and things like that. So make sure that we have scientific evidence behind us that that support us. And so what that means that we had Thio have a large amount of data >>on and >>put this to work right on the other side. The accessibility and affordability means that, Julian said. You know it needs to be on the cloud because if it's on the cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device with an Internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe, it's it's a good start on DSO the clock. The cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience in the same value to clients and and parent and teacher and allied health professionals around the world. Andi. That's why you know, it's it's been amazing to to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well. Obviously there is ah lot of benefit off being able to leverage the computational power off off the cloud to to make better, argue with them and better training. >>We're gonna come back to both of you on the I question. I think that's super important. Benson. I want to come back to you, though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, um, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning. But there is great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunity with Head Start. What trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with co vid, you know the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before covert and after co vid. There's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation. There's, um, or channels more data, the more engagement. How >>are you >>looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >>So there are three things that I want to quickly touch on number one. I think government are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't You can find a better time, uh, to now develop and not just developed a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right? We will talk about speed, three agility off the cloud. That's why the cloud is so powerful for government to adult. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools closed down across the world. UNESCO reported what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open? And that's where education, technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's Company and others there's so many of them around our ableto come forward and offer their services and help schools go online run classrooms online continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online and and this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even catch off education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they got to have a clear digital strategy. And the education technology companies like, what? Who we have here today, just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get toe addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >>Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just say it. There's some old technology out there and Jenny and you go, You're young enough not to know what I t means because you're born in the cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I t is like. In fact, there's a There's a joke here in the United States that with everyone at home, the teachers have turned into the I T department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go on mute and how toe configure a network adds just translation. If they're routers, don't work real problems. I mean, this was technology. Schools were operating with low tech zooms out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things. But now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So, Vincent, I'll start with you. Um, this is a big problem. So cloud solves that one. You guys have pretty much helped. I t do things that they don't want to do any more by automation. This >>is an >>opportunity not necessary. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. You just quickly talk about how you see the cloud helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >>We are all now living in a cloud empowered economy. Whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services. There are powered by the cloud, and a lot of them are powered by the AWS cloud. But we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right Whether you are watching Netflix, um Well, in the old days you're buying tickets and and booking hotels on Expedia or now you're actually playing games on epic entertainment, you know, playing fortnight and all those kind of games you're already using and a consumer off the cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness off club computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society, that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to happen. So the first big idea is want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on club literacy? The second thing is, for those who have not embarked on a clear cloud strategy, this is the time. Don't wait for for another pandemic toe happen because you wanna be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with, and you want to get ahead of the curve and so education training yourself, getting some learning done, and that's really very, very important as the next step to prepare yourself toe face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EC start actually helps toe empower and catalyzed innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you Join. >>Congratulations on the head. Start. We'll get into that real quickly. Uh, head start. But let's first get the born in the cloud generation, Janine. And you go, You guys were competing. You gotta get your APS out there. You gotta get your solutions. You're born in the cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How >>do you >>view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset? Janine will start with you. >>So for us, way are very aware that we're solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So So? So this is a very big problem. And being able to liberate on cloud technology means that we're able to just focus on what we do best. Right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is, um, effective? And how do we keep people motivated and all those sorts of great things, um, leveraging on game mechanics, social network and incentives. And then while we do that on the outside way, can just put almost out solved everything to AWS cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and hands organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments on brother, even big NGOs on, you know, because before cove it, we had to really do our best to convince them until our troops are dry and way, appreciate this opportunity and and also we want to help people realized that in order to buy, adopting either blended approach are a adopting technology means that you can do mass customization off learning as well. And that's what could what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So and there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government off East Java on top of just using the education platform as it is andare education platform, which is education game Donald Civilization. Um, they have added in a module that teaches Cove it because, you know, there's health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right and adding this component in and the most popular um mitigate in that component is this This'll game called hopes or not? And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region off 25 million people. So tech became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the federal government off Indonesia