>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. We're here in Washington, D.C. for live coverage of theCUBE here at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is the re-invent for the global public sector. Technically they do a summit but it's really more of a very focused celebration and informational sessions with customers from Amazon Web Services, GovCloud, and also international, except China, different world. John Furrier, Dave Vellante here for our third year covering AWS Public Sector Summit and again our next guest is Max Peterson, the Vice President of International Sales Worldwide for public sector data, Max, good to see you, thanks for coming back. >> It's good to see you again, John, thank you. >> So, we saw you at dinner last night, great VIP Teresa Carlson dinner last night, it's a who's who in Washington, D.C., but also international global public sector. >> Absolutely. >> And so, I want to get your thoughts on this, because AWS is not just in D.C. for GovCloud, there's a global framework here. What's goin' on, what's your take on how this cloud is disrupting the digital nations, and obviously here at home in D.C.? >> Well, John, so first of all, I love your description of this as a celebration, because really that's one of the things that we do, is we celebrate customer success, and so when you look at AWS around the world, we've got customers that are delivering solutions for citizens, new solutions for healthcare, a great solution to education all around the world. In Europe, we serve all those customers from London, Ireland, Germany, Frankfurt, Paris, all open regions, and we're bringing two new regions that we've announced, in the Middle East, which is an exciting part of the Europe, Middle East, and Africa business, and then also up in the Nordics, with Sweden. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa, it's the acronym for essentially international. Huge growth, obviously Europe is a mature set of countries, and it has its own set of issues, but in the Middle East and outside of Europe there's a huge growing middle class of digital culture. >> Yes. >> You're seeing everything from cryptocurrency booming, blockchain, you're seeing kind of the financial industries changing, obviously mobile impact, you got a new revolution going on with digital. You guys have to kind of thread the needle on that. What are you guys doing to support those regions? Obviously, you got to invest, got GDP always in the headlines >> Right. >> Recently, that's Europe's issue, and globally, but you got Europe, and you got outside of Europe. Two different growth strategies, how is AWS investing, what are some of the things you guys are doing? >> Sure, let me try and get all of those questions >> (laughs) Just start them one at a time >> That was very good, yeah. So, let's do the invest and grow piece. Digital skills are critical, and that's one of the challenges with the overall digital transformation, and, by the way, that's not just EMEA, that's all around the world, right? Including the U.S., and so we're doing a lot of things to try to address the digital skills requirement, a program that we've got called AWS Educate just yesterday announced the Cloud Academy Course. So, career colleges, technical colleges will be able to teach a two-year course specifically on cloud, right? For traditional university education, we provide this thing called AWS Educate. We, in the UK, we started a program over 18 months ago called Restart, where we focus on military leavers, spouses, and disadvantaged youth through the prince's trust, and we're training a thousand people a year on AWS cloud computing and digital skills. Taking them, in this case, out of military, or from less advantaged backgrounds and bringin' 'em into tech. And then, finally in April of this year, at our Brussels public sector summit, a celebration of customers in EMEA, we announced that we're going to be training 100,000 people across Europe, Middle East and Africa, with a combination of all of these programs, so skills is absolutely top in terms of getting people on to the cloud, right, and having them be digitally savvy, but the other part that you talked about is really the generational and cultural changes. People expect service when they touch a button on the phone. And that's not how most governments work, it's not how a lot of educational institutions work, and so we're helping them. And so, literally now, across the region, we've got governments that are delivering online citizen services at the touch of a button. Big organizations, like the UK Home Office, like the Department for Wealth and Pensions, like the Ministry of Justice. And then, I think the other thing that you asked about was GDPR. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Am I covering all the bases? >> You're doing good Max. >> You keep it rollin'. >> You're a clipping machine, here. >> So, GDPR might be thought of as a European phenomenon, but my personal opinion is that's going to set the direction for personal data privacy around the world, and we're seeing the implementation happen in Europe, but we're seeing also customers in the Middle East, in Asia, down in Latin America going, "Hey, that's a good example." And I think you'll see people adopt it, much like people have adopted the NIST definition of cloud computing. Why re-invent it? If there's something that's good, let's adopt it and go, and Amazon understood that that was coming, although some people act like it's a surprise. >> Yeah. >> Did your e-mail box get flooded with e-mail? >> Oh, Gosh. >> God, tons Well the day >> Day before. >> Yes! >> (laughs) >> Yes, day before! Acting like this was, like a surprise. It started two years before, so Amazon actually started our planning so that when the day arrived for it to be effective, AWS services were GDPR compliant so that customers could build GDPR compliant solutions on top of the cloud. >> So, I mean generally I know there's a lot of detail there, but what does that mean, GDPR compliant? 