(light music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's been here all week. John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Don't forget to check out siliconangle.com, thecube.net. This is day four, our last segment, winding down. MWC23, super excited to be here. Wayne Duso, friend of theCUBE, VP of engineering from products at AWS is here with Iyad Tarazi, who's the CEO of Federated Wireless. Gents, welcome. >> Good to be here. >> Nice to see you. >> I'm so stoked, Wayne, that we connected before the show. We texted, I'm like, "You're going to be there. I'm going to be there. You got to come on theCUBE." So thank you so much for making time, and thank you for bringing a customer partner, Federated Wireless. Everybody knows AWS. Iyad, tell us about Federated Wireless. >> We're a software and services company out of Arlington, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC, and we're really focused on this new technology called Shared Spectrum and private wireless for 5G. Think of it as enterprises consuming 5G, the way they used to consume WiFi. >> Is that unrestricted spectrum, or? >> It is managed, organized, interference free, all through cloud platforms. That's how we got to know AWS. We went and got maybe about 300 products from AWS to make it work. Quite sophisticated, highly available, and pristine spectrum worth billions of dollars, but available for people like you and I, that want to build enterprises, that want to make things work. Also carriers, cable companies everybody else that needs it. It's really a new revolution for everyone. >> And that's how you, it got introduced to AWS. Was that through public sector, or just the coincidence that you're in DC >> No, I, well, yes. The center of gravity in the world for spectrum is literally Arlington. You have the DOD spectrum people, you have spectrum people from National Science Foundation, DARPA, and then you have commercial sector, and you have the FCC just an Uber ride away. So we went and found the scientists that are doing all this work, four or five of them, Virginia Tech has an office there too, for spectrum research for the Navy. Come together, let's have a party and make a new model. >> So I asked this, I'm super excited to have you on theCUBE. I sat through the keynotes on Monday. I saw Satya Nadella was in there, Thomas Kurian there was no AWS. I'm like, where's AWS? AWS is everywhere. I mean, you guys are all over the show. I'm like, "Hey, where's the number one cloud?" So you guys have made a bunch of announcements at the show. Everybody's talking about the cloud. What's going on for you guys? >> So we are everywhere, and you know, we've been coming to this show for years. But this is really a year that we can demonstrate that what we've been doing for the IT enterprise, IT people for 17 years, we're now bringing for telcos, you know? For years, we've been, 17 years to be exact, we've been bringing the cloud value proposition, whether it's, you know, cost efficiencies or innovation or scale, reliability, security and so on, to these enterprise IT folks. Now we're doing the same thing for telcos. And so whether they want to build in region, in a local zone, metro area, on-prem with an outpost, at the edge with Snow Family, or with our IoT devices. And no matter where they want to start, if they start in the cloud and they want to move to the edge, or they start in the edge and they want to bring the cloud value proposition, like, we're demonstrating all of that is happening this week. And, and very much so, we're also demonstrating that we're bringing the same type of ecosystem that we've built for enterprise IT. We're bringing that type of ecosystem to the telco companies, with CSPs, with the ISP vendors. We've seen plenty of announcements this week. You know, so on and so forth. >> So what's different, is it, the names are different? Is it really that simple, that you're just basically taking the cloud model into telco, and saying, "Hey, why do all this undifferentiated heavy lifting when we can do it for you? Don't worry about all the plumbing." Is it really that simple? I mean, that straightforward. >> Well, simple is probably not what I'd say, but we can make it straightforward. >> Conceptually. >> Conceptually, yes. Conceptually it is the same. Because if you think about, firstly, we'll just take 5G for a moment, right? The 5G folks, if you look at the architecture for 5G, it was designed to run on a cloud architecture. It was designed to be a set of services that you could partition, and run in different places, whether it's in the region or at the edge. So in many ways it is sort of that simple. And let me give you an example. Two things, the first one is we announced integrated private wireless on AWS, which allows enterprise customers to come to a portal and look at the industry solutions. They're not worried about their network, they're worried about solving a problem, right? And they can come to that portal, they can find a solution, they can find a service provider that will help them with that solution. And what they end up with is a fully validated offering that AWS telco SAS have actually put to its paces to make sure this is a real thing. And whether they get it from a telco, and, and quite frankly in that space, it's SIs such as Federated that actually help our customers deploy those in private environments. So that's an example. And then added to that, we had a second announcement, which was AWS telco network builder, which allows telcos to plan, deploy, and operate at scale telco network capabilities on the cloud, think about it this way- >> As a managed service? >> As a managed service. So think about it this way. And the same way that enterprise IT has been deploying, you know, infrastructure as code for years. Telco network builder allows the telco folks to deploy telco networks and their capabilities as code. So it's not simple, but it is pretty straightforward. We're making it more straightforward as we go. >> Jump in Dave, by the way. He can geek out if you want. >> Yeah, no, no, no, that's good, that's good, that's good. But actually, I'm going to ask an AWS question, but I'm going to ask Iyad the AWS question. So when we, when I hear the word cloud from Wayne, cloud, AWS, typically in people's minds that denotes off-premises. Out there, AWS data center. In the telecom space, yes, of course, in the private 5G space, we're talking about a little bit of a different dynamic than in the public 5G space, in terms of the physical infrastructure. But regardless at the edge, there are things that need to be physically at the edge. Do you feel that AWS is sufficiently, have they removed the H word, hybrid, from the list of bad words you're not allowed to say? 'Cause there was a point in time- >> Yeah, of course. >> Where AWS felt that their growth- >> They'll even say multicloud today, (indistinct). >> No, no, no, no, no. But there was a period of time where, rightfully so, AWS felt that the growth trajectory would be supported solely by net new things off premises. Now though, in this space, it seems like that hybrid model is critical. Do you see AWS being open to the hybrid nature of things? >> Yeah, they're, absolutely. I mean, just to explain from- we're a services company and a solutions company. So we put together solutions at the edge, a smart campus, smart agriculture, a deployment. One of our biggest deployment is a million square feet warehouse automation project with the Marine Corps. >> That's bigger than the Fira. >> Oh yeah, it's bigger, definitely bigger than, you know, a small section of here. It's actually three massive warehouses. So yes, that is the edge. What the cloud is about is that massive amount of efficiency has happened by concentrating applications in data centers. And that is programmability, that is APIs that is solutions, that is applications that can run on it, where people know how to do it. And so all that efficiency now is being ported in a box called the edge. What AWS is doing for us is bringing all the business and technical solutions they had into the edge. Some of the data may send back and forth, but that's actually a smaller piece of the value for us. By being able to bring an AWS package at the edge, we're bringing IoT applications, we're bringing high speed cameras, we're able to integrate with the 5G public network. We're able to bring in identity and devices, we're able to bring in solutions for students, embedded laptops. All of these things that you can do much much faster and cheaper if you are able to tap in the 4,000, 5,000 partners and all the applications and all the development and all the models that AWS team did. By being able to bring that efficiency to the edge why reinvent that? And then along with that, there are partners that you, that help do integration. There are development done to make it hardened, to make the data more secure, more isolated. All of these things will contribute to an edge that truly is a carbon copy of the data center. >> So Wayne, it's AWS, Regardless of where the compute, networking and storage physically live, it's AWS. Do you think that the term cloud will sort of drift away from usage? Because if, look, it's all IT, in this case it's AWS and federated IT working together. How, what's your, it's sort of a obscure question about cloud, because cloud is so integrated. >> You Got this thing about cloud, it's just IT. >> I got thing about cloud too, because- >> You and Larry Ellison. >> Because it's no, no, no, I'm, yeah, well actually there's- >> There's a lot of IT that's not cloud, just say that okay. >> Now, a lot of IT that isn't cloud, but I would say- >> But I'll (indistinct) cloud is an IT tool, and you see AWS obviously with the Snow fill in the blank line of products and outpost type stuff. Fair to say that you're, doesn't matter where it is, it could be AWS if it's on the edge, right? >> Well, you know, everybody wants to define the cloud as what it may have been when it started. But if you look at what it was when it started and what it is today, it is different. But the ability to bring the experience, the AWS experience, the services, the operational experience and all the things that Iyad had been talking about from the region all to all the way to, you know, the IoT device, if you would, that entire continuum. And it doesn't matter where you start. Like if you start in region and you need to bring your value to other places because your customers are asking you to do so, we're enabling that experience where you need to bring it. If you started at the edge, and- but you want to build cloud value, you know, whether it's again, cost efficiency, scalability, AI, ML or analytics into those capabilities, you can start at the edge with the same APIs, with the same service, the same capabilities, and you can build that value in right from the get go. You don't build this bifurcation or many separations and try to figure out how do I glue them together? There is no gluing together. So if you think of cloud as being elastic, scalable flexible, where you can drive innovation, it's the same exact model on the continuum. And you can start at either end, it's up to you as a customer. >> And I think if, the key to me is the ecosystem. I mean, if you can do for this industry what you've done for the technology- enterprise technology business from an ecosystem standpoint, you know everybody talks about flywheel, but that gives you like the massive flywheel. I don't know what the ratio is, but it used to be for every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 is spent in the ecosystem. I've never heard similar ratios in the AWS ecosystem, but it's, I go to reinvent and I'm like, there's some dollars being- >> That's a massive ecosystem. >> (indistinct). >> And then, and another thing I'll add is Jose Maria Alvarez, who's the chairman of Telefonica, said there's three pillars of the future-ready telco, low latency, programmable networks, and he said cloud and edge. So they recognizing cloud and edge, you know, low latency means you got to put the compute and the data, the programmable infrastructure was invented by Amazon. So what's the strategy around the telco edge? >> So, you know, at the end, so those are all great points. And in fact, the programmability of the network was a big theme in the show. It was a huge theme. And if you think about the cloud, what is the cloud? It's a set of APIs against a set of resources that you use in whatever way is appropriate for what you're trying to accomplish. The network, the telco network becomes a resource. And it could be described as a resource. We, I talked about, you know, network as in code, right? It's same infrastructure in code, it's telco infrastructure as code. And that code, that infrastructure, is programmable. So this is really, really important. And in how you build the ecosystem around that is no different than how we built the ecosystem around traditional IT abstractions. In fact, we feel that really the ecosystem is the killer app for 5G. You know, the killer app for 4G, data of sorts, right? We started using data beyond simple SMS messages. So what's the killer app for 5G? It's building this ecosystem, which includes the CSPs, the ISVs, all of the partners that we bring to the table that can drive greater value. It's not just about cost efficiency. You know, you can't save your way to success, right? At some point you need to generate greater value for your customers, which gives you better business outcomes, 'cause you can monetize them, right? The ecosystem is going to allow everybody to monetize 5G. >> 5G is like the dot connector of all that. And then developers come in on top and create new capabilities >> And how different is that than, you know, the original smartphones? >> Yeah, you're right. So what do you guys think of ChatGPT? (indistinct) to Amazon? Amazon turned the data center into an API. It's like we're visioning this world, and I want to ask that technologist, like, where it's turning resources into human language interfaces. You know, when you see that, you play with ChatGPT at all, or I know you guys got your own. >> So I won't speak directly to ChatGPT. >> No, don't speak from- >> But if you think about- >> Generative AI. >> Yeah generative AI is important. And, and we are, and we have been for years, in this space. Now you've been talking to AWS for a long time, and we often don't talk about things we don't have yet. We don't talk about things that we haven't brought to market yet. And so, you know, you'll often hear us talk about something, you know, a year from now where others may have been talking about it three years earlier, right? We will be talking about this space when we feel it's appropriate for our customers and our partners. >> You have talked about it a little bit, Adam Selipsky went on an interview with myself and John Furrier in October said you watch, you know, large language models are going to be enormous and I know you guys have some stuff that you're working on there. >> It's, I'll say it's exciting. >> Yeah, I mean- >> Well proof point is, Siri is an idiot compared to Alexa. (group laughs) So I trust one entity to come up with something smart. >> I have conversations with Alexa and Siri, and I won't judge either one. >> You don't need, you could be objective on that one. I definitely have a preference. >> Are the problems you guys solving in this space, you know, what's unique about 'em? What are they, can we, sort of, take some examples here (indistinct). >> Sure, the main theme is that the enterprise is taking control. They want to have their own networks. They want to focus on specific applications, and they want to build them with a skeleton crew. The one IT person in a warehouse want to be able to do it all. So what's unique about them is that they're now are a lot of automation on robotics, especially in warehousing environment agriculture. There simply aren't enough people in these industries, and that required precision. And so you need all that integration to make it work. People also want to build these networks as they want to control it. They want to figure out how do we actually pick this team and migrate it. Maybe just do the front of the house first. Maybe it's a security team that monitor the building, maybe later on upgrade things that use to open doors and close doors and collect maintenance data. So that ability to pick what you want to do from a new processors is really important. And then you're also seeing a lot of public-private network interconnection. That's probably the undercurrent of this show that haven't been talked about. When people say private networks, they're also talking about something called neutral host, which means I'm going to build my own network, but I want it to work, my Verizon (indistinct) need to work. There's been so much progress, it's not done yet. So much progress about this bring my own network concept, and then make sure that I'm now interoperating with the public network, but it's my domain. I can create air gaps, I can create whatever security and policy around it. That is probably the power of 5G. Now take all of these tiny networks, big networks, put them all in one ecosystem. Call it the Amazon marketplace, call it the Amazon ecosystem, that's 5G. It's going to be tremendous future. >> What does the future look like? We're going to, we just determined we're going to be orchestrating the network through human language, okay? (group laughs) But seriously, what's your vision for the future here? You know, both connectivity and cloud are on on a continuum. It's, they've been on a continuum forever. They're going to continue to be on a continuum. That being said, those continuums are coming together, right? They're coming together to bring greater value to a greater set of customers, and frankly all of us. So, you know, the future is now like, you know, this conference is the future, and if you look at what's going on, it's about the acceleration of the future, right? What we announced this week is really the acceleration of listening to customers for the last handful of years. And, we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to bring greater value in the form of solutions. And that's what I want to pick up on from the prior question. It's not about the network, it's not about the cloud, it's about the solutions that we can provide the customers where they are, right? And if they're on their mobile phone or they're in their factory floor, you know, they're looking to accelerate their business. They're looking to accelerate their value. They're looking to create greater safety for their employees. That's what we can do with these technologies. So in fact, when we came out with, you know, our announcement for integrated private wireless, right? It really was about industry solutions. It really isn't about, you know, the cloud or the network. It's about how you can leverage those technologies, that continuum, to deliver you value. >> You know, it's interesting you say that, 'cause again, when we were interviewing Adam Selipsky, everybody, you know, all journalists analysts want to know, how's Adam Selipsky going to be different from Andy Jassy, what's the, what's he going to do to Amazon to change? And he said, listen, the real answer is Amazon has changed. If Andy Jassy were here, we'd be doing all, you know, pretty much the same things. Your point about 17 years ago, the cloud was S3, right, and EC2. Now it's got to evolve to be solutions. 