to talk about anti something and even a very difficult topic, like sex education as well. >>Yeah, and the learning is nonlinear, horizontally scalable, its network graft so you can learn share about news. And this is contextual data is not just learning. It's everything is not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo. Um, your competitive strategy. You're out there now. You got the covert world. How are you competing? How is Amazon helping you? >>Absolutely. John, look, this is an interesting one, because the current competitors that we have, uh, educational psychologist, they're not a tech, So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitive per se. I would say that we're competing against the old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to, um, empower people to be comfortable. We've having a machine, you know, analyzing your kids or your recording and telling you if it's likely to be dislikes. Yeah, and in this concept, obviously, is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with, you know, you have the app that stand Ford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. It's being done in different industry. Eso The biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that, you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big part in school, but when you're an adult, you learn on Did you know we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty, and so we've been doing some very interesting working in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do their job and and and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against attack. And often when we talk to other ethnic company, we come before you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide a assessment solution on e assessment solution. So, really, John, what we're competing against is an old way of doing things. >>And that's exactly why clouds so successful. You change the economics, you're actually a net new benefit. And I think the cloud gives you speed and you're only challenges getting the word out because the economics air just game changing. Right, So that's how Amazon does so well, um, by the way, you could take all our recordings from the Cube, interviews all my interviews and let me know how ideo Okay, so, um, got all the got all the voice recordings from my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that e. I wanna come back to you. But I wanna ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching. Okay on Dhere about Amazon. They know the history. They know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the cloud You get big pay when you're successful. Love that business model. But for the folks watching that were in the virtual garages, air in their houses, innovating and building out new ideas. What does Ed start mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it on what are some of the learnings that you have from work with Head Start? >>But our relationship X s start is almost not like client supplier relationship. It's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with protect their providing the technology, but on top of that, they have their system architect to work with my tech team. And they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things, like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet and also other opportunities, like getting out the word out there. Right. As you know, all of their, uh, startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting out without there is another big benefit as well. So, um definitely very much recommend that start. And I think another big thing is this, right? Uh, what we know now that we have covert and we have demand coming from all over the place, including, like, even a lot of interest, Ally from the government off Gambia, you know? So how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria? Right. With technology that is almost frameless. >>Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. And they got the region's too. So the region's do help. I love we call them Cube Region because we're on Amazon. We have our cloud, Hugo, um, and start your observations, experience and learnings from working with aws. >>Absolutely. Look, this is a lot to say, so I'll try and making sure for anyone, but but also for us on me personally, also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Johnny mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur you can connect with expert in different industry. You can ask technical expert and and have ah, you know office our every week. Like you said Jenny, with your tech team talking to cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have on day and you know, on the business side I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we when we've approached government being able to say that we have the support off AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms off, moving forward with discussion with potential plant and and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things where when people see you, there's a perceived value that you know, your your entourage is smart people and and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really >>helpful, you know, that's a great point. The APP SEC review process, as you do deals is a lot easier. When here on AWS. Vincent were a little bit over time with a great, great great panel here. Close us out. Share with us. What's next for you guys? You got a great startup ecosystem. You're doing some great work out there and education as well. Healthcare. Um, how's your world going on? Take a minute, Thio. Explain what's going on in your world, >>John, I'm part of the public sector Team Worldwide in AWS. We have very clear mission statements on by the first is you know, we want to bring about destructive innovation and the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many off our techs, whether it's a text, healthtech golf text, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions or health care institutions to really be better at what they do, we want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market as fast as possible. It's just an honor on a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver. Heck, the kind of work that Hugo and Janina doing. You know, we cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part off their work And in delivering this impact to society, >>the expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson, Andy Jassy in the folks that aws for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together. You're starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here, uh, making a social impact, transforming, teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on the Cube. Thanks for joining. >>Thank you. Thank >>you, John. >>I'm John Furry with the Cube. Virtual were remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic. You're watching a divest Public sector online summit. Thank you for watching