'Cause I like having my data in the cloud with GDPR, 'cause I can push a lot of the compliance onto my cloud provider, so what does that really mean, Max? >> Yeah, well fundamentally, GDPR gives people control of their information. An example is the right to be forgotten, right? Many companies, good companies were already doing that. This makes it a requirement across the entire EU, right? And so, what it means to be compliant is that companies, governments, people need to have a data architecture. They really have to understand where their data is, what information they're collecting, and they have to make the systems follow the rules for privacy protection. >> So how does AWS specifically help me as a customer? >> Right, so our customers around Europe, in fact, around the world build their solutions on top of Amazon. The Amazon services do things that are required by GDPR like encryption, alright? And so, you're supposed to encrypt and protect private data. In Amazon, all you do is click a button, and no matter where you store it, it's encrypted and protected. So a lot of organizations struggled to implement some of these basic protections. Amazon's done it forever, and under GDPR, we've organized those so that all of our services act the same. >> Max, this brings up security questions, 'cause, you know obviously we hear a lot of people use the cloud, as an example, for getting things stood up quickly, >> Yep. >> Whether it's an application in the past, and then say a data warehouse, you got redshifts, and kinesis, and at one point was the fastest growing service, as Andy Jassy said, now that's been replaced by a bunch of other stuff. You got SageMaker around the corner, >> SageMaker's awesome. >> So you got that ability, but also data is not just a data warehouse question. It's really a central value proposition, whether you're talking about in the cloud or IOT, so data becomes the center of the value proposition. How are you guys ensuring security? What are some of the conversations, because it certainly differs on a country by country basis. You got multiple regions developing, established and developing new ones for AWS. How do you look at that? How do you talk to customers and say, "Okay, here's our strategy, and here's what we're doing to secure your data, here's how you can go faster (laughs), keep innovating, because you know they don't want to go slower, because it's complicated. To do a GDPR overhaul, for some customers, is a huge task. How do you guys make it faster, while securing the data? >> Yeah, so first of all, your observation about data, having gravity, is absolutely true. What we've struggled with, with government customers, with healthcare and commercial enterprise, is people have their data locked up in little silos. So the first thing that people are doing on the cloud, is they're taking all that and putting it into a data warehouse, a data repository. Last night we heard from NASA, and from Blue Origin about the explosion in data, and in fact, what they said, and we believe, is that you're going to start bringing your compute to the data because the amount of information that you've got, when you've got billions of sensors, IOT, billions of these devices that are sending information or receiving information, you have to have a cloud strategy to store all that information. And then secondly, you have to have a cloud compute strategy to actually make use of that information. You can't download it anymore. If you're going to operate in real time, you've got to run that machine learning, right, in real time, against the data that's coming in, and then you've got to be able to provide the information back to an application or to people that makes use of it. So you just can't do it in-house anymore. >> You mentioned the talk last night as part of the Earth and Science Program, which you guys did, which by the way, I thought was fabulous. For the folks watching, they had a special inaugural event, before this event around earth and space, Blue Origin was there, Jet Propulsion Lab, much of the NASA guys, a lot of customers. But the interesting thing he said also, was is that they look at the data as a key part, and then he called himself a CTO, Chief Toy Officer. And he goes, "you got to play with the toys before they become too old," but that was a methodology that he was talking about how they get involved in using the tooling. Tooling becomes super important. You guys have a set of services, AWS, Amazon Web Services, which essentially are tools. >> Yeah. >> Collectively tools, you know global, you end up generalizing it, but this is important because now you can mix and match. Talk about how that's changed the customer mindset and how they roll out technology because they got to play, they got to experiment, as Andy Jassy would say, but also, also put the tools into production. How is it changing the face of your customer base? >> Sure, well, one of the things that customers love, is the selection of tools, but one of the most important things we actually do with customers, is help them to solve their problems. We have a professional service organization, we have what we call Envision Engineering, which is a specialized team that goes in and develops prototypes with customers, so that they understand how they can use these different tools to actually get their work done. One quick example: in the UK, the NHS had to implement a new program for people calling in to understand health benefits. And they could've done this in a very traditional fashion, it would've taken months and months to set up the call center and get everything rolling. Fortunately, they