(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the chief operating officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award and joining him one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who is a assistant developer with the United States, Small Business Administration, and of course the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu? >> Hey Stu; Thank you. >> All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, but maybe just give us a sketch if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. >> Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, Four Points is a value added technology reseller focused on the federal government and we've been working with federal customer since 2002. We're a service disabled veteran owned small business, and we've been in a Amazon partner since 2012. >> Wonderful; Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020, if you could tell us a little bit about your role in your organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. >> Sure; so I worked for the chief information officer and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. >> Wonderful; Joel, maybe a connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which I understand was predated the COVID incidents. >> Sure; we've been with SBA for several years now. And SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity, from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or use third party contractors for. So, Four Points came in as a true value added reseller of cloud to SBA providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professionals services. >> All right; so Ryan bring us in a little bit, the project that we're talking about here, what was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flush out a little bit, what you're doing there? >> Yeah, so most recently Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community oriented lenders to submit Paycheck Protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like big banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock and Four Points was there for us. We got new accounts set up. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but has done an incredible amount of work and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points. So we're really excited about that. >> Yeah, If I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money move through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. >> Yeah, that's so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today. And so we're very comfortable with AWS service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that, it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, dynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did. We never even actually saw a performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective as the program manager. >> well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime. Those are really the promise the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of teeing out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together, and, the various pieces underneath. >> Yes Stu, it's interesting. Four Points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200+ services that AWS has. They also have a direct access to billing and usage information that lets them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone. And they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using of variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live very, very robust, really large environment. >> Yeah, right, and I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with the serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud native technology. You know, the concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, you know, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written and now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need, means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, sba.gov is now serving a a hundred or a thousand times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, but we're doing a hundred or a thousand times more work. That's a win, that's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. >> Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SBA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SBA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think there were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well also. >> Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain instant size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native, like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances, so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year. So they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expire. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out and they have enabled us to do things like, be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up to all because it's been such a key thing over this last year. >> Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years, is that the role between developers and that, that finance piece. So, Ryan, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? is it Four Points? You know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at Reinvent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how, how does that communication and decision making happen? >> That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how Four Points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like Four Points instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider is that Four Points provides us a service where every quarter they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion, and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, "Hey, this is what we think" has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have, when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them, because they're the vendor >> From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give to your peers out there, and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things, either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations. >> So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration, that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like Four Points, and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that a third party entity that can come in and, call bowl and also call Yahtzee. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project. And it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is, we going to change how we do business project, and we going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. >> All right; and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about Four Points and congratulations again, the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. >> Great, thanks Stu, we're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud. And it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such, such payoff for the whole country. >> All right, Well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates, such an important project this year. Thanks so much. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks >> Stay with us for more covered from the AWS Public Sector Partner awards. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program". I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California doing the remote interviews, during this pandemic we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners and here to feature the most Innovative Connect Deployment. We have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations Joel Marchildon, Accenture Canada, managing director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada chief transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you and nice to be here >> So obviously, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing you got a business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. Its been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Teresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is starving and deserving of the award? >> Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that was stood up fairly quickly, over the course of about four days and really in support of benefit that the Government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, its a fully functioning featured contact center solution. Includes an IVR. And, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. >> Yeah, we're happy to actually, we were obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jobs are being lost, our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenge was quickly how do we actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada emergency response benefit that we had to support clients directly and so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a firestorm, to say, well, what could you do? And how could you help. And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, and Accenture won. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days, what for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody a real; a human being, as well as to be able to efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, was pretty fundamental for us. So the the people in the groups that we're talking through here we're speaking to millions of people, who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and of high quality personally as a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >> And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, its a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right. So like other things, you can kind of plan for things, hypothetical, you got scenarios. But this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. Its not like, well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think. This is real results, fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud, can I stand up something quick, and you did it with a partner, okay. This is like not, like normal. Its like, its like unheard of, right. Four days, with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here. Take us through through what happened. >> So I think I can start. As you can imagine the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly, for about two weeks. We had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody has seen before the level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine its a Warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs, there is no support, there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So, and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there. And there is straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed is unheard of on all fronts. When it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context, the clients that were desperate to reach us, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day. We're not talking a few thousand here, ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in overtaken by volumes, call centers, because we had our regular ones still operating. Over a million calls were coming in the day. With the capacity to answer 10s of thousands and so the reality is that the Call Centers that we put up here, very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same. That these types of solutions and technology and their scalability, their agility, their speed of deployment, is frankly something we want we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do them during normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us a while I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center, enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case we went from years, to literally days. >> Well, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? The waterfall meetings getting everyone arguing kind of gets in the way and the old software model, I want to come back to the transformation Benoit a minute, Because I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel, because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently, this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is, "We're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, a consulting firm, taking our times trying to get a pound of flesh from the client." This is an example of my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted, because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do sync up and execute take us through what happened on your side. >> Yeah, I mean, so its an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution out the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on, how we go through approvals, etc, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team and I think that we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to it. To help Canada in a time of need. So I think we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right, and we were down to hours and a lot of instances. So it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean to Benoit's point I think this is really going to hopefully change the way... It illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, etc. For solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things beat the market scalability, but just as the benefit itself has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is, its simple to use technologically. I mean, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents, by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think, from that perspective, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we know that we knew were going to come. >> Benoit this is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know its under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and then help people get on with their day. But transformation is about having people closest to the problem, execute. And also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. Amazon came in and said, "Hey, you want to stand something up?" You wired it together the solution quickly, you have close to it. Looking back now its almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before, as you said, and then you had to bring people in, who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook to share your thoughts on this because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time, and it actually is playing out in real time. >> Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that its a playbook. Its I would say its an ideal and dream playbook to bid like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly but also correctly, because you can't pull all these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly I think, as Canadians we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change, I was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some higher level of energy was thrown in quickly, mobilize everybody all at once. Nobody was said he is sitting around saying, I wonder if we have changed management covered off, this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best pay your plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous driving change, exception, acceptance, and adoption, is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward. And we now found the way and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning, we had 10 year plans for our big transformations, because some of our programs are the most important in the country in many ways. We support people about 8 million Canadians a month, depending on the benefits payments that we deliver. And they're the most marginal needing and requires our support from seniors, to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself, and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have its just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us a way that we had never forecast, and I have to say I had to throw up my 10 year plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 to nine to eight year plans going forward. And so its exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then, obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. >> What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable, but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have. And take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that's needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge. And this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC. Its, pass, shoot, score really fast. So this is the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary in solving problems? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we were able to show in what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens, that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly, is what's becoming more important, obviously, security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well. But its ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6, within four days, is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE, and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Acquia and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP. And I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway. If you're not going to do anything till you got the final end product out there, then its going to be late. So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >> Benoit, talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, on foundational things and then services. Its the cloud model. >> Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwartz, which I believe you are quite familiar with. And, I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the Government of Canada, right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting. And I'm sure its possible in some other places, and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon. I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile the building blocks sprints and MVPs. I mean, they're enough fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest Harriers and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective, service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult. Arduous you make change over years, not months, not days, for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working, its a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We know in working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. (all laughing) (indistinct) partners. We're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program and its going to be iterative, it is going to be designed built, it will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because the government is... We may have changed a lot, but the government is not necessarily caught on to most of these approaches. But the reality is