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's The CUBE, with digital coverage of AWS public sector online, (upbeat music) brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to The CUBE virtual coverage, of AWS public sector summit online. I'm John Furrier, your host of The CUBE. Normally we're in person, out on Asia-Pacific, and all the different events related to public sector. But this year we have to do it remote, and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE, with Data Virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here, about Digital Earth Africa project, Clive Charlton. Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS, Clive thanks for coming on, and Aditya Agrawal founder of D4DInsights, and also the advisor for the Digital Earth Africa project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John. >> So Clive take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project. What are the problems, that you're aiming to solve? >> Well, we're really aiming to provide, actionable data to governments, and organization around Africa, by providing satellite imagery, in an easy to use format, and doing that on the cloud, that serves countries throughout Africa. >> And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on, just with the tech, it's on Amazon. You got a little satellite action. Is there ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, you know, what's the scope of the project. >> Yeah, so, historically speaking you'd have to process satellite imagery down link it, and then do some heavy heavy lifting, around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built, from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by a Geo-sciences Australia and they use container services for Kubernetes's called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which we are required to process the raw satellite imagery, into a format called a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So, organizations can just use NHTTP get range request. Just a query part of the file, that they're interested in, which means, the results are served much, much quicker, from much, much better overall experience, under the hood, the store where the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3, and the Metadata Index in a Relational Database Service, that runs the Open Data CUBE Library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa, to store this data in both space and time. >> It's interesting. I just did a, some interviews last week, on a symposium on space and cybersecurity, and we were talking about , the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, and your reaction to the Digital Earth, cause you're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview, of how you see it playing out because, explaining to someone, who doesn't know anything about the project, like, okay what is it about, and how does it actually impact people? >> Sure. So, you know, as, as Clive mentioned, I mean there's, there's definitely a, a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa, in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the, the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa, and other parts of the world is that there's a level of capacity that's required, in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues, because, traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time, that you spend on satellite data is spent, just pre processing the data, before you can actually, do any of the fun analysis around it, that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa. And that's why this partnership, with Amazon is a fantastic partnership, because it really allows us, to be able, to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized, is that we're not just looking at it, from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program, and it is a program, that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent, and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that, once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation where illegal mining is, where is the water? We want to be able to do that, in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves, and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the sustainable development goals. >> No doubt in my mind, obviously, is that huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I want to also just ask you, as a follow up is a huge space race going on, right now, explosion of availability of satellite data. And again, more satellites going up, There's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity, and the congestion issue, but, you know, satellite data was power everyone here in the United States, you want an Uber, you want Google Maps you've got your everywhere with GPS, without it, we'd be kind of like (laughing), wondering what's going on. How do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability, of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this? And what are some of the challenges, from the data side that's coming, from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? >> Sure. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level, when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper. They're becoming more efficient. There's increased technology now, on the types of sensors that you can deploy. There's companies like Planet, that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites, and the constellation that they're putting forward, in terms of the frequency by which, you're able to get data, for any given part of the earth on a daily basis, coupled with that. And you know, this is really sort of in climbs per view, but the cloud computing capabilities, and overall computing power that you have today, then what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before, for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data now takes, you know, minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, you know, I think it really speaks, to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really, what that means, for how this data is going to be delivered to Africa, because it really allows for the scalability, for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so, for example, one of the approaches, that we're taking us, we identify what the priorities, and needs are at the country level. Let's say that it's a land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue, tested with additional countries, and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. >> Yeah. That's a great point. So many storylines here. We'll get to climb in a second on sustainability. And I want to talk about the Open Data Platform. Obviously, open data, having data is one thing, but now train data, and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I want to dig into that for a second, but, Clive, I want to ask you, first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way, as moves around the world, probably soon in space. There'll be a region Amazon space station region probably, someday in the future but, what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? >> Well, we're very pleased, that Digital Earth Africa, is using the new Africa region in Cape Town, in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world and we have another three new regions announced, what this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is, they're able to use region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the, it's the quickest connection for them. But more importantly, we also wanted to use, an African solution, for African people and using the Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. >> So, localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here. Right? >> That's right, Yeah >> And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously, this failover option, I mean, in any other countries to go to, but why is having something, in that region important for this project? >> Well, it comes down to latency for the, for the users. So, being as close to the data, as possible is, is really important, for the user experience. Especially when you're looking at large data sets, and big queries. You don't want to be, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time, for that query to go backwards and forwards, between the user and the region. So, having the data, in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. >> So it's about the region, I love when these new regions rollout from Amazon, Cause obviously it's this huge buildup CapEx, in this huge data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the, the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? >> Well, this, this project is also closely aligned with the, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research. and innovation, really by minimizing the cost, and the time required to acquire, and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators, and researchers with the data and tools, and, and technical experience, that they need to move sustainability, to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition, to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring, exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure, to serve sustainability challenges, of this nature. >> Aditya, I want to hear your thoughts, on this comment that Clive made around latency, and certainly having a region there has great benefits. You don't need to hop on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue, of what's going on in the country, from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So, so how do you see that evolving, from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint data standpoint, can you comment and react to that edge, edge angle? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that, the value of an open data infrastructure, is that, you want to use that infrastructure, to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so, from the perspective of being able. to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible, and really being able to bring industry, into that ecosystem, because of what we really want as we, as the program matures, is for this program, to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa, which has the largest proportion of young people, anywhere in the world, to be engaged around what you can do, with satellite data, and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And, so, by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent there's obviously technical benefits, to that in terms of, being able to apply the data, and create new businesses. There's also a, a perception in the fact that, the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving, is in Africa and residing in Africa which does have, which does go a long way. >> Yeah. And that's a huge value. And I can just imagine the creativity cloud, if you can comment on this open data platform idea, because some of the commentary that we've been having on The CUBE here, and all around the world is data's great. We all know we're living with a lot of data, you starting to see that, the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data, is one thing, but to put it into software defined environments, whether, it's an entrepreneur coding up an app, or doing something to share some transparency, around some initiatives going on within the region or on the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So, it's not just the technology data, is part of this new normal. What's this Open Data Platform, And how does that translate into value in your opinion? >> I, yeah. And you know, when, when data is shared on, on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it, using a broad range of compute and data to data analytics products, you know, things like Amazon EC2, or Lambda, which is all serverless compute, to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce, for complex extract and transformation processes, but sharing data in the cloud, lets users, spend more time on the data analysis, rather than, than the data acquisition. And researchers can analyze data shared on AWS, without needing to pay to store their own copy, which is what the Open Data Platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage, to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS, makes it easy to find those datasets, but, by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share, share your data on AWS, you make it available, to a large and growing community of developers, and startups, and enterprises, all around the world. And you know, and we've been talking particularly around, around Africa. >> Yeah. So it's an open source model, basically, it's free. You don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably, just started maybe down the road, if it gets heavy, maybe to charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open, contributing back. Is that right? >> Yep. That's right. To me getting, getting researchers, and startups, and organizations growing quickly, without having to worry about the data acquisition, they can just get going and start building. >> I want to get back to Aditya, on this skill gap issue, because you brought up something that, I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps. I'm going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent, young talent, people rescaling from existing jobs, certainly COVID accelerated, people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of (laughing) demand to, to do some innovative things. The question I always get, and want to get your reaction is, what are the skills needed to, to get involved, to one contribute, but also benefit from it, whether it's the data satellite, data or just how to get involved skill-wise >> Sure. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So most recently we've created a six week training course. That's really kind of taken users from understanding, the basics of Earth Observation Data, to how to work, with Python, to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks, and their own Use cases. And so there's a, there's a wide sort of range of skill sets, that are required depending on who you are because, effectively, what we want to be able to do is get everyone from, kind of the technical user, that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker, and decision maker, to understand the value of this infrastructure, whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data. If you're the one who's developing new applications, or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so, you know, in, in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again, with institutions across Africa, that already have a mandate, and expertise in this particular area, to create a holistic capacity development program, that will address all of those different factors. >> So I guess the follow up question I want to have is, how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed, as part of this program? >> Yeah, so, we are, we've created a governance model, that really is both top down, and bottom up. At the bottom up level, We have a technical advisory committee, that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa, that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities, and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board, that will be inclusive, of the key continental level institutions, that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program, and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational models, such that these institutions, that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones, who are also going to be supporting, the implementation of the program itself. >> And there's been some United Nations, sustained development projects all kinds of government