'Cause if that's all you're selling, is the bespoke services, then you know, the future is not as bright as the past has been. And so I think it's key to look for what are those outcomes or solutions that customers require and how you're going to meet 'em. And there's a lot of challenges. >> You continue to build value on the value that you've brought, and you don't lose sight of why that value is important. You carry that value proposition up the stack, but the- what you're delivering, as you said, becomes maybe a bigger or or different. >> And you are getting more solution oriented. I mean, you're not hardcore solutions yet, but we're seeing more and more of that. And that seems to be a trend. We've even seen in the database world, making things easier, connecting things. Not really an abstraction layer, which is sort of antithetical to your philosophy, but it creates a similar outcome in terms of simplicity. Yeah, you're smiling 'cause you guys always have a different angle, you know? >> Yeah, we've had this conversation. >> It's right, it's, Jassy used to say it's okay to be misunderstood. >> That's Right. For a long time. >> Yeah, right, guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. I'm so glad we could make this happen. >> It's always good. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, Dave Nicholson, for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, John Furrier in the Palo Alto studio. We're here at the Fira, wrapping out MWC23. Keep it right there, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>Hello, and welcome to this special presentation. This is the cube on cloud startups, our special event of Amazon web services, startup showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and excited to be here to talk about the hottest startups around cloud cloud computing data and the future of the enterprise. We've got Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog. Great company, Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. So this is a showcase presentation with AWS showcase startup showcase. You guys are a fast growing startup knowledge graph. We did a video explaining kind of what we did in the cube conversation. Um, really interesting category this, uh, eight hubs cloud startups with you guys. Talk about what you got. Take a minute to explain star dog and what you got. >>Sure. Yeah, here at startup, we are really a knowledge graph platform company. So we help build a knowledge graph for our customers tying together the data inside the organization and with data on the cloud in order for them to be able to find search and understand the context and relationship of all that data within their own organization. So that's really what we try to facilitate and make successful for our customers. >>Awesome. What market are you guys targeting? What's the market opportunity. Can you explain the market space that you're building product value in and what's your focus? >>Sure. Yeah, it's, it's pretty exciting. We do a lot from an industry perspective, we target a lot, uh, life sciences or financial the services, and it just tends to be, those are the ones that are most excited and getting started with this, but we certainly have a much broader set of customers in government or in manufacturing. What we really look for is the horizontal type solution, where you have a lot of systems that you want to tie together, or you want to have that understanding of your data all within context throughout your organization. So anybody struggling with that kind of tying of your data together, whether it's on the cloud or on prem, that's what we really go after >>Disruption. Who are you disrupting as you come into the marketplace? I love Amazon so hot startups because they got an eye clean take on something, but someone usually is being impacted. Who is, who are you guys disrupting as you come into? >>Yeah, a lot of times we find we're disrupting traditional ETL, right? So centralizing of all your data into one big platform, a lot of people have gone down this path of trying to create these large repositories data lakes, data warehouses. Yeah. We try to provide the additional value on top of them by not forcing you to continue to invest in moving and centralizing all your data together, but connecting it and providing context, um, while leaving and leveraging the mid worries. >>Awesome. Cause there's a big market opportunity as data warehouses becomes modernized and horizontal control planes and cloud computing is data is the key competitive advantage. Uh, great disruption. Great opportunity. So let's talk about the business star dog. What do you guys, uh, talk about the company, uh, where the headquarters is? The, how many employees what's the business model? How do you guys make money? Yeah, >>Well, a headquarters is always a little bit tricky nowadays is we were also distributed, but officially it is in Arlington Virginia. Uh, although we are all over the globe, uh, mostly in the United States and Europe, certainly as we look at, uh, how, how do we go to market and what do we do related to that? We have a subscription-based model where we help our customers get started usually small, um, by leveraging a package that they can run either on prem or in the cloud or directly from the AWS marketplace and letting them connect to the data and then growing out as they grow within their organization, larger, more interplay enterprise wide type of installations. So that's how we kind of go after it, uh, from, from our company perspective. >>So your go to market then for the company, is it bottoms up organic growth, kind of a freemium get in there? Or is it kind of a mid, mid tier or how do you guys look at that, that entry? >>It's a great question. That's exactly right. A lot of times we do start with a freemium type of model. We do have free trials and use usability to get started very quickly without having to talk to a salesperson or without having to pay up front in order to see the value, because we want you to be able to understand the value you're going to get out of our platform right off the bat and get started. Then after you've really tried it out and you see where it could apply within your organization, we help make it enterprise. >>I have to ask you how the business model of SAS, obviously clouds. Great. Are you guys leveraging Amazon web services marketplace at all? >>We are we're on the marketplace today, um, with the, both the free trial, as well as the ability through, you know, private offers to do whole production instances. So we're really excited about being a part of the marketplace. What we found is that sometimes customers want to run on the cloud. Sometimes they want to run on prem, wherever they want to run. We want to be sure that we're there. >>Yeah. Alex, let's pull up that slide on the hybrid, uh, architecture for these guys. So I want to bring this up since you brought up the business model and you talk about hybrid. This is interesting. This gets into the business model and this is kind of transitions into kind of the technology architecture. Could you walk me through this slide, the knowledge graph and the hybrid cloud. Why is this important for you guys and why is it important for customers? >>This is great. Thank you for, uh, for pulling this up. What this is really showing is as we look toward the future, as we really look at how people are deploying knowledge, graphs, and managing their data, we see that one of the big problems they're trying to address is what about cloud, uh, data that's on the cloud would a bit dated it's on prem. Maybe it's in multiple VPCs that you have within the Amazon environment. How do you tie all this together? And we all know that moving data around between all of these zones can be expensive and time consuming and difficult. And so we've come up with an architecture that allows you to run the knowledge, graph an agent of the knowledge graph in each of these zones. And they can all talk to each other and coordinate with each other. So they can see data that exists within that zone and pass it on to the other pieces as required or as needed to minimize your kind of in and out fees. And to leverage that all that data in one, in one place >>I asked you because this comes up a lot in our coverage, um, data mobility, uh, moving data is expensive. Um, how does that impact you guys in customers? A lot of people have been looking at, Hey, you know, the economics of the cloud are phenomenal, but at some point, if you've got a lot of data, you move compute to the data or you kind of think differently, how do you guys look at that? That trend? >>Yeah, that's, that's really our key value prop is people struggle with this. As people try to figure out how do I handle this large amount of data without having to generate all this additional costs about moving it around. We really look about how do I push that compute down to the storage layers, where the data already exists. And so if you think about our product architecture and you know, we, I know we have a slide on how our product is really built and how it's pulled together. When you look at our core core architecture, we have the graph that represents that connected data, but the exciting part of our architecture, what we do differently than everyone else is by allowing you to keep the data in its existing data silos, whether it's applications or repositories documents that you already have out there, we allow you to connect to that data where it is cross zone, whether it's on prem or on the cloud. >>And by leveraging the power of start on the virtualization engine, you can connect that data and be able to represent it from one source without having to move it around. But because we also have a persistence layer that's built into our product, you can really determine where's the best home. Is it data that you're going to use a lot and thereby should be really close to where the query engine is? Or is it something where you want to federate it out and leverage that compute at that storage layer itself? That flexibility is really why our customers come to us and are excited to use, start off. >>That's awesome. Great, great stuff. Love, love. The slides. Love to look at some pictures that describe the architecture both as well as the product. I love how you got the enterprise high-grade applications and then you're integrating with other partners. I think that's a really key, uh, value. And I think if you're not integrating well in this modern era, you probably won't be surviving much longer. It's pretty much a game changer at this point when knows that a question on the technology and product. Now keeping it on this theme. What's your secret sauce. Every company's got a secret sauce. What is star dog's secret sauce? >>Our secret sauce is really how do we coordinate across all of those applications? So if you can imagine you have, you know, Oracle database or Redshift repository, and you're trying to be able to unify that data in real time across those applications. There's a lot of thought and needs to go about how to do that efficiently. You don't want to take all the database from both repositories, move them, all that data into one place and then figure it out. And so our query planner, how do we coordinate across the multiple applications is really what makes us different and special >>On the Symantec modeling that you're doing? Because I see there's a lot of data there. You got to kind of get an understanding context. Um, how do you guys look at reusability metadata on data? This has become a very key point on not just data warehouse, but it's becoming much more about addressability and discoverability in as fast as possible, low latency, uh, with intelligence, this has been a big discussion. How do you guys look at that aspect of the reusability of the data? >>Yeah, it's, it's one of the exciting parts about starting with a semantic graph and then extending into these capabilities around virtualization and reasoning and inference by starting with the semantic graph, we allow you to, you know, incrementally invest in building out your model and then being able to reuse that model as you, as you go through your implementations. Yeah. That's been a, a big failing as people have looked at the analytical movements recently is so many times people spin up a repository, they answer a particular question and they do an absolutely fine job, but then we have your next question. You have to spin up another repository, build more views, re ETL the data. And then the semantic technology is what allows you to create that common understanding and reuse it over and over and over again. And I think it's time for that to hit mainstream. You know, it's been around a while. It's something that has taken some time to get some adoption around, but now that we really have build up awareness around it and we've shelled, the technology can scale the large volumes. Uh, I think it's time to be able to leverage the value that reasonability brings. Yeah. >>One final question on the product and the technology and kind of the architecture is how do you guys connect the dots going forward as more and more edge nodes become available in the network as that architecture of hybrid that we talked earlier about becomes so complex and so connected. I mean, you could have more connectedness than ever before. Um, it's very complex networks graph theory, right? You're talking about a lot of edges and a lot of traversal it's billions and billions of edges. I mean, this is it's complicated. How do you guys create, how do you guys see that unfolding and how and why the star dog remained relevant in that configuration? >>Yeah. And the simple fact is that people need help, right? It can't be that you're going to define all those edges and connections by hand yourself through some systems or keys. It's a great way to get started, but it's not sufficient in order to really get the value out of that graph that you expect. And the ways we do that is twofold. The first bit is really an influencing or reasoning capability. Being able to look at this structure of the data, how it's composed and create connections between that data based on, you know, logical, logical rules. The second is machine learning, right? Machine learning is high. We use things like linear regression algorithms or other types of community detection algorithms in order to build more connections in the data so that you can get really unlock that value that you're looking for. When you're leveraging graph technology, >>A lot of secret sauce here, a lot of technology graph, super exciting. Let's get into the final segment around customer traction and what you guys have seen with customers. Um, what are some of the use cases that are popular and what happens if customers aren't going down this road? What are they missing out on? Um, I mean, it's the classic fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed over right. Are going out of business. I mean, that's, that's motivational at some level, but you know, there are the, do I wait and people who waited on cloud computing by the way were left behind and some never survived. So we're almost in this same dynamic with customers. At some point you got to put the toe in the water, so to speak or get going to take us through some customer examples and use cases where, >>Or this is working. Yeah. I think both of those areas are, are, uh, great ones to hit on. So when you think about what are we missing out on one of our largest customer bases really in pharmaceuticals. Yeah. And they're using this technology in order to find more connections in the data so that they can really decrease the amount of time for getting a drug to market on the research and development. They can look more at leveraging the data they've already connected using related items to be able to accelerate their investments and waiting costs them hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So there are certainly ones where being able to adopt this technology early and get value out of early, really pays off in. And they're not the only ones. That's the only, that's the only the life sciences space. But there's also the idea to use it, as you said, really about what else am I missing out on? >>And the data fabric movement, this movement around, how do I lower the cost in my organization about moving data around creating more ETL jobs, leveraging all these data assets already have that the data fabric movement is the idea of how do we really automate that? How do we accelerate that? How do we make that an easier process so that it just doesn't cost as much to manage all this data in an organization. And I've observed that more and more. We have customers coming to us, really interested in this type of use cases that relates to our technology and they are getting ahead of their competitors by really lowering their, it costs in line to focus on these higher value activities. >>Life of the customers is what for you with, with startup? Why, how do they win? What's the reason why they buy and take the freemium. And when do they convert over? Well, take me through the progression of value. When do they see something and why do they increase their sure. >>Assumption? Yeah. That, I mean, the bottom line is you want to try to get more value out of your data at a lower cost and make it easier and faster to do. And so getting started in a single use case, trying out our free version, representing your data and taking a look at what it could look like under a common model, connecting it up with our virtualization services is a great way to try out the technology and really, you know, put your toe in the water to see is this something that would be a value to organization as you see that value unlock is you really understand that you can leverage these days assets with this lower time to value, you know, days in order to unlock a whole repository and connected to another repository. That's where we love to engage with you and help show you how you can make that successful in a more production environment. >>I like about some of the things you're talking about star dog has kind of that aspirin aspect, but also a growth, um, uh, vitamin E as well, in terms of the value proposition, a lot of companies are overwhelmed with the data, but yet you have this path towards more creation of value through the knowledge graph and reasoning and other other value. When does a customer, and this is kind of comes back to the customers who are out there potentially watching prospects or future customers. When do they know they need to call you guys up? Is it because they have too many sources? Could you take me through what it, what it looks like in a prospect's environment where they would really win with start a what's it look like? What are some of the signs that they need to engage, start out? >>Yeah. The two big things that we've seen repeated in our customer base over and over again, is if you have a large number of systems out there that aren't connected, that you don't see how all the data it can be pulled together between those systems, because the different data formats or different languages or different ways that the data is created in those systems start off, can certainly help. The second is if you have a large data warehouse or a data Lake, and you don't see the value being generated out of that, because people don't understand where the data is or what context it has with other data within those repositories, both of those situations are one where we think you'd get a lot of value out of start off. And we'd love to talk to you. >>So would, so just secondly, understand this. So if you have a lot of systems that either are not connected or connected, whatever, that's great, a lot of sources sitting around, you know, whether it's spreadsheets or Oracle or >>Red shift, whatever it is, we've loved it that's right. >>Ingest as much as possible from sources >>That's right. Ingest or connect. I mean, that's really the value that we bring is you don't have to