that, that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization once they've tasted that. If you let them down, well, they'll remember and frankly, they do remember now because they want more of this. And its going to be hard. But its a better hard, better challenge, than the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, would it work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus, and then we drive everyone to that solution. >> Shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new wave, you're oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of this just look could feel its success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice synergy. This is a key! Joe, take us home here on the Accenture. The award winner, you guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a it was a complete team effort and continues to be. Its not a bunch of eccentric technologists in the background doing this. The commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve it from Benoit team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So its been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been well said, I think one thing that's done is its created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Benoit team. >> Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect Deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the Hockey-Reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. Its pass, shoot, score every time and its contagious. (Benoit laughs) Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the election. Take care! >> Thanks. >> Take care. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's Coverage "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards" show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Awards for their partners. Really interesting, we get to talk to people around the globe, we talked to the vendors, the award winners as well as their customers who have some interesting projects. So happy to welcome to the program coming to us from Argentina. I have Leo Bracco. He is the Latin American Executive Director for CloudHesive and joining him, his customer Carolina Tchintian. She is the Director of the Political Institution Program at CIPPEC. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, so Leo, first of all, let's start with you if we could. So CloudHesive first of all, congratulations, you were the Nonprofit Sector award winner for cybersecurity solutions. Of course, anybody that knows public sector, there's the government agencies, there's nonprofits there's education. The cybersecurity of course, went from the top priority to the top, top priority here in 2020. So if you could just give us a snapshot of CloudHesive for our customer. >> Well, CloudHesive is a US based company, started six years ago in 2014. And we decide a couple of years ago to move to Latin America and to start working with Latin America customers. Our offices are in Argentina right now. And one of the focus that we have in the solutions that we give to our customers is security. We work on services to help companies to reduce the cost, increase productivity, and what should the security posture? So we've been working a long time ago to many NPOs, and seeing how they can leverage the solutions and how they can give secure, how to be secure in the world. In the internet. >> All right, Carolina, if you could tell us a little bit about the CIPPEC and maybe then key us up as the project that you're working on. >> Okay, thank you. So CIPPEC is a nonprofit think tank, nonprofit organization, independent organization that aims to deliver better public policies in different areas. In economic development, in social protection and state and government. My particular program, the political institutions program goal is, or the mission is basically to promote evidence based decisions to improve democratic processes and to guarantee civil and political rights across all the countries. So we on issues such as improving election administrations, legislative work, representation, and that's our area of work. >> Wonderful. Sounds like a phenomenal project. Leo, if you could help us understand where did CloudHesive get involved in this project? Was there an existing relationship already, or was it for a specific rollout? that tell us about, obviously the security angles are a big piece? >> No, we didn't have a previous engagement with them. They come to us with a very short time to elections and they need a secure solution. So we first have to analyze the actual solution, how it works, acknowledging well the current infra that they have. Then we have to understand the challenge that they're facing. They have a very public site, they need to go public and they need to be very secure. And the last, we have to develop a fast migration strategy. We knew that AWS was the perfect fit for the need. So we just had to align a good strategy with the customer need. And all these it has been done in less than 72 hours. That was our deadline to elections. >> Wow, talk about fast. Okay, Carolina, help us understand a little bit. Had your organization, had you been using a Cloud before? Seventy-two hours is definitely an aggressive timeline. So help us understand a little bit as to what went into making your decision and obviously, 72 hours super short timeframe. >> Super, super short. Yeah, that was a big challenge. So let me tell you more about what we do and the context. So Argentina holds elections, national elections every two years. In each election year CIPPEC tries to generate and systematize analysis of provincial and national elections with the goal of informing key actors in the electoral processes. This is and decision makers, political parties, media, and general population. So as our first experience in 2017, with informed voter project, we had this collaboration with the National Electoral Authorities in which we created a landing page in our website where you could find as the voter, all of the information you need to go and cast your vote throughout the entire election process. Meaning from the campaign stage, election administration details, polling places, electoral offer, participation et cetera. So that was a landing page hosted in our website. And in 2017, we managed to have a button in every eligible voter in Argentina Facebook feed. So you could go click there and go to our website, right. And have all of the information summarize in a very simple way, straightforward way. So what happened in the 2017 election day is that the button was so successful that the landing page made our server to collapse in the first hours of the election day. So we learned a huge lesson there, which was that we had to be prepared in 2019, if we wanted to repeat this experience. And that is how we get to CloudHesive. >> Wonderful, Leo, if you could, help us understand a little bit architecturally what's going on there, what was CoHesive doing, what AWS services were leveraged? >> Perfect. Well we need great reliability, performance, scalability of course and the main thing security. We have no doubt about the Cloud and all the differentials of AWS. Our main question was about how do we align the right services to give the best solution to the customer? So we did kind of strategy with S3, CloudFront, and we, at the same time being monitorizing everything with CloudTrail and securing the public's access to all of these information. That give us a perfect fit for the solution, a very easy solution and very of course scalable, but more than anything, we could improve the customer experience in very small amount of time. So this is a very simple solution, that fits perfect for the customer. >> Wonderful. Carolina, if you could, tell us how did things go? What lessons have you learned? Anything along the way that you would give feedback to your peers or other organizations that were looking to do something similar? >> Yeah, well, the 2017 experience was a very tough experience for us because we've been preparing for election day during the 2016 and 2017. And the infrastructure was the limit we had in that point. So we couldn't afford ... We have a commitment with informing voters and informing key actors on election process. And these key actors are expecting that information on election day, before, and after. The lesson there is, we cannot be limited by the infrastructure. Assuming that in 2019, that the landing page would receive a similar amount or a huge amount of traffic volume visits on the election day, basically, we knew that traditional hosting service couldn't fulfill those needs so we had to go beyond traditional and the partner was critical to help us to the migration, to the Cloud. >> Yeah, Leo, maybe you could speak a little bit to that, the scalability, and of course, nonprofit's very sensitive to costs involved in these solutions. Help us understand that those underpinnings of leveraging, AWS specifically in CloudHesive. How this meets their needs and still is financially, makes sense. >> Perfect. When you have this kind of solutions, of course, your first concern is, okay, how do I make a scalable solution that fits on the, just on this moment that they need the behavior for so many infrastructure involved. And then at the other day, they need no infra at all, but you have another two big things that you have to focus on. One, is the security, you need to monitor all the behaviors of the content and pay attention to any external menace. You have one 24-hour day, so you need