involvement, around making sure certain things would happen, within the country. Can you just share, some of the highlights, or some of the key initiatives, that are going on, that you're supporting, to make it a better, better world? >> Yeah. So this is, this program is very closely aligned to a sustainable development agenda. And so looking after, looking developing methods, that really address, the sustainable development goals as one facet, in Africa, there's another program looking overall, overall national development priorities and sustainability called the Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to this, this wouldn't be happening, without the country level involvement themselves. So, this started with five countries, originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and the government of Kenya itself, has really been, a kind of a founding partner for, how Digital Earth Africa and it's predecessor of Africa Regional Data Cube, came to be. And so without high level support, and political buying within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that. That's why we're, we're where we are. >> I need you to thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive will give you the final word, for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa, processes, petabytes of data. I mean the satellite data as well, huge, you mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes Service, making containers easy to use, pay as you go. So you get cutting edge, take the one minute to, to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS, in Cape Town, for Africa's new region? Take a minute to, to put plugin. >> Yeah, thank you for that, John. So all regions are built in the, in the same way, all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call Availability Zones. And each one is a contains a, a cluster of, of data centers, and all interconnected with fast fiber. So, you know, you can survive, you know, a failure with with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same the same way, we have most of the services available in the, in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So, as a user of AWS, you, you can have the confidence that, You can deploy your services and workloads, into AWS and run it in the same in the same way, with the same kind of speed, and the same kind of support, and infrastructure that's backing any region, anywhere else in the world. >> Well great. Thanks for that plug, Aditya, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup a government or enterprise, or the big society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great. A great story. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John >> I'm John Furrier with, The CUBE, virtual remote, not in person this year. I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (upbeat music decreases)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here covering A W. S s international public sector virtual event. We have a great guest. The star of the program is Max Peterson, Good friend of the Cube. Also Vice President of A W s International for Public Sector Max. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on this virtual remote interview. Cuban interview. Hey, >>John. Great to be back on the Cube, even if it is virtual >>well, you know, we're not face to face. We have to go virtual. So the cube virtual, you've got to public sector summit. Virtual. Um, this is the time of the year where normally we'd be out on the road in Bahrain, Japan, Asia, Pacific Europe. We'd be out on the summits talking to all the guests and presenting that the update on public sector. But we have to do it remotely. Um, a little bit of trade off. The good news is with cove it for at least you guys. It's a global media network. And with these remote interviews. Uh, public sector is seeing a lot more global activity, and that's what I want to get your thoughts on. What is the business update internationally for public sector? I'm sure that with CO over the pandemic, you're seeing a lot of activity. How is the public sector business doing internationally? >>John, You know, you mentioned one of the silver linings of a pretty bad situation with the Koven pandemic. And that's been that it has meant that people have to be resourceful. Governments have to be resourceful on DSO. There's been a tremendous amount of innovation people have gotten used to now using modern cloud technology to support remote work and remote war learning. Um, out of necessity, we've had to figure out how do we deliver far greater health care services using digital technology, telemedicine, digital social care, uh, chime rooms? Uh, it really, in a nutshell, has been a tough six months for people, but a relative relatively busy six months for innovation. And for i t for the public sector customers, >>you know, I did an interview a few months ago for one of the award programs in Canada. Um, with the center had a customer on disk customers. The classic customer, a Amazon. You know, I'm not sure we do it all internally. He deployed A W S Connect in literally days that saved the lives of many of his countrymen and women by getting the entitlement checks out. And he was a glowing endorsement because, he said, with Cove in 19 they were crippled. He said they will. They stood up a call center and literally he was converted. That's just one example again. That's Canada of the kind of solutions that you guys air, enabling with Cloud to quickly respond to the crisis, to use technology to solve other technology problems and also business problems. Can you give an example on the international front of where you're seeing some activity? Because this seems to be the same pattern we're seeing, People who have used in the cloud we cube virtual. Will there be no Cuba's wasn't for our cloud implementations, but this is, um, obvious, but I want to call it out. It's important. Can you share some examples of people internationally using the cloud to get and respond to the to the cove in 19 pandemic in delivering services? >>Yeah, In fact, John, we're focusing a lot on that at the public sector summit online that comes up here in October. Um, a couple of quick examples. In fact, one of the top learnings is speed matters. And so we have Eve Curry from Australia, who talks about social and health care and how they were able to get a complete digital suite up and running for supporting 5000 elderly patients and over 3000 employees in less than a week, and that included getting up and running a video conferencing and tele consultation capability using AWS chime. It involved getting up and running collaboration space for the remote workers using work work docks. And it involves setting up a complete call center on the cloud, using Amazon time and literally that was done in less than a week. Another example, really ambitious example, which again is a testament to the innovation and, uh, the capability, the capability that AWS brings to customers. I'm in India. They had a number of tele medicine applications. They were available for a fee, but they didn't have a universal way to reach the vast population in India. And so when the pandemic hit three organization that was responsible for the public health component was challenged to get a no cost tele consultation hella medicine system up and running for outpatient services that could scale to reach a billion people. Um, they did that in 19 days. They got the system up and running Now hasn't gotten to a billion people online at one time. But there right now, doing 6000 consultations a day with about 4000 doctors, and they're headed toward 100,000 consultations