pull it all in. You can just map and leverage the data where it lives. We have customers that have petabyte repositories that just mapped that data in to start off, and we can really facilitate pulling out the value of those systems without you having to move it around again, to another request, >>Ingest, connect, and visually see value. That's right. It sounds, it sounds like a tagline, um, great stuff. So just give some examples of who's using it. What big names? Um, obviously you guys, aren't hot startup coming out of the Amazon cloud showcase. Uh, congratulations. What are some names that have worked with you guys that can give an indicator of the company that you're keeping right now in terms of, >>Yeah, I mean our largest customer by far right now, our longest customer has been NASA. Um, so they've been a really exciting user of the platform we've been really to see them leverage the platform. Schneider electric has been a long time user, uh, Bayer FINRA in the U S which is a financial services watchdog organization. These are customers that are getting a lot of value out of our platform today, and we're excited to work with them. >>Awesome, Rob, great to see you. Congratulations. Uh, take a minute to just give the plug for the commercial. How do we engage? What's the culture like, um, you guys hiring, what's the, what's the state of that? What's the state of the company. >>Yeah, no, it's a, it's a great thank you for, uh, for bringing that up where, you know, we're an exciting growing company. Um, as we really reach out more and more to connect more people's data, we find that we're always looking at more resources on building out more conductivity between the individual data sources. So more understanding on that front, as well as more, a professional services type folks to help people through the process. We've really been trying to minimize the amount of effort that you have to have in order to get started, but we know that people like a helping hands. So we're always looking for people we're always growing and we're excited to have the chance to, you know, bring this technology out beyond just the semantic group that is historically been here. >>You know, you've got a great job. Vice-president solutions consulting, essentially you're in a product role, but more like a solution architect meets products, uh, customer facing, and also product century. You're kind of the center of all the action. So what's the coolest thing you've seen, um, from a customer standpoint or an architecture or, um, a deployment or an engagement that you've been involved with. That's been kind of like, Oh, wow, that's cool. That's game. That's something new that we've been, we wouldn't have seen a few years ago. Take us through just an example, anecdotal, you don't have to share the company name or you. >>That's a great question. Um, there is a company that is working on self-driving cars and being able to leverage the knowledge graph to pull together all of the videos and material they get from the vehicles themselves, as well as static information about the sensors. Uh, that's been pretty exciting to see. I, I, I just recently purchased the festival myself. So I'm excited about the whole self-driving car world and to be able to help them participate with these companies is, is pretty exciting. Um, we, we just help one of the large drug manufacturers come to market with one of their drugs earlier than expected. You know, that's a, that's a pretty exciting feeling to know that you can really help people, um, by just connecting the data they already have and letting them leverage those resources, uh, that that really is something that we're going to be very calm >>And the bridge to the future that the customers have to cross with you is also pretty compelling. You got industrial IOT and more and more data to take a quick minute to describe what that future looks like. >>Yeah. You know, as we see more and more automation in this process, we see a couple of different really, you know, exploding areas. The first off, you know, you hit the nail on the head is data being able to bring in more edge devices, being able to really process that data on the fly and be able to help answer questions as these changes in data are occur within these sources. Um, that's certainly part of the future. And the other thing that we're really excited about is this more automatic data discovery with an organization. How can we have an agent that goes out and kind of can infer really even what your data is about in the structure of your data without a lot of input for you. And so we've been working a lot with building up these models automatically and letting you have the foundation for integrating your data, um, and just the push of a button. So we're excited about walking, Alexa, our customers in this journey as well. >>It's, it's a fun area. You talk about reasoning. That's one of the key value propositions that you guys have. You talk about AI, you talk about bots and soon it's going to be thinking machines for us. They're going to be doing all the work. >>I hope they're not too soon, but I am excited about that idea as well. I can go. I do think that, uh, you know, if you look at organizations today, it's fascinating how it's not, that the problems are different, but we're trying to automate as much of it as possible so that we can work on that, the real value clumps of our organizations. And it's not that kind of drudgery work. I started as a DBA back in my career, um, just trying to keep the database up and running, you know, nowadays, you know, all these autonomous databases and self indexing, and self-correcting, it's just not a passive lead as much anymore. You know, we hope we can bring that to the data infrastructure automation. >>It's a double-edged sword gun, right. It's amazing, done wrong. It could cause some damage and flipped some, some pain and hurt. And so you got to figure it out, got to have the right data sets, gotta have the right software, um, and a great future. Rob Harris, congratulations for being a cannabis startup showcase here on the cube on cloud startups, uh, with AWS, uh, led partnership. Thank you for coming on and being part of this event. Thank you again. Okay. Rob Harris, vice president solutions consulting at star dog here for the coupon cloud. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah.

>> From Washington D.C.. It CUBE conversations with John Furrier. >> Welcome to this special exclusive CUBE conversation I'm joined for a year. The heart of the Amazon Web Services headquarters in Arlington Virginia the heart of Washington D.C.. I'm here with Teresa Carlson who is the chief of the Amazon Web Services Public Sector team. >> Great to see you again welcome to Washington D.C. John. >> A lot of action, having the CUBE on the ground all day yesterday. We've got interviews all day this afternoon, really getting the top stories and the big story is the the cloud computing impact to government. You've been leading the team in the public sector worldwide for Amazon Web Services really had great success since the CIA deal four years ago, which was a watershed moment to this gestation period of Amazon filtrating into all the different systems of the government, and worldwide. Congratulations. >> Thank you. It's been a great seven and a half years. It's gone by so fast. I still feel like every day is day one. >> One of the things that I'm the most impressed with you, and I want to get your take on it is: you've been very passionate about the mission of the public sector from nonprofits, education, inclusion and diversity, Women in Tech-- a variety of things-- as almost a higher level mission. But Amazon has been a real enabler for the change as well. So what is your official role now at Amazon. It's now Global has been. How has it changed over the past few years. >> Well in the early days, even though when I started here anyhow I always agreed it was worldwide that what ended up happening was the fact that it went from really just focused focusing on the U.S. to actually focusing on worldwide because if we didn't really win business here in the U.S. it was going to be hard to win business worldwide. >> You were the most powerful women in Washington D.C. as voted recently one of the magazine's. You've been doing great work here in D.C., but also globally. But one of the things that you're doing I want to explore with you is you're changing the game not just with technology and government, but in society entrepreneurship that you're enabling. You've kind of cracked the code on this formula with the work with Amazon where there's now the silos are being broken down and the blurring lines between the different sectors are all cross pollinating we're seeing that with entrepreneurship, nonprofits, education; what's going on there what's your view on this? >> Well when you're really going to drive change globally and when you're doing such a transformational change and shift with technology you can't just look at it as a shift of technology. It's got to be a shift to the sectors of what's happening. And also you can't just educate one group you have to go in and educate the society and have real societal change. Everything from ensuring that the community colleges have the right kind of programs for computer science that K through 12 that they have access, because if you miss one group you're going to miss a whole generation of something. >> The realities are there's millions of jobs worldwide that are needed for cloud computing and a variety of roles including new ones for AI and machine learning which we almost have no know individuals that are as qualified as we want them. So to drive real change you have to start at the policy level and ensure policy makers and regulators around the world are aware of what they need to put in place, so that these tools and technologies are enabled that they're promoting and budgeting for things like educational programs and they're very focused on not just old-tech companies but actual new-tech companies that are driving forward to start apps entrepreneurs and social engineers I'll call them. And that's really where we are trying to drive toward social change or societal change starting at the policy in going all the way down to education on diversity issues around the world. >> One of the things that you guys have done here in Washington has been as successful as you've done the hard work you put the time in. You paid your dues. Did the the brute force work you need to do with security and cloud. Now it's up and running is successful. Now you have a elevated responsibility with the cloud to enable wealth creation value creation change in society. So you're steward of a change agent at the same time you have to create value across those sectors. What does that responsibility mean to you and how are you leaving the team to continue to up the bar on the innovation in that area? >> Well it does mean a lot to me and it is super important because if you again get one element wrong it's almost like you misstep something. So we are we are like my entire team is really gritty, like we every day. We're sort of challenging each other. Do we have it right? The whole concept of the ability to dive and really understand your customers and what they need to do. That example of that would be is we really have sort of a model we developed as a team for going in and creating digital innovation or digital footprints for countries. So if you think about this if you walk into a country and they have zero idea how to become a digital nation you have to through her influence and your experience really educate them on what are the elements and again that goes through everything through. How did they set up policies. How do they have acquisition vehicles. How are their regulators working everything through the financial regulators telecommunication providers through the educational systems of how you operate within. Not only that but the entrepreneurs. How do they actually set up a group teach and train them. Sometimes in societies that really have not had zero training in entrepreneurship. You know you think about the United States I could call you up and say hey I have a question about something I'm doing in media. Can you like give me some suggestions. You would help me if you go to countries like that. They don't have the same network. We even have here. So really establishing helping them establish what is their blueprint. >> And I will tell you it's working. And the reason I think it's worth working is because we go in very humbly, we begin to we're very patient, we have a long term view and what we're doing and we really demonstrate for them and not just demonstrate that help them ensure that they're getting there and that's the customer obsession side of us. >> And the old way the old competitive landscape used to be a price on our product performance is the best. Therefore you should buy it right and make as much money as possible and provide some customer support and some maintenance. Okay. Now you guys have hit the form. That's just one element of a successful formula. Mission driven but also ecosystem and community. >> That's right. >> Talk about the dynamic between those three things having the mission the right price performance and also community and how is that formula work for you guys and how do you make that successful. > Yeah well so here's the really interesting fact: when we decide to go in and build in the region we can. The realities are we could go anywhere in the world and build region but will that region be successful. And there's many elements to that being a success. And one of the things as an example is price. So in order to have a region that is priced in in a manner that individuals can buy for cloud computing you've got to ensure that the elements that you need to build that region are in place. So you've got to think about things like utilities, power, water, land, networking, telecommunications, and then education, are the people there that can actually respond and take the jobs that are required. So you have to look at each and every element and go in and really make those changes. And an example that I'll share is telecommunication providers around the world were the most advanced in the world in the United States in telecommunications. But if you go to other parts of the world there's a there's a monopoly or duopoly and their prices are generally outrageous. And for a company like ours of course we're a big networking company and if you go in and if a customer pays a hundred percent more than they would pay in a region that was right next door they're probably not going to want to use that cloud. So when I say that we're going in and driving real change we really feel like it's our obligation to go in and ensure that we put all the pieces and parts in place with that country and those officials to ensure that they understand. And then that added element if we're going to do that to telecommunications provider that may be part of their revenues for government or it's all they know then we need to teach them how they set up new business models because there are fantastic business models for telecommunication providers with cloud computing managed service offerings they can do a lot more mobility, gaming there's so much stuff that many of them have been so used to an old business model. We really have to help them transform in order for that entire community and region to be successful. >> Would it be safe to say that you guys are enabling value creation and that you guys are allowing others to take advantage of that it's not just your profit you're enabling them to profit and or how they see that it could be for social good but also could be for making more money? You can't lose by helping people make more money or to achieve their objective. >> We love that. Will that any if you think about Amazon Web Services, our you know where we started was with startups and entrepreneurs the ones that led us first were the developers and engineers right. They came in and they start using AWS and then those developers and engineers turned into small companies and start ups and large companies and so we really have a soft spot for entrepreneurs and startups. So you know we talk about all the time in all parts of our business that we really need to be focused on those young entrepreneurs that are creating value in wealth. And if you do that you really see you want to change it even if you can back to the United States, you're starting to see in small communities. I'm from Kentucky we have agri-entrepreneurs. We have individuals that are looking at new farming techniques. They're taking health care startups in Kentucky. I mean it's great because you don't need to be in Silicon Valley anymore to have a startup and do really great work. >> You're a disruptive enabler you're changing your force of nature. You're one of the most powerful people in Washington. You're from a small town where this make you feel. I mean sometimes you pinch yourself. >> I'm very humbled. I'm super humbled. I know my parents were both teachers my dad was a high school basketball coach love coaching I'm a huge Kentucky basketball fan but you know humble I feel blessed every day that I get to do this role and that I've been able to work for such an amazing company who believes in this because you know Andy Jassy and myself always said, from day one the first day I met him, I was like wow he is gonna be such a champion of this because we talked about paving the way for disruptive innovation and making the world a better place and in order to do that there's multiple aspects of those things. And again the technology is that is that bridge builder. It really helps take the divided and pull it together but it's got to be all these other elements that really make it work completely. >> With this power you have in, and you're too humble to say that, but that that's true comes great responsibility. How are you using this opportunity to go to the next level at a higher level not just help them as other achieve their business objectives within D.C. you do involve them some things. What's your mission on that level. You go to a higher level. What is that and what are you doing with this opportunity that you have. >> Well it's really about helping drive social entrepreneurship. And then I would say the second one is diversity and ensuring that we are really getting more women in tech and a more diverse work environment for tech. And I'll just start on the social entrepreneurship side. It really interacts nicely with all of our goals. The thing that's really change about social entrepreneurship in the early days people thought of that just as a not for profit come of it. People were like that's not so cool. Well today social entrepreneurship is cool. Many young men and women if you talk to them they want to be involved in something they want like many but they want to be involved in something that's really doing good things. And we've sort of again been able to bridge how we're doing things that eight of us through social entrepreneurship. So an example we talked about Bahrain a little bit we have a scale in Bahrain where we take these groups in that we have also one here in Washington D.C. at the U.S. Institute of Peace for Peace tech which we're looking at technologies that helped push down correction and improve peace around the world. And then we have Halcyon House which we support and Halcyon is just as beautiful Georgetown has such a lovely place that Dr Satsha Kuno started where, we support but it's all social entrepreneurs that live there for five and residency and their health. Thirty seven the most amazing are in Washington become social entrepreneurs and they have