to be very responsibility and high sensitive information that the customer has on the set of data there. It's good to say that we have no security incidents, and no security breach during the most public stage of the operation, so that there was very good for us. The next thing is from the delivery perspective. You have a potential pick of people over the side to usually manage the content delivery network to answer all the requirements. You must be able to share the content in CloudFront, and so you have, and you can achieve your goals, right? And what I can say, it's about numbers, we achieve more than 99.5 efficiency hit rate you over the CDN, that's over CloudFront. And we kept server CPU such below 10% all the time. So this was a major success for us. Like we have no trouble, we use things at the most. And most of anything, the customer has the security, everything look from our perspective. (mumbles) >> Leo, what follow up if I could, if you look at 2020 being able to scale and respond to the changes in workload and be able to stay secure when bad actors, many people are working at home, but doesn't mean the bad actors aren't out there. We've actually seen an increase in security attacks. So just, do you have any commentary overall about what's happening more recently in what you see in your space? >> Yeah, well, we're very focused right now and while security is being each time bigger, right? One of the biggest menace in security is our own team, because we have to keep our teams auto align to the process and understanding the security as a first step doing things from the network perspective. Then we have a very good experience over this last two years, with all the security tools that AWS is seeking to the market. So we now have CloudTrail. We can do many things with WAF we're working towers of new good security solutions. And so I think this will be the future. We have to focus ourself in these two pillars. The first pillar is, okay, what we can do on our own network and the other pillar's, all the tools that AWS is giving us so we can manage security from a new perspective. >> Carolina, last question that I have for you is, look forward a little bit, if you will, are there things that you'll be looking to do in future election cycles or anything else from this project that you could expect going forward? >> Yeah, definitely. We're going to repeat this experience in 2021. Trying to think of the success was the 2019 election cycle. And in this particular informed voter project, we might want to keep doing this for the next election cycles, not only 2023 now, but for the future. >> All right then, Leo, last piece for you, first of all, congratulations, again, winning Best Cyber Security Solution for Nonprofit. Just talk a little bit if you would, about your partnership with AWS and specifically, the requirements and what you see in the nonprofit segment. >> Well, we see that the nonprofit are growing large too, they will need very good scalable solutions. We see that all the focus that we have in on security is the next need because we have been working on these towers to the future. The solutions kept growing each time. The networks are growing each time. And the traffic is growing. The focus on the security will be one of the appendix of our work in the future. And I think that's the biggest issue that we are going to have. Having good engineers, good hard work and manage the challenge and consolidate all the solution as a need. Right now, we're working on many projects with different NGO's and we're working towers that they have the solution that fits them. And of course, we try to keep, in all the public sector, we try to keep the cost at a range level that we can afford that our customers can afford. That's I think, a big problem that we're having. >> Well, Carolina, congratulations on the progress with your project. Thank you so much for joining us. And Leo, thank you again for joining us and congratulations to you and the CloudHesive team for winning the award. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage, theCUBE, at the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the AWS Public Sector. Their Partner Awards, really enjoying this. We get to talk to some of the diverse ecosystem as well as they've all brought on their customers, some really phenomenal case studies. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. First of all, we have Jared Bell, he's the Chief Engineer of self response, operational readiness at T-Rex Solutions and T-Rex is the award winner for the most customer obsessed mission-based in Fed Civ. So Jared, congratulations to you and the T-Rex team and also joining him, his customer Michael Thieme, he's the Assistant Director for the Decennial Census Program systems and contracts for the US Census Bureau, thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to be here. >> All right, Jared, if we could start with you, as I said, you're an award winner, you sit in the Fed Civ space, you've brought us to the Census Bureau, which most people understand the importance of that government program coming up on that, you know, every 10 year we've been hearing, you know, TV and radio ads talking about it, but Jared, if you could just give us a thumbnail of T-Rex and what you do in the AWS ecosystem. >> So yeah again, my name's Jared Bell and I work for T-Rex Solutions. T-Rex is a mid tier IT federal contracting company in Southern Maryland, recently graduated from hubs on status, and so T-Rex really focuses on four key areas, infrastructure in Cloud modernization, cybersecurity, and active cyber defense, big data management and analytics, and then overall enterprise system integration. And so we've been, you know, AWS partner for quite some time now and with decennial, you know, we got to really exercise a lot of the bells and whistles that are out there and really put it all to the test. >> All right, well, Michael, you know, so many people in IT, we talk about the peaks and valleys that we have, not too many companies in our organization say, well, we know exactly, you know, that 10 year spike of activity that we're going to have, I know there's lots of work that goes on beyond that, but it tells a little bit , your role inside the Census Bureau and what's under your purview. >> Yes, the Census Bureau, is actually does hundreds of surveys every year, but the decennial census is our sort of our main flagship activity. And I am the Assistant Director under our Associate Director for the IT and for the contracts for the decennial census. >> Wonderful and if you could tell us a little bit the project that you're working on, that eventually pulled T-Rex in. >> Sure. This is the 2020 census and the challenge of the 2020 census is we've done the census since 1790 in the United States. It's a pillar, a foundation of our democracy, and this was the most technologically advanced census we've ever done. Actually up until 2020, we have done our censuses mostly by pen, paper, and pencil. And this is a census where we opened up the internet for people to respond from home. We can have people respond on the phone, people can respond with an iPhone or an Android device. We tried to make it as easy as possible and as secure as possible for people to respond to the census where they were and we wanted to meet the respondent where they were. >> All right. So Jared, I'd love you to chime in here 'cause I'm here and talking about, you know, the technology adoption, you know, how much was already in plans there, where did T-Rex intersect with this census activity? >> Yeah. So, you know, census deserves a lot of credit for their kind of innovative approach with this technical integrator contract, which T-Rex was fortunate enough to win. When we came in, you know, we were just wrapping up the 2018 test. we really only had 18 months to go from start to, you know, a live operational tests to prepare for 2020. And it was really exciting to be brought in on such a large mission critical project and this is one of the largest federal IT products in the Cloud to date. And so, you know, when we came in, we had to really, you know, bring together a whole lot of solutions. I mean, the internet self response, which is what we're going to to talk about today was one of the major components. But we really had a lot of other activities that we had to engage in. You know, we had to design and prepare an IT solution to support 260 field offices, 16,000 field staff, 400,000 mobile devices and users that were going to go out and knock on doors for a numeration. So it was real6ly a big effort that we were honored to be a part of, you know, and on top of that, T-Rex actually brought to the table, a lot of its past experience with cybersecurity and active cyber defense, also, you know, because of the importance of all this data, you know, we had the role in security all throughout, and I think T-Rex was prepared for that and did a great job. And then, you know, overall I think that, not necessarily directly to your question, but I think, y6ou know, one of the things that we were able to do to make ourselves successful and to really engage with the census Bureau and be effective with our stakeholders was that we really build a culture of decennial within the technical integrator, you know, we had brown bags and working sessions to really teach the team the importance of the decennial, you know, not just as a career move, but also as a important activity for our country. And so I think