today. Eso just to your point, speed and scale. We're seeing it across the board from from our public sector customers. >>You know, it's just mind boggling just to kind of pinch myself from it in 19 days. It's crazy, right? I mean, crazy fast If you throw back to the eighties and nineties when I broke into the business, you know, young gun client server was all the rage back then. And if you wanted to do, like a big apt upon an oracle s a p, whatever it was years, it was months just to do planning. E mean, I mean, think about the telemedicine example 19 days. That's huge. I mean, just the scale is just off the charts. So So I mean, even if you're not a believer in cloud I don't feel should be should just go home and retire at this point because it's just obvious. Uh, the question I wanna ask you specifically because Theresa brought this up on my last interview with her. And I wanna ask you the same question is, what is AWS doing specifically to help customers? I know customers are helping themselves. You mentioned that. What are you guys doing? Toe? Accelerate this. How are you helping of you guys changed a little bit. Can you just share what you guys specifically doing to help customers pivot toe not only solving it, but having a growth strategy behind it? >>Yeah, John, that's a great question. Some of the things that we're doing our long standing programs and so customers from day one have had a need for skills and workforce development. We keep on doubling down on those programs. Things like a W s academy aws educate our restart programs in different countries. So number one is we continue to help customers double down on getting the right cloud skills to enable the digital workforce. The second thing, in fact, if I can, for just amendment, um, there is actually a section of the public sector online called the New Workforce, which talks about both the digital skills that are required and then also some of the remote working skills that we need to help folks with. So So workforce is a big one. Um, the second one. Yeah, and I'm super excited about this because we've opened up the opportunity, form or customers around the globe to participate in our city on the Cloud Challenge Onda That gives a great opportunity to showcase and highlight the innovation of public sector customers and, you know, win some AWS credits and technical assistance to help them build their programs. But I think one of the most the things I'm most proud about in the last 6 to 9 months was when the when this pandemic struck and we listen to our customers about what they needed. We came out with something called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, and that was a program specifically aimed at providing technical assistance. Um, a ws cloud credits all to researchers to help them, um, tackle the tough questions that need to be answered to help us deal with and then hopefully resolve the pandemic. >>So on the international front, like I said earlier in the open, we would've been in Bahrain. That's a new region, only a couple of years old, Obviously the historic, um this, um, geopolitical things happening there, opening things up, that's been a very successful region. This is the playbook. Can you just give us an update on some of the successes in the different regions by rain and then a pack and other areas? What? Some of the highlights? >>Sure, John, One of the things that I think it's super exciting is that all of these customers are developing new capabilities right now. Um, one example from Egypt. Uh, they had to get literally an entire student population back to school. When the pandemic hit on DSO. They quickly pivoted to bringing a online learning management system or LMS up on the cloud on AWS. Um, and they have been able to continue to teach classes, literally to millions of students there. We've seen that same sort of distance learning online education across the globe. Another example would be when countries needed to figure out how to beam or effective in that sort of time tested, contact tracing process. So So when ah person has been found to have the the flu or the illness the subject illness, um, they typically have a lot of manual contact tracers that have to try to identify kind of where that person's been and see if they can. Then, um, helped to control the spread of whatever the diseases Kobe 19. In this case, um, we put together with governments across the world with a W s partners across the world again in very fast order, automated systems to help governments manage this, um, Singapore is a super example. India's a massively scaled example, but we did it in countries of across the globe, and we did it by working with them and the partners there to specifically respond to their needs. So everybody's case, while similar at a high level, you know, was unique in the way that they had to implement it. >>And it's been a great, great ride international us with co vid. You guys have ah current situation. You guys are providing benefits and I'll see the cloud itself for the customer to build those modern APS. The question I wanna ask you, Max, as an executive at eight of yourself. So you've been in the industry, Um, with public sector pre covert, it's, you know, it's before Cove. And there's after Govind is gonna be kind of like that demarcation line in the society. Um, it has become a global thing. I just did an event with Cal Poly was mentioned before we came on, um, small little symposium that would have been, you know, face to face. But because we did it virtually it's now global reinvents coming up. That's gonna be essentially virtual. So it's gonna be more global, less physical, space to face. Everything is introduced, no boundaries. So how >>does that >>impact? How do you How do you guys, How do you look at that? Because it impacts you, I guess a little bit because there's no boundaries, >>right? You know, John, I think this plays into what we're talking about in terms of people and governments and organizations getting used to new ways of working on de so some of our new workforce development is based around that, not just the digital skills in the cloud skills a couple of the things that we've recognized by the way, Um, it's different, but done well, there's new benefits. And so so one of the things that we've seen is where people employ chime, for instance, Uh, video conferencing solution or solutions from our partners like Zoom and others. Onda people have been able to actually be Maurin touch, for instance, with elder care. Um, there were a number of countries that introduced shielding. That meant that people couldn't physically go and visit their moms and dads. Um and so what we've seen is a number of systems on care organizations that have responded andare helping thing the elderly, uh, to use this new tech on. But it's really actually, uh, heartwarming, uh, to see those connections happen again, even in this virtual world. And the interesting thing is, you can actually step up the frequency on DSO. You don't have to be there physically, but you can be there, Andi and interact and support with the number of these thes tools. I think one of the other big learnings that we've seen for many organizations and just about every public sector group has toe work with, um uh, their constituents on the phone. Of course, we've got physical offices, you know, whether it's a hospital or a outpatient center or a social care center. Um, but you always have to have a way to work on phones. What's happened during the Cove in 19 Pandemic is there's been a surge is where information needed to get out to citizens or where citizens literally rushed the phone lines