technology enablement legal enable a venture capital access and that's good. >> And then the last one that we've done is called Cal Polytech we're with the president there President Armstrong he's another gentleman from Kentucky. We started there he left what we were doing and he said I want to go all in on that. Yes. And I want to start in innovations in hardware right here on campus where we can bring our talented students. We can also merge with community and Sabriel government issues. So they're they're doing areas of justice and public safety. They're looking at health care issues. They're looking at their looking and also child exploitation issues and they're bringing all those things together to try to solve real problems. And we're helping. So it's really How about the women in tech. You're involved in. So you are women tech leader again most powerful women DC powerful people in DC. >> Well women in tech is such an important issue because again we're a fairly significant part of the population and pretty underrepresented in tech. And one of the things that we've done we started a program at AWS yes called we power tech where it's really about diversity and overall but we go out into communities we work with the schools. We have coding days on campuses. We have started in clubs. We have empowerment days where we teach women how to you, how do you interview. How do you understand the roles in tech. We do serve early. What is Cloud and how do you get involved with cloud and you would talk about other jobs. You know I've had this conversation before about tech is great in the coding part but also there's so many other jobs in tech like and to finance its operations its sales you know PR marketing and your you have to be pretty talented in tech to do any of that. It's not again I'll say for the faint heart. So we are making progress but we still have a long way to go and take a superfund. >> What's your secret of success. >> I think I learned very early on how to operate in a very diverse world. My dad was a basketball coach during my time growing and I had a lot of young men basketball players our home. We were always kicking and I had to stand toe to toe with them all the time in every aspect. I could not you know I just really I was like you know I'm going to win this argument. So the court and >> >> I don't want delays for sure but I really once I guess once I set my mind to something I really believe in it. There's passion in me. I just keep going. I don't know. That is not the right answer. How do we get there blockers are just something that can be removed in my mind and I think Amazon is the kind of culture that you know obviously the way the whole company has been created and how it's driven nothing has gotten in the way. You just sort of learn from those things and if you if you say every day we may not have gotten to where we want to be today but we learned from that from the failure that we had today in that experience and you take that in each day you sort of evolve until OK. Now we learn from that suggest and I and the other thing I tell my team because we're said to Yang Campany you don't really know what you know so don't get tied to the ways that you're doing things because we need to adjust very quickly. So I so I try to promote a an environment where we don't we've made progress. We don't know the right answer every day and we need to constantly be looking at do we get that right and how do we adjust so you know getting that agility in your business has a lot of the hiring that we do today. There's so many that we bring in that are from sort of an old school mindset because these companies did not grow as fast as we're grown and we are in a hyper growth mode. And when you're in a hyper growth mode you have to constantly look for leaders that can scale. And so that's the other sort of thing. >> So the place that can you hang with it. I've seen people you know where they sort of hit a wall and they come back but you really have to constantly say you know this is strapon. You're probably not going to have the same experience ever again. >> Here's some oxygen for some people that are not really oriented so culturally you feel that you're a good fit for Amazon given your personality. That's a key and >> I love it. I mean I love it because of the pace I love it because it change we're driving and the other thing after years of working in tech it's so fun to see your customers be successful. I mean I can't that high seeing customers actually drive results in young entrepreneurs be able to create a company. I had a young girl in Brazil I was in Brazil at the embassy and we had a we had a actually a women's panel and she Saanich like 23 years old and we got to talking and she said I just she said I created my first gaming video at 16 and sold it at 18 percent millions and she was like in her third company. She said all built on a yes. And that is like so cool. >> Like those stories you're just like wow and wouldn't be possible if you went through the old gatekeeper's other ways. >> Well I mean you know I was part of all that. I mean you spent so much of your many on just building out the tech the servers and you know in the early days entrepreneurs. >> So in each of their early capital on that. And now I think that's why you know private equity and venture pathless we are involved with them so much because they see the value that cloud computing can have in their portfolio as trying to value their image. And then the entrepreneurs you'll see seven they'll have to have Mini's going at once you know what it's like it's a good thing because that cost of creating a business is a lot less they can focus on their real talent not just buying servers and stacking them. >> Final question for you talk about the impact that you've had with either the U.S. public sector here in town your event that you started the public sector summit early days conference room in a hotel ballroom or hotel where she was at the major convergence center. It's looks like reinvent. So you had an impact. And this year probably going to be bigger. That is an indicator that something is going right there. >> Well I'm very proud of my team for helping us build this thing out that it was early days. I do think we I say up until this thing we had maybe 50 50 people. And I think last year we had about eight or nine thousand and growing and it is likely that we'll reinvent we have in over a two day period will be June 20th and 21st this year. Please can we have you back. We will be there. But we're doing something a little bit unique this year we're going to have a Space Day on the 19th. And what you know obviously eight of us Amazon we really like space has a leg like you know the cars. Yeah like SpaceX blew out like a comfortable space safe space in the clouds and way beyond that. >> And this is a really interesting area because you know space I remember as a young girl you know sing sing you know the first whole videos of walking on the moon and it makes you feel so good. You know that science and technology emerging that there's a lot of that that needs to be updated and modernized now. And we work with a lot of partners now you know like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon groups that are building tools Blue Origin Space X Nassa Air Force has been a huge robotic surgery of robotics and software involved in machine learning. I mean you think about ground stations and if you think about ground and satellite stations a lot of that is very outdated technology and that's where cloud computing and the new tools that you know that we are driving in our age on machine learning space are really going to help as well as that storage and compete and do more things at the edge with that. So so that's going to be a really fun day and we're going to have folks from all of them helping the public and the public. So it's like a precursor day to our two hour meeting and then all our public sector many re reinvent. So we're we're really excited about that. And it's something new we're going to try this year and see what kind of momentum that we want to add that we have a lot of requests with. Let's just do it. >> What's your goals. Next couple of months. See you at Public Sector Summit your event in June. Q I'll be there. What's what's on your radar. I'll have. >> A big agenda for global traveling. I'm going to be in Australia Singapore Argentina. I've got a couple of trips to Canada. I'm going to be doing very shortly here in London. I'm going to be doing a girls and tech conference and I have went out to San Francisco for the keynoting that so I have a big agenda this year of travel so get myself all geared up for my year on the road. But it's going to be fun. We have a lot of great things going on this year worldwide public sector. >> Congratulations on your success. Thanks for spending that time. Thank you Don. It's good conversation here in Washington D.C. We're in Arlington Virginia. Amazon Web Services headquarters here in Washington. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's CUBE Conversations with John Furrier. >> Well, welcome to a special CUBE conversation here at Amazon Web Services headquarters in public sector, in Washington DC, actually, in Arlington, Virginia. It's a CUBE coverage on the ground in Washington DC. Our next guest is Shannon Kellogg, who's the Director of AWS Public Policy in Americas, here, joining us. Thanks for spending the time with us. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> So obviously, public policy is a big part of public sector, hence the success you guys have had. Amazon's had great success. I mean, you go back four years ago, the shock heard all around the cloud was the CIA deal. >> Shannon: Indeed. >> And since then, there's been this gestation period of innovation. You guys have been penetrating, doing a lot of hard work. I know how hard it is. And kind of knowing the DC culture, how hard was it, and hard is it for you guys now? Is it getting easier? I mean, policies, got a lot of education involved, a lot of moving parts. >> Yeah, well, I joined over five years ago. And when I joined, there was very little understanding that Amazon was even in the cloud computing business. And so we really had to start from scratch. And so it was just basic education and awareness work. And I wouldn't call that easy, but it certainly was in a different time where people were curious about Amazon, AWS, and cloud. What is cloud computing? The cloud computing directive of the Federal Government, Cloud First Policy, had just come out a year prior, and so there was a lot of curiosity. So people were willing to talk. People were curious, but they didn't really understand what cloud computing was. And again, they didn't even realize AWS was in that business. >> And back at that time, and I know you have a tech history over at EMC before and RSA. You know the tech game. You've seen many waves of >> Shannon: I have. >> innovation, and it's almost a time where you saw some interesting shadow IT developing. Shadow IT term referred to kind of a in-the-shadows experiment. You put your credit card down and get some Amazon, get some cloud, and test, kick the tires, if you will, kind of, without anyone seeing you, called shadow IT. That became a big part of the growth. How much shadow IT has been involved to kind of force Amazon to the table? Did that help? Was that a help-driver for you guys? Was it going on? >> Yeah. Well, it's interesting, because when you look back four or five years ago, there were a lot of first movers in departments and agencies, folks in little units that I had actually even never heard of in some of the big agencies, customers that I would speak to that were experimenting with AWS and commercial cloud. In those days, they were able to take out their credit card and experiment a little bit with it and discover what was possible. And we saw a lot of uptake in interest as a result of some of that experimentation. But really, things started to change in a big way when AWS won the contract to build the community cloud for the intelligence community. And following that win, and as that project was implemented, and in the six months to a year after that award, we saw a lot more interest by agencies to not just experiment, but to go bigger. >> I couldn't get Amazon to confirm. I've tried many times on the CUBE, Jassy and Teresa, to get them to confirm that that was certainly a shadow IT effort, that someone within the CIA came out of the woodwork and said, "Hold on IBM, we have an alternative." >> Yeah, well I can't-- >> (laughing) Conferment denied. I can't comment on that either, but I can tell you that it was a very open, competitive process that we won. And it was a very big deal for the community and a very big deal for us. And that's when we really started to see a number of other agencies and organizations, really, not just experiment with cloud, but how can we leverage this to get the same benefits that the intel community needs? >> And IBM didn't help either. They got cocky. They figured they're going to sue you guys and ended up amplifying it, where the judge actually said on the ruling, "Amazon is a better service." >> Shannon: Yeah. >> I mean, you couldn't get a better testimony. But let's talk about that move. >> There was a resounding public, or resounding legal opinion, and I would encourage your viewers who haven't read it to read it. >> It's well doc, but at SiliconANGLE. Search SiliconANGLE, AWS, IBM, CIA deal, you'll find it. But I think what's notable about that is it's kind of cocky, because the old way of doing things was schmooze, win the ivory tower, have that relationship, lean on that relationship. And the IT just, they were just like going through security at the airport, just whatever, right? >> Shannon: Right. They just checked the boxes. You got to win the C level. That now has changed, where not only at the buying and evaluation process bottoms up, there's a lot of consensus involved. There's now new stakeholders. >> You bet. >> Talk about that new dynamic, because this is a modern trend. It's not just send it to the department for a check box, it's truly agile. Talk about this new, modern procurement process that people are going through. >> You bet, and it's still evolving. But over the last few years, we've seen a lot of interest by federal organizations to shift from what is traditionally a capital expense model to an operational expense model. And you'll probably laugh at me that I actually even remember this. But in the 2015 budget, with the previous administration, President Obama's budget request in 2015, there was, actually, on page 41 of that budget, a line, or actually a paragraph, that talked about how the Federal Government would need to continue to move to commercial cloud services. And in the language, in the budget, it actually talked about the consumption model, the operational expense model versus the traditional capex model. >> Shannon, what is commercial cloud, because, I mean, again, back to the old days, kind of back in my days when I was growing with the industry, you had a federal division that managed all the government stuff, sometimes separate products, right, I mean, absolutely different, unique features >> Yeah, you bet. >> in the government. Now with the cloud, I'm I hearing that this is the same cloud that Amazon runs? Is it a different product. I know there's different private clouds. >> Certainly, our cloud >> But what is the commercial cloud? >> is one option. >> Explain what the commercial cloud is. >> Yeah, our cloud is one option in this area of commercial cloud services. And we think it's a great option. But if you look at the different types of solutions, NIST actually talked about this when they put out the definition on what cloud computing should be described as several years ago. I think the final definition came out in 2011. And at the time, they called public cloud, which we in federal agencies, now, really refer to as commercial cloud, as one of the deployment models. But it also is really emphasizing commercial solutions and commerciality, versus having an agency go out and try to build its own cloud, or to issue a special contract that is controlled by that agency, that does a traditional private-cloud type of build, like for example, California did with CalCloud several years ago. We're seeing more and more agencies move away from that model and into procuring-- >> Why is that? Why are they moving, costly? >> Well, because, yeah, it's-- >> Just like HP and everyone else backed out of the cloud, same reason? >> It's costly, and one thing, looking at CalCloud, and if you haven't sort of looked at what they did with their policy, in 2014 they issued a policy, California did, which basically created a preference for CalCloud. And by August of 2017, they moved away from that preference reversing the policy and then doing sort of a about-face and saying not only is there not a preference for CalCloud, this privately built cloud, anymore in California, but there's going to be a preference for commercial cloud services and leveraging commercial solutions and technologies. >> Is that, again, the same reasons why a lot of commercial vendors like HP, even VMware, and others who kind of backed out of the cloud. It's expensive, it's complicated, right? I mean, is that main driver, or is it of talent? I mean, why did CalCloud move from that to the (mumbles). >> Yeah, I mean, I obviously can't speak for what other >> Well generally speaking. >> companies have done, but I think, based on our observations at the federal level, at the state level, and even internationally, we're seeing more and more governments in their cloud policies focus on how to leverage commercial cloud services, versus build their own, or go out and spend a billion dollars in trying to build their own through a contractor or traditional contractor. >> I talked to Teresa Carlson. >> And by the way, just for the record, in California, it was IBM who actually ended up building CalCloud. >> Nice dig on IBM there, good one. >> So I just talked to Teresa Carlson, and she and I, we talked about the notion of commercializing ecosystem, to bring in tech in with government kind of the mash up or integration culturally among other things, technology. I had an interview with an executive of New Relic, one of Amazon's top customers. I think they were saying they were getting FedRAMP certified. But there's a variety of certifications that you guys offer, essentially, people in the ecosystem, non-governmental, but they can come in and provide solutions. Can you talk about that dynamic, because we're seeing that become a trend now, where folks in the Amazon, or in general tech ecosystems, that says, "Hey, you know what? "I can go in through Amazon and do some business "with the public sector." >> Sure. >> What do you guys offer? Is there a playbook? Is there a roadmap? Is there check boxes? What's the playbook? >> Well, first of all, if you don't, if your viewers don't know what FedRAMP is, it's a Federal Government security evaluation process for cloud computing providers and service providers who want to sell to the US Federal Government. And the framework itself was created on international security standards as well as existing, and evolving in some cases, NIST security standards. And so it's a common security framework that any company of any size can align to. And AWS, because we believe so strongly in security, and because we had a lot of first-mover customers in the Federal Government marketplace, we really invested in that process early. And as a result of that, we meet the FedRAMP requirements at the different security levels that exist. And we were one of the first providers to actually do that. And