worked with one of our partners, and they understood that they could use new speech and language processing tools like Lex, and Amazon's in-the-cloud call center tools, like Connect. In two weeks, they were able to develop the application that handled 42% of the inbound call volume entirely automated, with speech and text processing, so that the other 52% could go to live operators where they had a more complex problem. That was prototyped in two weeks, it was implemented in three more weeks, a total of five weeks from concept to operation of a call center receiving thousands and thousands of inbound calls on the cloud. >> Max, can you paint a picture of the EMEA customer base, how it sort of compares to the US, the profile? I mean, obviously here, in the United States, you got a healthy mix of customers. You got startups, you're announcing enterprises, you got IOT use cases. I imagine a lot of diversity in EMEA, but how does it compare with the US, how would you describe it? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah sure, candidly, we see the same exact patterns all around the world. Customers are in different stages of readiness, but across Europe, we have central governments that are bringing online, mission systems to the cloud. I mentioned Home Office, I mentioned DWP, I mentioned Her Majesty Revenue and Customs, HMRC. They're bringing real mission systems to the cloud now because they laid the right foundations, right? They've got a cloud native policy, and that's what directs government, that says stop building legacy systems and start building for the future by using the cloud. Educational institutions across the board are using AWS. Science and research, like the European Space Agency is using AWS, so we see, really, just the same pattern going on. Some areas of the world are newer to the cloud, so in the Middle East, we're seeing that sort of startup phase, where startup companies are gettin' onto the cloud. Some of 'em are very big. Careem is a billion dollar startup running on AWS, right. But we're helping startups just do the basics on the cloud. In Bahrain, which is a small country in the Middle East, they realized the transformative opportunity with cloud computing, and they decided to take the lead. They worked with AWS, they produced a national cloud policy, their CIO said we will move to the cloud, and that's key. Leadership is absolutely key. And then they put in place a framework, and they very systematically identified those applications that were ready, and they moved those first. Then they tackled the ones that weren't quite ready, and they moved those. They moved 450 applications in a matter of three months, to the cloud, but it was by having a focused program, top-level leadership, the right policy, and then we provided technical resources to help them do it. >> Max, I want to get one last question before the time comes up, but I want to put you on the spot here. >> Oh good. >> In the United States, Amazon Web Services public sector has really kind of changed the game. You saw the CIA deal that you guys did years ago, the Department of Defense is all in the news, obviously it's changing the ecosystem. How is that dynamic happening in Europe? You said the patterns are the same. Take a minute to just quickly describe, what's going on in the ecosystem? What's the partner profile look like? You've got a great partner ecosystem, and there are different partners. You mentioned Bahrain, Digital Nation, changing the game. You guys seem to attract kind of a new guard, a new kind of thinking, partners. What is the ecosystem partnerships look like for you guys, internationally, and is there the same dynamic going on that's happening in the US with the CIA, and DOD leaders around changing the narrative, changing the game, with technology? >> Sure, good questions. We wouldn't be able to deliver the solutions that we deliver to customers without our partner ecosystem. And sometimes, they're small, born in the cloud partners, the same sort of phenomenon that we have in the US. The example with the National Health Service was delivered by a expert consulting partner called Arcus Global, about a hundred person strong consulting organization that just knows cloud and makes it their business. And we see those throughout Europe, Middle East, and into Africa. We have our large global partners, Capgemini, Accenture, and then I think the other thing that's really important, is the regional partners. So what's happening is we're seeing those regional partners, partners like Everee, or Dee-Ecto, or SCC. We're seeing them now realize that their customers want to be agile, they want to be innovative, they want to be fast, and it doesn't hurt that they're going to save some money. And so we're seeing them change their business model, to adopt cloud computing, and that's the tipping point. When that middle, that trusted middle of partners, starts to adopt cloud and help the customers, that's when it really swings the other direction. >> It's great growth, and new growth brings new partners, new profiles, new brands, new names, and specialty is key. Max, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you taking the time. International, we're riding the wave of home sector with CUBE here in the US, soon we'll see you in some international summits. >> I'm looking forward, >> Alright. >> John, Dave, it was awesome to talk to you. >> Thanks Max. >> Alright, we are here live in Washington, D.C., for Amazon Web Services, AWS, Public Sector Summit 2018, we are in Washington, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, and also Stu Miniman is here, the whole CUBE team is here, unpacking the phenomenon that is AWS, rocking the government and digital nations around the world. We're back with more, after this short break. (upbeat techno music)