that that really helped the team, you know, internalize that mission and really drove kind of our dedication to the census mission and really made us effective and again, a lot of the T-Rex leadership had a lot of experience there from past decennials and so they really brought that mindset to the team and I think it really paid off. >> Michael, if you could bring us inside a little a bit the project, you know, 18 months, obviously you have a specific deadline you need to hit, for that help us understand kind of the architectural considerations that you had there, any concerns that you had and I have to imagine that just the global activities, the impacts of COVID-19 has impacted some of the end stage, if you will, activities here in 2020. >> Absolutely. Yeah. The decennial census is, I believe a very unique IT problem. We have essentially 10 months out of the decade that we have to scale up to gigantic and then scale back down to run the rest of the Census Bureau's activities. But our project, you know, every year ending in zero, April 1st is census day. Now April 1st continued to be census day in 2020, but we also had COVID essentially taking over virtually everything in this country and in fact in the world. So, the way that we set up to do the census with the Cloud and with the IT approach and modernization that we took, actually, frankly, very luckily enabled us to kind of get through this whole thing. Now, we haven't had, Jared discussed a little bit the fact that we're here to talk about our internet self response, we haven't had one second of downtime for our response. We've taken 77 million. I think even more than 78 million responses from households, out of the 140 million households in the United States, we've gotten 77 million people to respond on our internet site without one second of downtime, a good user experience, a good supportability, but the project has always been the same. It's just this time, we're actually doing it with much more technology and hopefully the way that the Cloud has supported us will prove to be really effective for the COVID-19 situation. Because we've had changes in our plans, difference in timeframes, we are actually not even going into the field, or we're just starting to go into the field these next few weeks where we would have almost been coming out of the field at this time. So that flexibility, that expandability, that elasticity, that being in the Cloud gives all of our IT capabilities was really valuable this time. >> Well, Jared, I'm wondering if you can comment on that. All of the things that Michael just said, you know, seem like, you know, they are just the spotlight pieces that I looked at Cloud for. You know, being able to scale on demand, being able to use what I need when I need it, and then dial things down when I don't, and especially, you know, I don't want to have to, you know, I want to limit how much people actually need to get involved. So help understand a little bit, you know, what AWS services underneath, we're supporting this and anything else around the Cloud deployment. >> Sure, yeah. Michael is spot on. I mean, the cloud is tailor made for our operation and activity here. You know, I think all told, we use over 30 of the AWS FedRAMP solutions in standing up our environment across all those 52 system of systems that we were working with. You know, just to name a few, I mean, internet self response alone, you're relying heavily on auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, you know, we relied a lot on Lambda Functions, DynamoDB. We're one of the first adopters through DynamoDB global tables, which we use for a session persistence across regions. And then on top of that, you know, the data was all flowing down into RDS databases and then from there to, you know, the census data Lake, which was built on EMR and Elasticsearch capabilities, and that's just to name a couple. I mean, you know, we had, we ran the gamut of AWS services to make all this work and they really helped us accelerate. And as Michael said, you know, we stood this up expecting to be working together in a war room, watching everything hand in hand, and because of the way we, were able to architect it in partnership with AWS, we all had to go out and stay at home, you know, the infrastructure remain rock solid. We can have to worry about, you know, being hands on with the equipment and, you know, again, the ability to automate and integrate with those solutions Cloud formation and things like that really let us keep a small agile team of, you know, DevSecOps there to handle the deployments. And we were doing full scale deployments with, you know, one or two people in the middle of the night without any problems. So it really streamlined things for us and helped us keep a tight natural, sure. >> Michael, I'm curious about what kind of training your team need to go through to take advantage of this solution. So from bringing it up to the ripple effect, as you said, you're only now starting to look at who would go into the field who uses devices and the like, so help us understand really the human aspect of undergoing this technology. >> Sure. Now, the census always has to ramp up this sort of immediate workforce. We hire, we actually process over 3 million people through, I think, 3.9 million people applied to work for the Census Bureau. And each decade we have to come up with a training program and actually training sites all over the country and the IT to support those. Now, again, modernization for the 2020 census, didn't only involve the things like our internet self response, it also involves our training. We have all online training now, we used to have what we called verbatim training, where we had individual teachers all over the country in places like libraries, essentially reading text exactly the same way to exactly over and over again to our, to the people that we trained. But now it's all electronic, it allows us to, and this goes to the COVID situation as well, it allows us to bring only three people in at a time to do training. Essentially get them started with our device that we have them use when they're knocking on doors and then go home and do the training, and then come back to work with us all with a minimal contact, human contact, sort of a model. And that, even though we designed it differently, the way that we set the technology of this time allowed us to change that design very quickly, get people trained, not essentially stop the census. We essentially had to slow it down because we weren't sure exactly when it was going to be safe to go knocking on door to door, but we were able to do the training and all of that worked and continues to work phenomenally. >> Wonderful. Jared, I wonder if you've got any lessons learned from working with the census group that might be applicable to kind of, the broader customers out there? >> Oh, sure. Well, working with the census, you know, it was really a great group to work with. I mean, one of the few groups I worked with who have such a clear vision and understanding of what they want their final outcome to be, I think again, you know, for us the internalization of the decennial mission, right? It's so big, it's so important. I think that because we adopted it early on we felt that we were true partners with census, we had a lot of credibility with our counterparts and I think that they understood that we were in it with them together and that was really important. I would also say that, you know, because we're talking about the go Cloud solutions that we worked, you know, we also engage heavily with the AWS engineering group and in partnership with them, you know, we relied on the infrastructure event management services they offer and was able to give us a lot of great insight into our architecture and our systems and monitoring to really make us feel like we were ready for the big show when the time came. So, you know, I think for me, another lesson learned there was that, you know, the Cloud providers like AWS, they're not just a vendor, they're a partner and I think that now going forward, we'll continue to engage with those partners early and often. >> Michael the question I have for you is, you know, what would you say to your peers? What lessons did you have learned and how much of what you've done for the census, do you think it will be applicable to all those other surveys that you do in between the big 10 year surveys? >> All right. I think we have actually set a good milestone for the rest of the Census Bureau, that the modernization that the 2020 census has allowed since it is our flagship really is something that we hope we can continue through the decade and into the next census, as a matter of fact. But I think one of the big lessons learned I wanted to talk about was we have always struggled with disaster recovery. And one of the things that having the Cloud and our partners in the Cloud has helped us do is essentially take advantage of the resilience of the Cloud. So there are data centers all over the country. If ever had a downtime somewhere, we knew that we were going to be able to stay up. For the decennial census, we've never had the budget to pay for a persistent disaster recovery. And the Cloud essentially gives us that kind of capability. Jared talked a lot about security. I think we have taken our security posture to a whole different level, something that allowed us to essentially, as I said before, keep our internet self response free of hacks