then partners started working with us and leveraging that. And not just-- >> So what does that mean to the partner? >> resellers or systems integrators. >> They piggyback on your certification, or they have to do some modifications? It's like the stamp of approval. You can't get into the party without it, right? >> Yeah, you have to have FedRAMP certification in order to provide certain types of services to the US government. A lot of agencies now require some type of FedRAMP certification to do business with them. It's very common now. >> Any other certifications that they need? >> Well, that's the most common one at the federal level. But there are some department-specific requirements too. So for example, when you look at the Defense Department, they've added additional requirements on top of FedRAMP. And providers like us have to go through those additional processes, and then again, if you're partnering with an AWS, and we've gone through that process, and we made the investments, and you have some software that's based on AWS, that's going to be favorable for you in order to sell to that market segment. >> Take a step back and zoom out, and talk about the big landscape in DC. Obviously, DC's the center of the action for policy and this, obviously, public sector all around the world, as well in the United States. What's the trend that you're seeing? I mean, obviously Amazon is kind of like its own black swan. If you think about it, lowering prices, increasing functionality on a daily basis is the business model of Amazon. They win on scale. Customers are happy with that, and government seems to be happy. Yet, the competitive landscape couldn't have been at an all-time high, certainly Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, the others are competing for the same dollars, potentially. So you have the old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, and you guys, self-described, new guard. What's the landscape look like? How are you guys competing? What observations can you share and the role of policy makers in the middle of it? Are they stuck between all this? >> Well, it's been quite a ride over the last seven or eight years. Again, going back to when the First Cloud Policy was issued by the Federal Government CIO at the time, Vivek Kundra. Very early days, they talked about each agency trying to move three applications to the cloud. And so we're in a much different time now. And there a lot of agencies who are going all in on cloud services. That's actually been really fast forward and emphasized even more over the last couple years, starting with the previous administration and the emphasis that they had. I talked about the 2015 budget, but we also saw a number of other policy initiatives in the previous administration during President Obama's eight years. And then you had the new administration come in and really emphasize this early too. And one of the cornerstone things that's happened by the new administration over the last year has been the development and then the release of the President's report on IT modernization. And they set up a new Office of American Innovation and a new tech council to advise on the development of that report. And they went out, the administration did, and got a lot of input from the industry. And then they came out with a final report of recommendations in December. And they're already moving to actually implement a number of those recommendations and pilot a number of recommendations in agencies. And they're really emphasizing shared services and commercial cloud services as a key part of that effort. And then in tandem with that, and this is probably going to shock you, but in tandem with that, Congress actually worked with the administration to also make a number of changes to law, including in December of 2017, a really important piece of legislation called, The Modernizing Government Technology Act. And that was added to the Defense Authorization Bill for 2018. You know in this town, that's often how legislation moves at the end of the year is through the Defense Authorization Bill. So that legislation was passed, and it really is focused on helping agencies in their IT modernization efforts move again from legacy IT systems to the cloud. And they're not doing that just because it lowers cost, and it's a good thing to do. They're actually doing that as part of a way to improve the Federal Government cyber security posture. And that's the last thing I'll talk about that's happened in the last year is I mentioned what the administration did about its IT Modernization Report. I mentioned also what Congress did with the Modernizing Government Technology Act. Well, there was also a new cyber security executive order that was issued during the year by the President that married those two things. And basically, it made very clear that there's very little possibility to actually improve the security of federal systems without moving forward with the IT modernization efforts and moving to cloud. >> And the cyber warfare we're living in it truly is a cyber war. This is not just hand-waving, IT modernization. It's beyond that, because it's critical infrastructure now being compromised. This is our security, right? It's the state of the security of our people. >> You bet, and quite frankly, we're seeing this trend internationally too. You see more and more governments making this link between IT modernization and improving the country's cyber security posture. We've seen that in the UK. We've seen that in Australia. >> It takes cyber war to fix IT. I mean, is that what we're coming to? Okay, final point is obviously IT modernization is key. I love that that's driving it. We need to go faster. Question for you, Cloud First, certainly a big, initial orientation from the government to go Cloud First. Question for you is do you see the expectations yet in the agencies and throughout public sector for cloud speed, meaning not only like speed in feeds, like moving to an agile outcome, faster delivery, under budget, on time, lower prices. Is that expectation now set, or is it still getting there? >> No, we believe it is being set. And if you look at developments over the last six months I mean, you now have the Department of Defense that has come out with changes to policy to move faster to the cloud. And if you look at the Secretary, I'm sorry, the Deputy Secretary of Defense's memorandum in September of last year, he talked a lot about leveraging cloud computing as part of a way to make improvements in the implementation of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. And in that memo they talked about that's a national security imperative to do that. And so they're seeing technology, not as the end result, but as a way to enable a lot of these developments and changes. And we've already seen many of those steps forward in the intelligence community. So it's very encouraging to us that we're also seeing now the Department of Defense move in this direction. >> So they're running towards the cloud. They're running towards AI. >> Shannon: They're trying to. >> They're going as fast as they can, because they need to. >> They're trying to. >> Final word on security. What do you hope to have happen in our government in America to really crack the code on cyber security and surveillance all these holes? Especially with IoT, their surface area couldn't be bigger. >> So before I answer that question, one thing I did want to say, because we were talking about the Department of Defense. And you had added a question in earlier about what some of the legacy proprietors may or may not be doing. Well, these two things are married. What we're seeing at the Department of Defense is that they really do want to move faster to the cloud. But you probably noticed in the press that there are many different legacy providers out there. And as our boss would say, Andy Jassy, a lot of the old-guard community, who want to try to slow that transition down. And so that is really something that's going on right now. There's a lot of effort out there to pursue the status quo, to continue to keep the lights on. And if you look at what amount of the federal budget that is being spent on keeping the lights on in IT, it's over 80% is what the number is commonly referred to. And so a lot of companies are making traditional companies, old-guard companies, as Andy Jassy would say, are making a lot of money following that same path. And you know what? The taxpayer can't afford that anymore. The mission owners can't afford that anymore. And so it's really time to move forward into the 21st century and leverage commercial cloud technology and some of these advanced capabilities, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And then to answer your final question-- >> Hold on, on the DoD thing, because I did see that in the news. It's obviously clearly FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, as they said, in the industry from the old guards to slow down the process. That's classic move, right? Hey, slow down. >> It is. >> We're going to lose this thing. If we don't put the brakes on-- >> It's a classic move that some companies have been practicing for a few decades. >> Decades, decades, we all know that, I mean, it's called Selling 101 when you want to secure the ivory tower. Okay, so papa, this is the tactic, and I want to get your opinion. This is a policy question. It's not in the best interest of the users, and the society, and the citizens to have a policy injection for political warfare on deal selling. So that's, essentially, what I see happening. >> Yeah, we agree. >> I want to get your comments on this, because it comes up to a very political topic, technically, multi-cloud. >> Shannon: Right. So the move is, whoa, you can't go to one cloud. We're putting all our eggs in one basket, so we have to spec it to be multi-cloud. That's the policy injection. What's the impact of that in your opinion? Does it matter? Does the government say, "Hey, we should do multi-cloud"? You actually want to have one cloud. That's what Andy Jassy >> Well, actually... >> wants, right? >> you know, that's not true. What I'll say, and take a step back here, is that what we want is what the customer wants. And a lot of companies are forgetting the customer in this debate about multi-cloud versus single cloud. >> So you're jump ball. Your philosophy is to say jump ball. >> We welcome open competition. >> So multi-cloud, >> We want to serve the customer. >> and single cloud. >> What happened with the intelligence community is they had an open competition for a single-cloud approach. One thing that's happening right now as part of this broader discussion is some of the old-guard companies are spreading a lot of misinformation about-- >> John: Like what? >> the different types of contracts, and so there's been a lot of misinformation about DoD trying to pursue a sole-source contract for this JEDI program that they're trying to do to implement cloud. And what DoD has said in the stories that I've read on the record is that they want to have an open competition. And whether or not they choose a single award, which is different than a sole source that's not competed, if they choose a single award that's competed like the intelligence community did, or they choose a multi-award, it's going to be their preference. And let me tell you something, the policy space, what we've heard consistently from members of Congress and other policy makers is they don't want to be in the business of telling the Department of Defense or any other federal agency, specifically, what they should do or shouldn't do in a technology procurement. What they want is an open competition. And I'll tell you on the record, we embrace an open competition, and that will serve the customers well. But don't tell the customer if you're an old-guard company what they should or shouldn't do. And don't ignore the customer. >> Well, I would, from just a personal standpoint, industry participant, I would say that that's going backwards. If you have the companies doing old-guard tactics injecting policy and FUD to slow a deal down just to save it, that's really bad, bad form. >> Yeah, it's- >> That's going backwards. >> It's bad policy, but it's also bad for the taxpayer, and it's bad for the mission owner. So let there be open competition. Let the customers, like DoD, make the decisions that they're going to make, which is going to be best for their mission. >> Well, Shannon, as Teresa, a basketball fan, would say, "Jump ball," make it fair. >> Let's do it. >> Let the chips fall where they may. >> Let's do it. >> All right. Open competition, that is Amazon's position here in DC. Policy, no problem, we can play that game, but it's all about the customers. Shannon, thanks for your insight and observations. >> You bet. >> Shannon Kellogg, who's in charge of policy at Americas for AWS. This is CUBE Conversations. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (rhythmic electronic music)

(dramatic music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's cube conversations with John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special cube conversation, I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE media Inc. We are here in the Washington D.C. Beltway area. We're actually at Amazon web services' public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. My next guest is John Wood, he's the CEO and chairman of the board at Telos, a big provider of some of the big contracts, certainly with Amazon CIA, among others, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for joining me. >> I'm glad to be here. >> So, you guys have been pretty instrumental and we were talking to Teresa Carlson earlier, with an exclusive interview with her, and we talked about the shot heard around the Cloud. That was the CIA, Amazon win, four years ago. >> Yes. >> Kind of infiltrated the government area. It's almost a gestation period and now you got DOD action, a ton of other opportunities, but it really is an architectural mindset changeover from the old way. >> Yes You're involved in this, with Telos. What's your take, how are you guys involved, what's going on? >> Yeah, so it was groundbreaking, when the CIA made the determination that they were going to move to the Cloud, for sure. It kind of made everybody stand up and take notice, if the most security conscience organization in the world was considering it, why aren't I? And here we are, four years later, so where is the CIA now? Well now, the CIA is able to provision a server in a couple minutes, whereas the past, it used to take them almost a year. Now, with the use of automation tools like we have with Telos and the Xacta suite, the CIA is able to get their authority to operate in less than a week, when it used to take 18 months. So, I basically think what's happening is, the Cloud is providing an access point to IT modernization and the agency is showing that there is a blueprint that the rest of the government can also follow if they want to. >> One of the things we're involved in a lot of Blockchain covers, as well as kind of kicking the tires on Blockchain. You're in the middle of a Cloud gain with identity. Identity is the secret to having good scalable systems, because when you have good identity, good things happen. In Blockchain, some people say a theory about those. In IT, it's what identity you're going to use. How does the authority to operate challenge, you mentioned, become so important, because you're talking about massive amounts of time, I mean time savings. >> Wood: Yeah, so-- >> Just tease out the nuances of why it's so important to have that identity solution. >> So, in the past, there was no common language within which our cyber security professionals could engage with each other. Now, with the signing of the President's executive order on cyber security, the White House really is mandating the adoption if the NIST framework. What's relevant there is that on the one hand it provides you with a common language, but on the other hand, it's 11 hundred controls. So, as a result, automation is going to be key, to making sure that people can work with each other and making sure that, actually, the adoption actually takes off. >> They're safe, they know the trusted party. Is trust a big part of this and how does that--? >> I think what's happening, because the intelligence community has been working so closely together, and when I say the intelligence community, it's not just the traditional CIA, NSA, NRO, et cetera, it's also the military component of the intelligence community. So, you've got almost 38 assessors that are assessing C2S and SC2S. You know, the secret, if you will, Cloud, and the top secret Cloud, and those assessors all have been working in the same community under this framework and I think that has given them the confidence that the data is protected and as a result, they're heading much closer to reciprocity than ever before. >> There's been observations certainly on the Cube, we've said this many times with the past few years in tracking IT over the years, IT transformation, digital transformation, whatever you want to call it, buzz word. The reality is you had some progressives that would move faster and kick the tires, certainly financial services, in some areas you see that. Really, no problem. Then you had the folks who have just been consolidated down, didn't have a lot of budget and were lagging, waiting to adopt. Now there's no excuses, with cyber security, top of mind, with hacking, malware, ransomware, cyber warfare from nation states, sponsored states, an open source it's out of control. >> It is. >> So the security equations is forcing IT to move. The action has to be taken. What are you guys seeing in this area, because this is a big story and it's really putting a fire under everyone to move. >> And it's long over due. I co-wrote and article with our chief security officer in 2011, talking about why the Cloud was the way to go for federal, state, local, and education customers and at the end of the day, I think what's happening from a top cover perspective, the legislative community understands that. Obviously the Executive branch understands that, and now with editions like C2S the rest of the environment, the rest of the government can see what's possible. So, I believe the leadership within the government is ready for this change. They're seeing the benefit as it relates to C2S and SC2S and ultimately, the key is, the guys who run the contracts themselves, you got to make sure that those guys want that, to embrace that change too. >> Furrier: Yeah, so you have the-- >> And right now, 80, if you look across the government, 80% IT span is going back into maintenance. If you look at all my commercial customers, it's somewhere between 20 and 25%. What does that mean? It basically means that the government has a lot of legacy systems, which means that there's a lot of threats, and, which means there's a real cyber security problem. I believe fundamentally that by moving work loads to the Cloud, you'll be eliminating a lot of those cyber security problems. >> Yeah, it just means security is going to be the driver. The other thing I wanted to bring up, especially here in D.C., in public sector, is transparency. Now everyone can see everything. We're in a data-driven world, you can't hide either. The light is on, it's right there on the table. No more hiding. How has transparency been impacted in the procurement process, in the sales motions, the overall engagements with gov and public sector customers? >> I think, truth be told, there have been a lot of ideas that were sort of short-term and not really thoughtful, but the good news, as I said, is that the policy makers are really thinking