to be able to get the most current information back. Andi, the legacy called systems have been completely overwhelmed, their inadequate. And we've seen customers launch the online call center in the cloud piece, using Amazon connect as their starting point. But then, you know, continuously innovating. And so starting to use things like Lex to be able to deliver a chat box function, Um, in the in the US, for example, one of our partners, Smartronix, was able to automate the welfare and social care systems for a number of different states to the point now where 90 plus percent of those calls get initially handled, satisfied using a chat bots, which frees up agents the deal, you know, with the more difficult inbound calls that they get. >>I gotta ask you, where do we go from here? What's next for these organizations? Post Covad World. You know, if we're sitting at a cocktail party was sitting down having dinner or where he talking remotely here, how would you? How would you explain to me what's what's next? Where do we go from here? And how do organizations take that next post co vid recovery and growth? What's your take? >>And John? I think that's a fantastic question to ask. Let me tell you what we learn from our customers every day because we see them try and do new things. If I had to take my sort of crystal ball, I think we're in version one of figuring out How do we work in this new environment? I think there's a couple of key things that we're going to see. Number one. Um, resilience and continuity of service is not gonna be optional. Everybody is coming to expect that government care, not for profits. Education is going to be able to seamlessly continue to deliver the core services irrespective of these world events or emergencies on B C customers. Now you know, really getting that right. It used to take. You talked about it? Um, heck, you couldn't get a system up and running in 19 days. You'd be lucky if you cut a purchase order in 19 days and citizens and constituents that aren't going to accept that anymore, right? That's one big, uh, change that I think is with us. And we'll keep on driving cloud adoption. I think the next one is how do we start putting the pieces together in ways that make some of this invisible and an example? Um, you know, kind of starts with that with that example in the US with partner that was building systems to help, uh, welfare and social care call centers operate smoother. But if you think about the range of AWS services and the building blocks that customers have, we'll find customers starting to create that virtual experience in aversion to dot away where they tie the contact center into chat box and into transcription. Like, for instance, being able to have a conversation with the parents and using comprehend medical actually get a medically accurate transcription. So the doctor can focus on that patient interaction and not on actually data captured, right, and then if that patient asks. Well, g Doc, could you give me more information about, you know, X y z, uh, medication, or about what a course of treatment sounds like? Instead of tying up the doctors time, you could go and use a tool like Amazon Polly to then go text to speech and give all of that further rich information to that citizen. Um e think some of them things. Same scenarios, right? How do we go from this? This very fast version one dot response to a a mawr immersive, less tech evident capability that strings these things together that to meet kind of unique use cases or unique needs. >>Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think you know the 19 days. Yeah, I'm blown away by that. But I think you know, we thought about agility. That was a cloud term. Being more agile with your code business. Agility has come on the scene and then with business agility you have I call I call business latency. Andi, you went from years to months, months, two days. And I think now, as you get into the decks versions, it's days, two hours, hours, two minutes, hours two seconds Because when you look at the scale of the cloud some of things we were talking what's going on? Space force and globally around with space Leighton See, technically and business late and see this is the new dynamic and it's gonna be automation. Ai these air. This is the new reality. I think co vid points that out. Uh, what's your reaction to that? And give a final message to the AWS international community out there on on how to get through this and what you guys are doing? >>Yeah, John, I think your observation is you know that increasingly, uh, there needs to be a connectedness between the services that thes public sector customers deliver on dso Um, that connectedness can be in terms of making sure that a citizen who eyes on their life journey doesn't need to continuously explain to government where they're at. But rather, government learns how to create secure, scalable data stores so that so that they understand the journey of the citizen and can provide help through that journey. Eso it becomes mawr citizen centric. I think another example is in the entire healthcare arena where what we have found is that the ability thio to securely collaborate on very complex problems and complex data sets? Uh, like like genomes, um is increasingly important on DSO. I think what you'll find is you'll find we're seeing it today, right? With customers like, uh, Genomics England and the UK Bio Bank were there, in fact, creating these secure collaboration spaces so that the best researchers can work against these very important data sets in a secure, yet trusted collaboration environment. So I think we're seeing much more of that on I would say The third thing that we're probably learning from our customers is just how important that skills and workforce pieces. Um, with the accelerated pace, we continue to see pressure on smart skills, and resource is that our customers need. Fortunately, we've got a great global partner ecosystem, Um, but you'll see us continuing to push that forward as a zone agenda that will help customers with eso. I guess my parting comment would be how could it not be? I hope that the customers that attend the summit are from all over the world. I hope they find something that's useful to them in pursuing their mission and in their journey to the cloud. And John, I just This is always a pleasure to join the Cube. Thanks very much for the time today. Thank >>you, Max. Great. Call out. Just I'll call it out. One more time to amplify the learnings in the workforce development starting younger and younger. The path to get proficiency is quickly. You could be a cloud computing cybersecurity application, modern application development, all hot areas. Uh, the new playbook is cloud. It's all there online. And, of course, Max. Global footprint with the regions, the world has changed, and it's gonna be pretty busy. Time for you. We'll be covering it. Thanks for coming on. >>That's great. Thanks, John. >>Okay, I'm John. Free with the Cube. You're watching any of US? Public sector summit, The international online event. I'm John. Hard to keep your host. Thank you for watching