and breaches through this whole process and through a much longer process than we even intended to keep it open. So, there's a lot here that I think we want to bring into the next decade, a lot that we want to continue, and we want the census to essentially stay as modern as it has become for 2020. >> Well, I will tell you personally Michael, I did take the census online, it was really easy to do, and I'll definitely recommend if they haven't already, everybody listening out there so important that you participate in the census so that they have complete data. So, Michael, Jared, thank you so much. Jared, congratulations to your team for winning the award and you know, such a great customer. Michael, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. We Appreciate all that's being done, especially in these challenging times. >> Thank you and thanks for doing the census. >> All right and stay tuned for more coverage of the AWS public sector partner award I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome to a special production of theCUBE. We're talking to the Amazon web services public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and we're digging in on education. It's one of the sectors, of course, public sector looks at nonprofits, it looks at the government sectors and the education, and of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program, we have two guests. First of all, representing the award winning-company, Mohammad Haque. He is the co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with eLumin. And joining is one of his customers, Damian Doyle, who is the associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, or UMBC, as it's known. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us here. >> All right, first of all, Mohammad, congratulations. As I said in my intro, such an important topic. I have two children that are dealing with remote learning. I have lots of friends that work in higher education and new in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS public sector award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition. And of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit, you know, you are the co=founder, so we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background, and tell us about what differentiates eLumin. >> Sure. eLumin, we provide managed products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology resources, course content, course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use whatever device they have wherever they are, and have access to those applications that are required for completing that course coursework. They can be in, at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop, on the side of a mountain in the middle East, wherever they may be, but leveling that playing field so that they can access and have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're, what our goal is, is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >> Fantastic. Damian, if we could turn to you, then. At UMBC, maybe if you could give our audience a thumbnail of the university, and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about e-learning, but maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre-COVID and what you were faced and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >> Sure. Be happy to. So we're, UMBC is a midsize public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate, and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the STEM disciplines. And so pre-COVID, very based in collaborative environments, active learning, but hands-on, so a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that, and we leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in, whether it's in engineering, biology, any of those kinds of programs. As you said, the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scattershot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're going to have access to and the abilities and connectivity they're going to have. So this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >> Excellent. Mohammad, were you working with UMBC before the current move to go remote? Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >> I believe actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damian and his team reached out to eLumin looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs, but with the change and not having access to those labs anymore, needed a remote learning solution, a remote access solution for being able to access those high compute, high graphics processing, memory-intensive applications through the cloud and taking into account the fact that students won't have the highest end computer laptop. They'll probably be working on a Chromebook or a lower-end machine, but need that compute power. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, schools were shutting down, essentially, physically shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. >> Yeah, Damian, I'd like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit the timeframes? How fast did you go from, oh my gosh, we need this, we need proposals, we need to roll this out, and we need to have students and teachers back up and running? >> Well, I think the one thing from our side, we had already known of eLumin and we had been looking at that pre-COVID. We knew we needed product that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they needed. So once we identified that, the thing that was amazing to me is we moved from our existing system over to production eLumin in, I think it was about two and a half weeks sort of start to finish, and to get all the images, to get all the technology running, tested, and everything up and running in two and a half weeks for a full solution for a campus is, was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw as going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time, rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >> Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could, Damian, a little bit help us understand how much were you using a cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that in the, I guess if we say post-COVID world, you will probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say? >> Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud-based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of a virtual computing solution in the cloud, but it wasn't that extensive, and a lot of our individual programs, chemical engineering, geography, and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of schedule times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Coming out of this, we fully expect if we're going an extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of COVID, they're not going to want to go back to that model where they're asking, they have to get permission and go in in limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now on. >> Yeah, this is, I mean, they've gotten a taste, essentially, and so they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >> Yeah, Mohammad, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there. Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great. If in the future, you still want to leverage this solution, but you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of a how AWS architecturally supports what you're doing, and just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment and however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that too. >> Right, I mean, so with AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed, but we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of student scheduling. So if we've got a course that we know that is running from >> 10: 00 AM to 11:00 AM, prior to that course starting, we'll scale the environment up so that it's available for those students if it's more of a in course lab session and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. Physical environment, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for student usage, off hours, overnight, take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running all the time. >> And this is one of the biggest differentiators. So many times in higher ed, we struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very different from corporations and other verticals. With the eLumin solution and the capabilities in AWS, we're really having this tailor to our students' schedules, to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us, but it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of pushback from the academic side, because it is really tailored to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing and acceptance standpoint. >> Yeah, Damian, I'm curious, once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educator side, as well as the student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use things. That sounds great, but do you have to change office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that? I'm just trying to understand the ripple effect of what you're doing. >> No, it's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we, with students, if there's a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively, they're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is reached out to all of our faculty that we're training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and tried to work with them to understand