and considering, trying to figure out how to make changes. Take for example, LPTA, low price technically acceptable. When I went to the congress and talked to both the House and the Senate side, and talked about how if I have one customer whose gotten hacked and the other customer has the same hack, but one happens to be a government customer and one's a commercial customer, the resources that we have are really trained, highly skilled, highly sought-after resources. Well, my commercial customers are willing to pay three to four hundred percent more than my government customers are. So when you have scarce resources, where are you going to apply them? You're going to apply them where the people are who are going to pay you. So my point to the Congress was simply to say, hey man, you get what you pay for. So ultimately, the good news is that, both on the House and the Senate side, that they elimanted LTPA, as it relates to cyber security, goods and services. So I believe, again, that there's a lot of, not just transparency happening, but there's a lot of people realizing that there are things that we can do. Procurement is kind of the last frontier for me. I have seen recently, I saw one of our government customers, where we were subcontracted, they went with something called an OTA, which stands for an other transaction agreement. Big problem in the government these days is everybody protest everything and there's really no downside to the protesting. With an OTA it's not protest-able. So I am seeing our government customers beginning to think about other means of actually doing things like procurement, and so that you can actually acquire. >> Are they going to have instant replay? (laughter) It sounds like the NFL, that call's not reversible. I mean, this is kind of, we're getting into all these rules and regulations where you've got protest, it seems that policy injection is not healthy at some level, because that point about what cost more on the commercial side, because of demand there, they understand the consequences and resource availability. To the government you just eliminated a policy that wasn't really helping. >> Right. >> So policy is a real consideration in here. >> I think so. Again though, it's a different environment than it was five or six years ago and I do think that there are some real positive things that are happening. I agree with you that there's a ground-swell of support behind the Cloud and certainly, players like us see the benefit associated with that shared security model. >> One of the things we've been observing and tracking on Sillaconangle and the Cube is this notion of public-private collaberation. Sharing data is a huge deal. Certainly, in Cyber people realize that data is valuable. Certainly, at Scale, you see patterns you might not see, customers on workloads, here and there, need to be identified. You're not sharing the data you don't know. So data sharing is a big deal, but also, collaborations between the private and public sector. Can you comment on what's going on there, because we're seeing some movement where, you're seeing some security agencies saying, "We'll share some stuff." >> Yeah. >> Furrier: You share some stuff with me, so you're seeing a little bit of the community developing heavily around data-sharing, what's you're take on that? >> So, I think we have a ways to go to make it work right, because if it was working right, you wouldn't see the very published, publicized hacks that have gone on. One of the things that the Congress can do is to provide incentives for the private sector to share more information, more quickly. When the Yahoo hacks occurred, it wasn't discovered until two or three years later. As a result, like I said, there's really no incentive and there's a perceived amount of liability. One of the things I'm asking some of our Congress people to consider is if you do share information, maybe, there's a limitation on liability and that provides, if you will, a mechanism and that provides an incentive for the private organization to work with the public organizations. >> So not to bury it, like Yahoo tried to bury that thing. >> Exactly. There's no sense in burying it. There should be no reason to bury. >> Okay, take a minute to talk about Telos, what you guys are doing, the chief executive. What's going on with the company, talk about the successes, where you guys are winning, your challenges and opportunities. >> Sure, we're in the business of, we do cyber security, we do identity and we do secure mobility. In the area of cyber security, I'm very proud about the fact that we're the database of record for intelligence community, many department of defense agencies use us, homeland security, a whole, department of safe-- There's a whole bunch of organizations that tend to work with us. I think that the issue for me has always been around investing in things that make our customers more efficient. So whether it's cyber security, it's one thing to provide the authority to operate, but I like to provide that authority to operate on a continuous basis. When we talk about identity, it's one thing to say that I am who I say I am, but it's another thing to let you know that I'm actually somebody that's trust worthy. So, we have a special relationship with the FBI that allows us to do real-time data look-ups on their people. We're the integrator of record for the common access card, the military ID card, we have been for a long time. From that, we built a business relationship with the TSA and now we have about 70 airports around America that use our service to do identity as a service for all their employees. >> Can you get me to cut the line at Pre? (laughter) >> You know, if you want to cut the line at TSA pre-- >> Quality of service opportunity and people will pay more for that. >> Absolutely. And plus, I think TSA pre-check wants to have a lot more people in that ecosystem too. No different than when the Easy Pass came into play years and years ago. I remember just zooming through the Easy Pass and wondering why people would want to stand in line, why would you, right? And then if you think about it, we're also involved with secure mobility, so we have a capability called Telos ghost that allows you to basically hide on a network. You're familiar with the notion of signal hopping? In World War two that's how we avoided detection by the enemy, so this is what we invented here with something around IP hopping. So as a result of that, whether you're a server-facing thing or a client-facing thing or a mobile device, you can't be seen on the network and if you can't be seen on the network, you can't be hacked. >> Well, that's awesome stuff. Your relationship with Amazon Web Services, talk about that, some of the things you're involved in. >> Yeah. >> The deals, the momentum. What's the relationship look like between you guys? >> So we have an enormous relationship with Amazon, most important part that we have, it started with the agency and I was in a meeting with Teresa Carlson, one of the senior people in the agency, and we wondered whether or not we could do for, we Telos, can do for the Cloud that which we've been doing for the enterprise for the better part of 15 to 17 years now, which is basically providing that authority to operate in an automated way. So we invested together and we were able to prove that we could absolutely do that. Now, what we're doing is we're basically copying and pasting that model to our customers across the government. >> And you guys put a stake in the ground, 2011. You were early. I mean 2008 was the beginning of the DevOps movement, you were in the heart of it in 2011. >> Wood: Yep. What's the biggest thing you've learned or observed or experienced over those years, since 2011? >> The biggest thing? >> Or just the most important. >> Wood: That is an enormous question. >> It could be the most important, the most relevant, most surprising-- >> Well the most important thing was I got married in 2012. (laughter) I have a four year old and two year old and a 14-year old, those are the most important. >> Was it really you who got married, was it your identity? >> Wood: It was really me and it was my identity. I will say, I think that the government is embracing efficiency. The government is embracing change. I think it started around 2014 or 15, and now it's really moving out. I think there's a lot of top cover, both from a policy side and an executive side and I'm seeing a lot of leadership from within the government itself of people who want to make the change happen. >> And there's also the competitive fairness question we're hearing, just here in town, yesterday, rumblings of one-source Cloud, multi-Cloud. Amazon is technically a one-source Cloud, but they've got an ecosystem. Should they have multi-Cloud in their requirements? All these things almost feel like that protest model is going on, like there's a little fud going everywhere from the other vendors. Do we expect to see more of that in your mind or less of it? (laughter) >> I think at the end of the day-- >> The chips are taken off the table. >> The people who don't want change are the ones, who are, if you will, very invested in the legacy. If those people are paid, time, material or cost blessed, they're not paid to be efficient. So there's going to be push back. On the other hand we've seen by the gigantic growth of the adoption of the Cloud and by the Cloud infrastructure and the Cloud ecosystem itself, there are enomorous opportunities for organizations out there. So I think people should embrace the change, I really do. I think, fundamentally, it's going to be a really big positive to this industry and into this region. >> I always say to Dave Vellante and my co-hosts, it's like no brainer, you look at the main frame, that was the generation when I was growing in the industry. I was the young gun, like main frame co-ball, who the hell wants that? Mini computer, eh, I want the client server. It's pretty obvious when you're in it. So I got to ask you with that in mind, Cloud is pretty obvious. Folks will understand DevOps and automation and those efficiences. You mentioned authority to operate as an example. Some of these numbers are pretty significant. So let's go down the problems that are important, what are the consequences, how do you quantify it, right? So the problem that people are trying to solve is how do I get resources, computing, software, whatever. Pretty important, because now you've got security, you've got all kinds of stuff. What are some of the consequences and you mentioned some benchmarks that you've quantified. You mentioned provisioning a server in a year. Is that really true? >> Wood: That's true! >> So give me some data on some of consequences, kind of the old way and new way. >> Well the old way if you're using the traditional procurement, it's like I said, one of the big issues is whether it was the culture or it's procurement roles or just the process to get an approval, it would take a year to get a server provisioned. Now, it's literally, you push a button and one to two minutes later you have a server, a new server. So you get ultimate scale, you get ultimate throughput, you pay as you go, you pay what you use. What's not to like? So that's all good. From the standpoint of security, because it's the NIST framework we can automate about 90% of that. That's 11 hundred controls, right? So we automate about 90% of those 11 hundred controls. Now, you get a whole bunch of auto inheritance, a whole bunch of things that can be automated are, and as a result, when NIST goes from one version of NIST to another version, all that happens automatically, and more importantly, as a cyber security professional, and I've only been at it since 1994. (laughter) I've been in it for relatively a long time as a CEO. As a cyber security professional, what I see is, as long as I can show a continuous monitoring of your current status, that's very relevant to the operational security professional. That's really good. So for us, we know that our customers are going to be a combination of Cloud, hybrid, and on-prem. These large organizations are going to take years and years and years to move to the Cloud, but they got to start, because now is the time. >> So automation and having that nice stack where it automatically updates and auto-provisioning, auto scaling, but the operational provisioning piece is really where the rubber meets the road, right? Is that what you're getting at? >> Well it's that. It's also you're consolidating your data centers. You don't need lots of them anymore. You can just focus on one, that's another big area. Another big area is, you can lift and shift your legacy IT infrastructure into the Cloud and then put the big investment into the new application as it's siting in there in the Cloud. >> Awesome, John, thanks for joining us here in the cube conversation. Here at Amazon Web Services Headquarters, breaking down the trends in GovCloud public sector as Cloud computing really levels the playing field, opens up new doors, new solutions, faster time to operate, in vi of other things, here in Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier. >> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C. at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from D.C. Our next guest is Robert Groat, with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, a service provider in Cloud and an IT. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you John. >> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting the lay of the land, so much innovation happening around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going, scratching their heads, wondering what's happening, some groups saying what happened, and you got people making it happen, right? >> Exactly. >> What's the big "ah-ha" moment people might not know looking into D.C. now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it, what are they doing? Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven? >> Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations, to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time, the contracting process has been a mess, some of the things that happened, some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers, and we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker, and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the Cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler, we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from the security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to manage services and manage security services and it's really disrupting the way that the Federal Government's done business in the past. >> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June, and we were commeters, the first time the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no-excuses government at this point, cause there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring me iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? >> Exactly. >> Now you have security looking down the barrel, and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing, so you have Swiss cheese called malware, attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. >> Exactly. >> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar. >> We are! >> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress emergency funding for more security, or is it happening? >> Well, they need to be, but if you look at, if you look at the way traditional data centers are built and on-premise infrastructure is built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing, you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together, and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at Cloud services or be able to look at a Greenfield environment, and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the Cloud is enabling. You're actually. >> You mean program the whole infrastructure? >> Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually, every single thing that happens in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged, and when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment, and you can apply some of these new primatives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about, to protect critical infrastructure, really in ways that you couldn't do before, and you can actually, with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events, and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you've programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events, and it's repeatable. >> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you, I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor, >> Mhmm. >> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out, he was like the complexity of the Cloud actually is an advantage in the security, and I said what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item, and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up.6 >> It's just like on the battlefield. The surface area of attack matters, and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack, there's no way for them to. >> So you agree with that? >> 100% agree with that. >> How is that, how do I turn that complexity, obviously there's a main range of tools to make the Cloud easier, but complexity of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage? What do I do? >> So the security advantage is that every time you build a rule, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization, you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now, across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure, so when we develop one thing as a manage service provider, to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate, that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space, and this can start to really help create that protective ops infrastructure. >> So you scale more observation space to get more data, that gives you also an advantage. >> It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advance persistent threats are, you can then really start to do things, that this was the province of really large organizations, only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. >> Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure. Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than building on site because of human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts. >> That's exactly right. Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide, they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is, they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment, and that's what you get when you start to utilize Cloud services. >> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this was like a 2011 time-frame. Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that like okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth, and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers? >> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact, but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably a strategy that they should take. And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology, I think what they're seeing now, especially in the Department of Defense, and then some of the Federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into the Cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. >> Well we had a different approach and automated actual code bases so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly, so it's interesting. >> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's Share-A-Plan or >> Authentication. >> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized and done right with the right subject-matter experts, then you can start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. >> This is an open-source ethos. >> It is. >> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate something that's already a service, throw it in a service catalog, make it a micro-service, make it an API. >> And that culture's finally transformed in the Federal Government, that didn't used to be the culture, right? >> People must be like, finally! >> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this, I have to be able to understand everything that's happening, and you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit. I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open-source. >> You're speaking our language, we talk about this all the time, the lock-in, there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs. >> Yes. >> And choice, right? So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that's successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. >> Right. >> But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting and out in the field, we've been getting the data coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture is interesting, because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government, because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon. >> Mhmm. >> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul calling, we need spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be requirement or should we jump off? >> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got, you know, tens and tens of years of legacy technical debt in your data center, there's not a reason to pull everything into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. >> Got the mainframe. >> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud, it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment, while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. >> And some people choose to have Cobalt code running banks right now, and just because they have that process. >> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably come to the time that they have to do that migration. >> Great commentary, great to have you on, great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing, how do you guys fit into this trend, take a minute to talk about what you guys do, and your opportunity. >> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old company, we talk about some of our competitors will talk about being born in the Cloud, we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise, we helped the Marine Core establish their network operation security command, 20 some years ago, we were first to kind of lead virtualization technologies to help the forward-deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that can move into theater, so it's always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cybersecurity, and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology, in government. >> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy. >> Absolutely. >> You need wireless. >> Austere environments, you know, low-power, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data center, and we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, you know. >> You got to push the envelope. >> You have to. >> Your job is to push the envelope. >> And that's really where I think Smartronix has done a really good job, is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways. More securely, and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track 750 billion dollars worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution that said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities, we're going to build out the test endeavor while we build out the data center environment, and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. >> Do you meet your deadline? >> We absolutely did. >> What was that other website that you didn't actually get the deadline done, they had to bring in? >> Yeah, the healthcare. >> Oh, the Obama. >> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented success, it ended up being the very first cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government. The very first government property running on public Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to >> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on open government. >> He doesn't. >> He opened up data sets, he changed the game. >> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the Federal Government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government, how you could get that agility and innovation, and speed of business of commercial and do that in the Federal Government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on, and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes of delivering this kind of abilities and services. >> Literally. So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized, because this is is problem. No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. If you've been sitting around not innovating, now there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity, IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast. >> You got all of these competing pressures, security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner, to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars, and these are very simple pillars, but it's really really required for really looking at Cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments, help them think through what the roadmap and strategy is to get there, and then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud-native, to utilize cloud-native services that also, when you get to the implementation and migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage, and that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have the more effective organization and better services in your environment. >> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me. >> Thanks, John. >> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C., actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's CUBEConversations with John Furrier. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back everyone, here to a special CUBEConversation in Washington, DC. We're actually in Arlington, Virginia, at Amazon Web Services Public Sector Headquarters. We're here with Sri Vasireddy, who is with REAN Cloud and recently won a big award for $950 million for the Department of Defense contract to partner with Amazon Web Services, really kind of changing the game in the cloud space with Amazon, among other partners. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> So, obviously we love cloud. I mean, we actually, we have all of our stuff in Amazon, so we're kind of a little bit biased, but we're open minded to any cloud that we don't provision any infrastructure, so we love the idea of horizontally disrupting markets. We're just kind of doing it on a media business. You're taking an approach with REAN Cloud that's different. What's different about what you guys are doing and why are you winning so much? >> Yeah, I mean, I guess that is, you know, the key word being disruption. You know, I'm hearing more and more as this news spreads out about why, you know, we've disrupted, so they're proven the disruption, and when I mean disruption, you know, I'll explain what the disruption, you know, we're creating in the service industry is if you take a typical, like a services company-- >> John: Mm-hm. >> They integrate products using people to integrate products to solve a problem, but in the cloud world you can create those integrations with programmatic or APIs, so we can create turnkey solutions. With that, what we're able to do is really sell outcome based. We go to the customer and say it's not time and material, it's not fixed price, it's pure outcome based. So, to give you an example, let's say if you went to a theme park and while you're on a ride somebody just takes a picture, and then after you're done with the ride they put a picture in front of you and say, "Do you want to buy this?" And if you don't buy it they throw it away, so we literally have the ability to create those outcomes on the fly like that, and that's the disruption because that kind of outcome based allows customers to meet their goals much quicker. So, one of the secrets to do that, if I can get this right, is you have to have a really software driven, data driven environment. >> Sri: Absolutely. >> So, that's fundamental, so I want to explore how you do that, and then what does it mean for the customers because what you're essentially doing is kind of giving a little predictive solution management to them. Say you want to connect to this service-- >> Sri: Yeah. >> Is that microservices, is this where it's going to be wired, take us through how that works, because there's tech involved. I'm not saying you don't want to throw anything away, but if it's digital (chuckling) what does it mean to turn it on or off, so is this what people are referring to with microservices and cloud? >> Yeah, so I'll get to the microservices part. The disruption, the way, you know... The innovation that we created is if you take 20 years ago, when you look at people transforming to the internet, right, so their first time they're going on the internet, at the time they were paying a HTML developer that would develop a webpage. >> Mm-hm. >> You know, hundreds of dollars an hour, right, and today high school kids can create their own webpages. That's the outcome focus, because the technology matured to a point where it auto-generates those HTML pages. So, fast forward 20 years, today people are looking for devops engineer as a talent, and whatever that devops engineer produces, we've figured out a way to outcome base. We can drag and drop and create my architectures and we are to produce that code, right. That's what makes us very unique. Now, coming to your question about microservices, when we are going to large customers we're taking this phased approach, right. First they will do lift and shift based-- >> John: Mm-hm. >> Move to cloud, which actually doesn't even give them a lot of their features. It doesn't give them better response. It doesn't optimize for cloud and give the benefits. Say they put in the effort to apply devops to become very responsive to customers. Say if I'm a bank I have my checking business and savings business, and each line of business got very efficient by using cloud, but they have not disrupted an industry because they have not created a platform across lines of business. >> John: Mm-hm. >> Right, so what they really need to do is to take these services they are providing across lines of business and create a platform of microservices. >> So, you basically provide an automation layer for things that are automated, but you allow glue to bring them together. >> Absolutely. >> That then kicks off microservices on top of it. >> Absolutely, right. >> So, very innovative, so you essentially, it's devops in a box. (laughing) >> That's it and what-- >> Or in the cloud. >> Yeah, what normally takes three years, so most of our customers when they tell this story they tell us, "Oh, that's five years down the road." So, we knock out three years off the mark, right. There are companies that, for example, DOD is one of our customers. >> Mm-hm. >> There are some other companies that have been working with DOD for the last two, three years and they have not been able to accomplish what we accomplished in three months. >> You guys see a more holistic approach. I can imagine just you basically break it down, automate it, put it in a library, use the overlay to drag and drop. >> Exactly, plug and play and that's it. >> So, question for you, so this makes sense in hardened environments like DOD, probably locked and solid, pretty solid but what about unknown, new processes. How do you guys look at that, do you take them as they come or use AI, so if you have unknown processes that can morph out of this, how do you deal with that use case? >> So, yeah, those unfortunately, you know, so what... There's this notion of co-creation-- >> John: Yeah. >> So, there's unknown processes where we put out best engineers is what drives to this commoditization or legos that-- >> So, you're always feeding the system with new, if you will, recipes. I use that word as more of a chef thing, but you know, more-- >> Sri: Exactly. >> Modules, if you will. >> Sri: Yeah. >> As a bit of an automated way, so it's really push button cloud. >> Absolutely. >> So, no integration, you don't have to hire coders to do anything. >> No. >> At best hit a rest API-- >> Sri: Yeah. >> Or initiate a microservice. >> Yeah, so what, I mean, the company started with Amazon.com as a, sorry Amazon Web Services as our first customer, and they retained us for software companies like Microsoft, SAP, and they went to Amazon and said, "We want to create a turnkey solution," like email as a solution, for example, for Microsoft, exchanging software. Email as a solution is spam filters plus, you know, four or five other things that we have to click button and launch, and Amazon, then we were servicing Amazon to create these turnkey solutions. >> So, talk about the DOD deal, because now this is interesting because I can see how they could like this. What does it mean for the customer, your customer, in this case the DOD, when you won this new contract was announced a couple days ago, how'd that go down? >> Yeah, so you know, I think we're super happy. Actually, again, 2010-- >> All your friends calling you and saying, "Hey, that $950 million check clear yet?" (laughing) That doesn't work that way, does it? >> It doesn't, it doesn't quite work that way, but although, you know, just some history, 10 years ago I had to choose between joining as a lead cloud architect for DISA versus first architect for Amazon Web Services, and I made the choice to go to Amazon Web Services, although I really loved servicing DOD because I think DOD's very mature in what you're calling microservices. >> John: Mm-hm. Back in the day, they had to be on the forefront of net-centric enterprise services, modern day microservices, because the Information Sharing Act required them to create so many services across the department, right, but there wasn't a technology like Amazon Web Services to make them so successful. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we're coming back now and we're able to do this, and I was with a company called MITRE at the time-- >> John: Yeah. >> And we, you know, I was the lead on the first infrastructure as a service BPA. If I compare to what that infrastructure as a service BPA was, the blanket purchase agreement, to what this OTA I think it's a night and day difference. >> What's OTA? >> OTA stands for other transaction agreements. >> Okay, got it. >> Which is how-- >> It's a contract thing. >> It's a contract thing, it's outside of federal acquisition regulation. >> Okay, got it. >> Which is beautiful, by the way, because unlike if you are doing such a deal, $950 million deal, probably companies that spend millions of dollars to write paper to win the deal, OTA's a little different. DIUx, who has the charter for the OTA, they need to find a real customer and a real problem to bring commercial entities and the commercial innovation to solve a theory problem, and then we have to prove ourselves. Thereabout, I'm told 29 companies competed and we, you know, we won the first phase, but there were two consequent phases where we have to provide our services, our platform, to the customer's satisfaction, and the OTA can only be the services we already provide. So, it's a very proven technology. >> John: Mm-hm. >> And as I see some of the social media responses, I look at those responses that people are talking about, you know, small companies winning this big deal and somebody was responding like, okay, we spent, you know, hundreds of millions on large companies, did nothing, and this small company already did a lot with $6 million. >> Well, that's the flattening of the world we're living in. You're doing with devops, you've automated away a lot of their inefficiencies. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And this is really what cloud's about. That's the promise that you're getting to the DOD. >> Sri: Yeah, absolutely. >> So, the question for you is, okay, now as you go into this, and they could've added another $50 million just to get a nice billion dollar, get a unicorn feature in there, but congratulations. >> Sri: Thank you. >> You got to go in and automate. How do you roll this out, how big is the company, what are your plans, are you... Where do you go from here? >> Our company today is, you know, about 300 plus people, but we're not rolling this out on a people basis, obviously, right. You know, usually we have at least 10x more productivity than a normal company because especially servicing someone like DOD, it's very interesting because they do follow standards set by DISA. >> Mm-hm. >> So, what that means is if I'm building applications or microservices, which is a collection of instances, I have, DISA has something called STIG. You know, it's security guidelines, so everybody is using these STIG components. Now we create this drag and drop package of those components, and at that point it's variations of, you know, those components that you drag and drop and create, right, and the best thing is you get very consistent quality, secure, you know, deployment. >> I mean, you and I are on the same page on this whole devops valuation, and certainly Mark and Teresa wrote that seminal common about the 10x engineer. >> Sri: Yeah. >> This is really the scale we're talking about here. >> Sri: Absolutely. >> You know, so for the folks that don't get this, how do you explain to them that they, like what Oracle and IBM and the other guys are trying to do there. All the old processes are like they got stacks of binders of paper, they have their strategies to go win the deals, and then they're scratching their heads saying, "Why didn't we win?" What are they missing, what are the competitors that failed in the bid, what are they missing with cloud in your opinion? Is it the architecture, is it the automation, is it the microservices, or are they just missing the boat on the sales motion? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing that people need to know is being on their toes. When Andy talks about being on the toes, when companies like Amazon at scale being on their toes, which means gone are those days where you can have roadmaps that you plan year, you know, year from now and you know, you do it, you're away from the customer by then, right, but if you're constantly focusing on the customer and innovating every day, right, we have a vision and a backlog. We don't have a roadmap, right. What we work on is what our next customer needs. >> John: Mm-hm. >> Right, and you're constantly servicing customers and you have stories to tell about customers being successful. >> What's your backlog look like? (laughing) >> Backlog could be a zillion things. Like what-- >> Features. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Feature requests or just whatever the customer might need. >> Feature requests, user stories, really understanding the why part of it. We try to emphasize the why of, you know, why you're doing and whose pain are you solving type of things, but the important thing is, you know, are we focusing on what matters to the customer next. >> How hard is multi-cloud to do, because if you take devops and you have this abstraction layer that you're providing on top of elastic resources, like say Amazon Web Services, when you start taking multi-cloud, isn't that just an API call or does it kind of change because you have, Amazon's got S3 and EC2 and a variety of other services, Azure and Google have their own file system. How hard is it code-based-wise to do what you're doing across multiple clouds? >> It's not at all difficult because every cloud has their infrastructure as code language, just like I talked about, you know, HTML to be generated to get a webpage. We use a technology called Terraform-- >> Mm-hm. >> That is inherently multi-cloud, so when we generate that cord I could change the provider and make it, you know, another cloud, right. >> Just a whole nother language conversion. >> Sri: A whole nother language, yes, exactly. >> So, you guys, do you have to do that heavy lifting upfront? >> Again, we don't, and it so happened that it will look at our platform that automates all these-- >> Yeah. >> The Amazon part of it grew so much because of what I just said. Like, the customer demand, even the enterprise customers that do have a multi-cloud strategy-- >> Mm-hm. >> You know, they end up more of what is good. >> Yeah. >> Sri: Right, so we end up building more of what is good. >> So, the lesson is, besides be on your toes, which I would agree with Andy on that one, is to be devops, automate, connect via APIs. >> Yeah. >> Anything else you would add to that? >> Devops is a, it's a principle of being very agile, experimenting in small batches, being very responsive to customers, right. It is all principles that, you know, that we embody and just call it devops, it's a culture. >> Managing partner of REAN Cloud. Sri, thanks so much for coming in. Congratulations on your $950 million, this close to a billion, almost, and congratulations on your success. Infrastructures, code, devops, going to the next level is all about automation and really making things connect and easily driven by software and data. It's theCUBE bringing you the data here in Washington, DC, here in Arlington, Virginia, AWS's Public Sector World Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