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California, about social impact, transforming teaching and learning with Cloud technology we've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, we're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems, they're today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally, and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent we'll start with you Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >> Thank you, thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they're always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting, delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders, and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story. >> Thank you so much for the question. So actually my co-founder was invited to speak at an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly you need knowledge and how do you get knowledge well through education. So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not while, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se, from UN, education, and perhaps I'm biased, because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading, and everyone has a smartphone and (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. >> You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning for questions that are nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, okay, you got the idea, you're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So for us, we know education technology is not new, right. And education games are not new, but before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) devices, and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. so with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we work on, certainly with it. >> Yeah, and then a motivated community, is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, it is three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how are we going to make this work And so we've.. We have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine said, you know, it needs to be on the Cloud because if it's on the Cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so, the Cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well obviously there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the Cloud, to make better algorithm and better training. >> (indistinct) to come back to both of you on the AI question. I think that's super important. Vincent I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before COVID and after COVID, there's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation is more channels, more data, the more engagement, how are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >> So there're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the Cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right, We will talk about speed, the agility of the Cloud, and that's why the Cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open and that's where education technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >> Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the Cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach. Like in fact, there's a, there's a joke here in the United States so with everyone at home the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So Cloud solves that one, you guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that are powered by the Cloud. And a lot of them are powered by the AWS Cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia, or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, you know, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games you're already using and a consumer of the Cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of top computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is, want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on Cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear Cloud strategy, this is the time don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've got to get your solutions. You're born in the Cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset, Janine, we'll start with you. >> So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem. And being able to leverage on Cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective. And how do we get people motivated and all those sort of great things leveraging on game mechanics, social network, and incentives. And then while we do that on the Cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves, everything to AWS Cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and has organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other, even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID we had to really do our best to convince them until (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, you know, we appreciate this opportunity and also we want to help people realize that in order to.. By adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's, what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and, there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform, as it is an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called Hoax Or Not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 25 million people. So that became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the Federal Government of Indonesia to talk about (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, it's horizontally scalable, it's network graph. So you can learn, share about news. And this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo, your competitive strategy. You're out there now, you got the COVID world. How are you competing? How's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept obviously is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with AI, you know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big pot in school, but when you're an adult you learn and, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and, and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against Ed Tech. And often when we talk to other Ed Tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really John, what we competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the Cloud gives you speed. And your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> Absolutely. >> Vincent I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching okay and hear about Amazon. They know the history, they know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the Cloud. You get big pay when you're successful, love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) from the Government of Gambia, you know, so how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. >> Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. I think, at the regions too. So the regions do help. I love we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our Cloud Hugo, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, office hour every week. Like you said, Janine with, your tech team talking to a Cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And, you know, on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. >> You know, that's a great point. The AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and education as well, healthcare, how's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. >> John I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS, we have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market, as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver.. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work. And in delivering this impact to society. >> The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and the folks at AWS for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you for having us >> thanks John >> Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual we're remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic you're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. 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(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)