what this solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taken an approach of rather than sit everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab, they're moving some of this to more asynchronous so that the students can sort of work at their own pace and sort of rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking of this, but the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing we're always trying to do. >> Excellent. Mohammad, I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what's been happening. Obviously I'm sure you've been quite busy in responding to things. What's been the impact on your business? How has AWS been as a partner to be able to support the needs of what you're doing? >> Well, as you can imagine, things have just really blown up in terms of demand and being able to, again, through the power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment. As we spoke about earlier, this deployment was two and a half weeks from start to finish, being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been critical in moving things forward. >> Excellent. Damian, back to you on this. Obviously if you had had more time to be able to plan this out, there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give as you've moved through this rapid acceleration of the move to remote? >> Certainly, I think we would've certainly done some things differently, but we had been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of COVID, so for us, it wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish, and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you deploy and how you think through that. For us, we deployed one way because we could do it very quickly, and then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents, do you like this method, or do you like some of the other possibilities, and see which user experience they liked more, and then we're able to work with eLumin, and they've been able to be very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would've done that testing ahead of time, but that's a very minor thing. These are really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier, not fundamental differences in what we're providing. >> Yeah, Damian, one last question, if I could. Sorry, Mohammad. Just, I'm curious from the financial standpoint how much you felt that you understood what costs would be and some of the levers as to what you were using and the impact there. We've seen great maturation over the last handful of years as to transparency and understanding how cloud actually is built. But just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece of things, seeing that it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. >> It wasn't, that's very true, but we also knew that it was essential. So what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We'd move to this, we'd have to see what adoption was. But being able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammad and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize, we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect, but on the weekends, it was in the evenings. Nobody's logging on Saturday or Sunday morning, but boy, at eight p.m., there's a good bit of usage. So we could tailor and do some of that off-hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable, and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we had to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the, if you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it out. >> Excellent. And Mohammad, I want to let you kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously it's a technology space you've been in and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned, advice you would give to other companies, other universities and educational facilities out there. >> Right, and this is, again, speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of the, one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. As Damian was saying, we went back, kind of analyzed what we were seeing, and after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted based off of that, according to that, taking in feedback from faculty members on how they were using the system and tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly. You're not, you don't have to be committed to every single bit there, and being able to change it on the fly is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us, Damian, thank you for joining and moving forward, sharing your story, wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammad, big congratulations on winning. Super important category, especially here in 2020. Congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector. It's their partner awards program. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE coverage Of AWS Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto, California studio doing the remote interviews with our quarantine crew. Obviously during this time of COVID we're remote with the best Remote Work Solution Award for AWS Partner Awards goes to Tyler Technologies and the City of Alvin Municipal Court, and we have Sandy Peters, Vice President General Manager of Virtual Courts, an Incode court system. Sandy is here to talk about that and Sonya Cates, who's the City of Alvin's Municipal Court Court Administrator. Welcome and congratulations for the Best Remote Work Solution. We're remote! Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> (chuckles) Thanks, John, thanks. >> Okay so Sandy I'll start with you. Tyler Technologies, you're the General Manager of the Incode Court. This is a solution that you're deploying with the city of Alvin to do some things. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing together, what does your group at Tyler do and how is it working with City of Alvin? >> Yeah John, Tyler Technologies is just completely focused on local, state and federal government software and services and particularly, the Incode court application focuses on municipal court, which is what Sonya is the Court Administrator for in Alvin. We have about 900 clients across the US that do that same thing. We had this idea about coming up with a remote solution for ability for someone to, instead of having to go to court to see a judge that they could do that remotely and really have the same experience and so we sort of launched off on that and worked with several different of our clients and came up with a way for that to happen. Sonya got involved in it very early on and has been instrumental in helping us continue to make it successful. >> Sonya, talk about the City of Alvin's municipal court system. Obviously with COVID people are sheltering in place and they're not moving around much. You have to have a solution. Talk about the partnership with Tyler. How did this come together, how do you guys work? Take us through that. >> Well we have a great relationship with Tyler Technologies. They are very instrumental in our day-to-day processing. They sent out an email with the idea, due to COVID, and soon as we received the email we decided that was the best solution for our court and we just immediately jumped on board with it so we could resolve cases and not get behind. >> So the Virtual Court means, okay, I get a ticket, I want to appeal it, normally I'd show up and now I can't so it interfaces it? Take me through the solution and where does AWS fit into all this? I'm assuming it's on the cloud. >> It definitely is on the cloud, John, and that's exactly right. So if you get a citation, sometimes you may want to appeal it; sometimes you just want to find out what your options are and you are going to go appear before a judge. You can do that remotely now through our application. It supports all the video, you can upload documents, exchange those supporting documents and then it interfaces with our case management system so that, as changes are made on the case, they're reflected and the defendant can see those and so it just, really, the whole idea is remotely being able to go before the judge, find out what your options are go through that process, and then at the very end it gives them a way to completely take care of that case and within a few minutes it can be completely resolved. >> Sonya take us through the City of Alvin's court system there. What's the challenges that you have and what was some of the feedback when you first brought this out? Take us through what happened. >> Well, to be honest, for us it was unknown territory. We were a little nervous, we were a little scared to do something of this sort but with the situation at hand we had to figure out something and this was the best fit for us. There was other options available but we prefer to stay within Tyler and utilize the system to its fullest so that's why we just said, "Okay, let's do this." I have a judge that's amazing that is very tech savvy and he was on board and my city manager. So just working with Tyler each step of the way and them comforting us, in a sense, to let us know, "Hey it's okay. "We're here each step of the way. "We'll build this together," and that's kind of where we started with the whole project. >> So this is a low-hanging fruit, obviously. It's not jury, I'm assuming. Not a jury kind of situation. It's more of other, non-jury activities, right? >> Right. It's the day-to-day court, you know, non-jury. We're not doing any jury trials right now until after the governor allows us. So