(techno music) >> (Narrator) Live from Washington, DC. It's Cube conversations with John Furrier. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome to the special exclusive Cube Conversations here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier host of the Cube. Here at Amazon Web Services Headquarter World Headquarters for Public Sector Summit in Arlington, Virginia. Our special guest is Tricia Davis-Muffett, who is the Director of Marketing for Worldwide Amazon Web Services. Thanks for joining me. >> Yep. >> So we see each other and reinvent Public Sector Summit, but you're always running around. You got so many things going on. >> I am. >> Big responsibility here. (Tricia laughs) >> You guys are running hard and you have great culture, Teresa's team. Competitive, like to have fun. Don't like to lose. (Tricia laughs) >> What's it like being a marketer for the fastest growing hottest product in Washington, DC and around the world? >> Yeah. I mean it's really been amazing. When I came here, I kind of took a leap of faith on the company because it's four and a half years ago that I came. I literally accepted the job before we had even gotten our first fed ramp approval. So it wasn't entirely sure that this was going be the place to go to for technology for the government, but I really loved the way that we were helping the government innovate and save money of course. I think most of us who are in Public Sector have a passion for citizens, and for making government better and so that's really what I saw in Teresa and her team that they had such a passion to do that and that the technology was going to help the government really improve the lives of citizens. It's been great. One of the things that's been amazing is the passion that our customers have for our technology. I think they get a little taste of it and they go "Wow, I can't believe what I can do "that I thought was impossible before." And so I love seeing what our customers do with the technology. >> It's something people would think might be easy to be a marketer for Amazon, but if you think about it, you have so much speed in your business. You have a cult of personality in the Cloud addiction, or Cloud value. In addition to the outcomes that are happening. >> Uh huh. >> We're a customer and one kind of knows that's pretty biased on it. We've seen the success ourselves, but you guys have a community. Everywhere you go, you're seeing Amazon as they take more territory down. Public Cloud originally, and now Enterprise, and Public Cloud, Public Sector Enterprise, Public Cloud. Each kind of wave of territory that Amazon goes in to Amazon Web Services, is a huge community. >> Yeah. >> And so that's another element. I mean Public Sector Summit last year it felt like Reinvent. So this years going to be bigger. >> Yeah. We had 65 hundred plus people attend last year, just in the Washington DC area and we've also expanded that program now and we are taking our Public Sector Summit specifically for government education non-profit around the world. So this year we will be in Brussels, and Camber, Australia. We have great adoption in Australia as well with the government there. In Singapore, Ottawa. So we're really expanding quite a bit and helping governments around the world to adopt. >> So if that's a challenge, how are you going to handle that because you guys have always been kind of with Summits. Do you coattail Summits? Do you go separate? >> No. We go separate. We actually have the Public Sector Summits we take the experience of our technology to government towns that wouldn't typically get a Summit. So for instance here in the United States of course, San Francisco and New York there's a lot of commercial businesses. We have our big Summits there, but there's not as much commercial business here in Washington DC, so really Public Sector takes the lead here. And then we focus on some of the things that really are most important to our Public Sector customers. Things like, procurement and acquisition. Things like the security and compliance that's so critical in the government sector. And then also, we do a really careful job of curating our customers, because we know that our government customers want to hear from each other. They want to hear from people who are blazing a trail within the Public Sector. They don't necessarily want to hear about what we want to say. They want to hear what their peers are doing with the technology. So last year, we had over a hundred of our Public Sector customers speaking to each other about what they were doing with the Cloud. >> And I find that's impressive. I actually commented on the Cube that week that it's interesting you let the customers do the talking. I mean, that's the best ultimate sign of success and traction. >> Yeah. And the great thing is, you know I've worked in other places in the Public Sector and government customers can be kind of shy about talking about what they're doing. You know, there are very motivated to just keep things going calmly, quietly, you know get their jobs done. But I think... >> Well, it doesn't hurt when you have the top guy at the CIA say, "Best decision we've ever made." "It's the most innovative thing we've ever done." I mean talk about being shy. >> Yeah. >> That's the CIA, by the way. That's the CIA. And we've also had, people like NASA JPL who've been very outspoken. Tom Soderstrom said that it was conservatively 1/100th of the cost of what it would have been if he had built out the infrastructure himself to build the infrastructure for his Mars landing. I mean that kind of... >> It just keeps giving. You lower prices. Okay I got to change gears, because a couple things that I've observed to every Reinvent, as being a customer and I think I've used Amazon I first came out as an entrepreneur. (inaudible) had no URL support, but that's showing my age. (Tricia laughs) But, here's the thing, you guys have enabled customers to solve problems that they couldn't solve in the past. >> (Tricia) Right. >> You mentioned NASA and then a variety of other (inaudible). But you guys are also in Public Sectors specifically are doing new things. New problems that no ones ever seen before. And society, entrepreneurship, diversity inclusion, education, non-profits. You don't think of Gov Cloud and Public Sector; you think non-profits, education. So it's kind of these sectors that are coming together. This is a new phenomenon. Can you talk and explain the dynamic behind that and the opportunity? >> Sure. I love to hear the stories of what our customers are doing when they really are tackling a problem that no one had thought of before. So for instance, at Reinvent this year, one of our Public Sector customers who spoke was Thorne. And they are using AI to crawl the dark web and help find people who are trafficking children in human trafficking, and that's a great use of AI and that's the kind of thing. It also helps our public servants because it helps to make police officers' jobs more effective. So of course we know that police officers, there are never enough police officers to go around. There's never enough detectives to look into everything that they need to and this makes them so much more effective to make the world a safer, better place. I also love some of the things about educational outcomes. Ivy Tech Community College is one of our great community college customers. And their using big data analysis to put together all of the different data sets that they have about their students and identify who might be at risk of failing a class 10 days into the semester so that they can help intervene with those students. >> Where was that class when I needed it? >> I know. >> Popup and say, "Hey homework time." >> I mean it really is looking at what kind of issues that they're having very early on with attendance, with different behavioral things. >> A great example at Reinvent with the California Community College system. That was a very interesting way. He was up there bragging like it was nobody's business. >> Yeah, and I think the community colleges that really goes into this idea of we're trying to expand opportunity for a wide-range of people. You might think of computer scientists as that's going to be all the Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and MIT people. And of course those are great contributors to computer science, but the fact is that computer science is so critical in so many aspects of life and in so many different kinds of careers. We know that one of the limiters to our own growth is going to be the talent that we have available to take advantage of the technology. We've been really working hard to expand opportunity for a wide-range of people, so that any smart person with an idea, can be using our technology, that's part of what's behind building the AWS Educate Program, which is a program to offer free computer science training to any university student or college student anywhere in the world. >> So it's a program you guys are doing? >> (Tricia) This is a program we are doing, >> What's it called again? >> AWS Educate. And it's a program that offers free credits to use AWS to any student who is enrolled in any kind of university or college anywhere around the world. >> That's a gateway drug to Cloud computing. >> Absolutely. >> Free resources. >> Yeah, and we're giving them a training path so that they can... >> So they want to write some code, or whatever they want to do. >> Yeah, and they can take different paths and learn. Okay, I want to learn a data science pathway, so I'm going to go that way. I want to learn a websites pathway. And they can go through things and build a portfolio of projects that they've actually built. >> So can they tap into some of the AWS AI tools too? >> They can tap into a wide range of tools and they have different levels of tiers of credits that they get, so it's a really great program to really open up Cloud computing. >> Now is there any limitations on that? What grade levels, is it college and above? >> Actually at Reinvent we just opened it up to students 14 and above. >> (John) Beautiful. That's awesome. >> And we also have a program called... >> How do they prove they're a student? >> Having a school, an EDU email address, or their school being registered through the program. >> (John) Okay, that's awesome. >> And then we also have another program called We Power Tech, and that really is a program to help open up the talent pool again to women to underserved communities, to people of different ethnic backgrounds who might not see themselves in technology because they don't see themselves as computer programmers on TV or whatever. >> Or they don't see their peer group in there, or some sort of might be an inclusion issue. >> Right and we're looking at if you take educate and We Power Tech, we're looking at that full pipeline of talent all the way from kids who are deciding should I pursue computer science or not, all the way through to professionals and getting them to try to stay in technology. >> So you guys are legit on this. You're not going to just check the box and focus on narrow things. A lot of companies do that, where they go oh we're targeting young girls or women. You guys are looking at the spectrum broader. >> Yep. And we're really looking at different communities and helping people to find their community in technology so that they can find supportive networks and also find people to mentor them or find people to mentor who are elsewhere. >> How big of a problem is it right now in today's culture and in the online culture to find peers and friends to do work like this? Because it just doesn't seem to me like there's been any innovation in online message groups. Seems like so 30 years ago. (Tricia laughs) >> Yeah. I think it is tough and I think there are somethings that we're trying to break through. For instance, a lot of the role models out there are the same people over and over again. We're trying to find new role models. And we find that through our customers. We find customers who are doing interesting work and we're trying to cultivate their voice and help put them on stage. >> New voices because it's new things. Machine learning, these are new disciplines. Data science across the board. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I love about the technology is it really is has democratizing affect. If you have an idea, you can make that idea happen for very little money, with just your ingenuity and your ability to stick to it. >> I got to ask you the hard question. Shouldn't be hard for you, but Amazon is gritty. It's been called gritty by me, hustling, but they're very good with their money. They don't really waste a lot in marketing. >> Yeah we're frugal. >> Very frugal, but you're very efficient, so I got to ask your favorite gorilla marketing technique. Cause you guys do more with less. >> (Tricia) We do. >> Once been criticized in Wired magazine. I remember reading years ago about they were comparing the Schwag bag to Reinvent. (Tricia laughs) Google almost gave out phones. It's kind of like typical reporter, but my point is you guys spend your money on education to engineers. You don't skip on that, but you might not put the flair onto an event, but now you guys are doing it. >> I think there are two things. So one of them is the aesthetic of our events. We typically do have a very stripped down aesthetic and we've made frugal look cool. I think that's one of the things I learned when I came here was go ahead and have the concrete floor and put quotes from customers there instead of paying to carpet it. So don't waste money on things that don't add value that's one of the core tenants of what we do in marketing. >> Get a better band instead of the rug. You guys have always had great music. >> We do always have great music. >> Tricia, tell me about your favorite program or project you've done a lot over the years. Pick your favorite child. What's your favorite? You have a lot of great stuff going on. Do you have a favorite? >> I think that my favorite is probably the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge which is something we've done every year for the last four years. And we really went and asked cities, "Tell us what you're doing with our technology." Because we weren't sure what they were doing cause it's not very expensive for cities to run on us. We found that they were doing incredible things. They were doing water monitoring in their cities to help improve the quality of life of their citizens. They were delivering education more effectively. They were helping their transportation run in a more effective way. New York City Department of Transportation was doing really cool citizen facing apps to help them manage their transportation challenges and also cities all around the world. We've had people put in things about garbage management in Jerusalem and about lighting management in a Japanese city. We've had all kinds of really interesting stories come out and I just love hearing what the customers are doing and this year we added a Dream Big category where we said, "If you had the money, what would "you do with technology in your city?" and we've been really thrilled to be able to offer grants and fund some of those things to help cities get started. >> That's awesome. Not only is it engaging for them to engage with you through the program, it's inspirational. The use cases are everything from IOT to every computer. >> Yeah and we've also had partners submit as well, and we've learned about things like parking applications that cities are putting in place to help their citizens find better parking or all kinds of really interesting. How to keep track of the tree and do a tree census in their cities. Things like that. >> Maybe I'll borrow that and give you credit for it as a Cube question. What would you do if you had unlimited money? >> Exactly. (John laughs) Well the great part is that most of the cities find out that they can do what they want to do with very little money. They think it's going to be millions of dollars and then they realize, "Oh my gosh, it's going to be hard "for me to spend this 50 thousand dollar grant "because it doesn't cost that much." >> That's awesome and you got a big event coming up in June. Public Sector Summit again. Any preview on that? Any thing you can share? I'm sure it's a lot of things up in the air. >> A lot of really cool things. We are very excited to have some of our great customers on stage again. We're also this year going to have a pre day where we're going to feature Air and Space workloads on AWS. So that's going to be really interesting. I think we're going to have Blue Origin there and we're going to talk about what it's going to take to get to the next planet. >> And certainly that's beautiful for Cloud and also a huge robotics trend. People love to geek out on space related stuff. >> Yep. >> Awesome. Well the Cube will be there. Any numbers? Is it going to be the same location? >> It's going to be the same location at the Convention Center June 20th and 21st. We're going to have boot camps and certification labs and all that kind of stuff. I expect we'll grow again, so definitely more than seven thousand people. >> How big was the first one? >> Oh my gosh, the first one was in a little hotel conference room. I think there were a hundred and 50 people there. (Tricia laughs) >> Sounds like Reinvent happening all over again. We've seen this movie before. >> (Tricia) Yep. >> Tricia, thanks so much for coming on the Cube here. In the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington DC. We're in Arlington, Virginia, right next to the nation's capital. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (techno music)