it's just the regular, you know, pre-trials, the attorney dockets, arraignments and those sorts of cases. >> I'd love to be on the planning sessions as you start to roll out the software for jury selection. We'll go into that- >> I'm excited, I'm ready. >> Kind of like, what's your Facebook handle look like? (laughs) >> Yeah. >> You know, it's going to be digital surveillance. I don't know, could be crazy. But this is the future. This is what we're talking about here. This is all cloud scale. One of the benefits of cloud is taking things and doing experiments. We hear that all the time. Take us through the judge. So you said he's tech savvy. Are these like Zoom-like calls, is there a workflow? I'm just trying to envision what stood up in terms of the Incode Virtual Court side, Sandy. Sonya, what's it like? Take me through the experience. >> Well everything's tied in together, whereas Zoom and other options out there, it's separated from your software. So that was one of the perks of going through Tyler with this Virtual Court is because everything's tied into one. We don't have to enter data or anything. After the docket's over it's all live. Our forms, as soon as the defendant and the judge make an agreement, it's put into TCM where the defendant can see it live, sign the orders and immediately get it back to us and there's no delay time, there's no down time, and it's housed in one. So we're not having to miss data or, you know, it eliminates a lot of errors, clerical errors or cases from being missed. >> And the judge handles everything, right? He deals with the personal interactions, reviews the data, the defendant makes their case? >> Well (crosstalk), the clerics do a lot, too. He's talking, and as he's talking, we're entering his orders as he's speaking. >> So it's real-time- >> So we're interacting. >> This is true agility. Sandy, this is the future. This is where the solutions start to get the scale. So what's next? What is the vision? How do you guys see the next step because we all know that COVID will be over soon, we hope faster than it's happened, but it'll be a hybrid world and I think this shows a template for efficiencies. >> Right. Yes, yeah, I think that's a great point and it is the future. We're going to continue to leverage our relationship with AWS which has just been incredible through this process and went way beyond what we were expecting just in terms of resources and helping us even just within our own development processes, as we brought something to scale and in learning how to load test and really build applications that can scale out. So we believe it is the future and Sonya makes a great point many times because they live in an area where, sometimes, there's other natural disasters, like hurricanes, that can disrupt what's going on for them. But then, also, as you just think about, really, what I would call responsibility. As we move forward, we have a responsibility to provide ways that people can take care of things and not put themselves at risk as we move into the future, past COVID. So we're going to continue to leverage the technology that AWS provides, the scalability, how we can load test and everything and it was really a no-brainer for us to run this application on the AWS services for us. >> And Sonya, it's also not just about justice, not only getting the folks who are speeding and taking care of the penalties there, but it's also potentially for justice. If someone is not guilty or they want to get... business has to continue, right? So this extends into the use case of remote, hybrid, the future, because- >> Oh yes. >> Work can be distributed. Now you have efficiencies. This is going to create a connected system, which ultimately can be a connected community. >> Yeah, and it's going to reduce the failure to appear for court cases, also, so that'll be less warrants, more compliance, and it's a better relationship between us, the court, and our defendants, because they have the option of not having to leave work or miss appointments. You know, they can still tend to their case and do other things that they need to do without taking and spending, you know, couple of hours sitting in a room at the court. >> That's a huge point, Sandy. This is about resource utilization on both sides; not just the courts and the City of Alvin, on the municipal side, the citizens. It's efficiency. I mean how many people don't show up because they can't get out of work or they need to make their paycheck or they have their family needs need to be met. So all these things play into the psychology (chuckles) of life. This is digital life, virtualization of life. It really is a big thing. >> Yeah, yeah. I think you're exactly right, I mean, you're hitting on some great points. That's exactly right and when you think about what has to happen for you to go and maybe go before a judge and take off work, you got to go fight traffic, you got to find parking, you may have to have someone that takes care of your children. There's all sorts of things you're having to go through just to get down and be in front of a judge that this can help with and I think it's just one aspect, to your point, of really trying to think of really starting to help government think about how to be more customer centric, how to provide some ways for people to take care of what they need to take care of. So we're really trying, and your point about connected communities is a huge key point for us at Tyler, as we think of ways that we can help a community be more connected, for sure. >> Well you know I'm huge into whole civic relationships and having a productive government and having citizens be served for that reason and having it be a community, and now more than ever, transparency is helpful, right? This only helps things. So you guys are doing a really great job of, one, enabling a work environment remotely, in this case, it's for the courts to be operational, which they need to be, but it clearly can extend. So Sonya, I've got to ask you the question. I'd love to get your commentary on surprises when you rolled this out. You know, were people like, "Oh my god, no one's ever going to use it," or, "It's just too techie," or has there been any pleasant surprises or things that surprised you that you didn't think was going to happen? Give us some kind of commentary on some observations that you've seen from rolling out the Best Remote Work Solution. >> It's been very interesting. Our actual first defendant, he was elderly, and so we were kind of concerned. Okay, will he know how to connect and he did amazing. So that's kind of where we knew if we could reach the older generation and he can connect, all these younger defendants and younger people shouldn't have any issue. So we explained to him, "Hey, you're our first defendant. "This is new to us, it's new to you," and he did awesome. So that kind of gave us the confidence we needed to pursue it even more and push it out there and give the defendants options. There's been, we've looked (chuckles)... Some people forget, and so do I, that we're on camera and, you know (John laughs), we can see up noses, they forget they're in their vehicle, you know, it may hit a few bumps. >> John: There are dogs barking in the back (laughs). >> You know like, okay, maybe we need to pull over. (laughs) So it's been an experience but a pleasant experience and it gave us... We didn't want to backlog cases throughout this COVID and having the virtual option through Tyler has, we were, when COVID first started, we got behind, until we launched, we had about 800 cases we got behind on, and then soon as we launched out Virtual Court, now we're caught up, my court's running smooth, everything's great and there's no backlog of cases. >> Clear the backlog. The question I want to ask is that elderly first user. Did he or she get an early adopter discount on the sentence? (laughs) >> The judge was kind. (laughs) But he did awesome, I was shocked. >> I kind of resent the elderly remark, Sonya, but that's okay. (laughs) I think she's referring to me. >> No, no, no. He was in his 80s. >> Okay, I feel a little, I feel young, then. Well you guys, congratulations. I'd like to get your parting thoughts just with cloud technology. A lot of other folks out there are looking at re-imagining public service, specifically around these times where there's a lot of emotional stress, like, you got backlogged, you don't want to have the court get backlogged. I can see that. People don't want tickets hanging out there. But that kind of encapsulates people's feelings right now and I think remote citizenship is coming. Just your thoughts on how you see this as a beginning, starting point for cloud computing enabling the efficiencies, the solutions and the applications for a more connected community experience. Sonya, we'll start with you. >> Okay. I can see this, this is the way we're going to keep things. We like the option, the flexibility that our defendants, our citizens have. It's opened our eyes, and if there's other courts out there that are kind of hesitant to go ahead and jump in and do it, I strongly recommend just do it. It's scary in the very beginning because a lot of us were not used to it, but after you get through it and you go through the changes, it's so worth it in the end and you'll see such a... More of a compliance for both sides and, you know, it reduces the stress on staff having to send out mail notices for failure to appears and stuff of that sort. Reduce warrants. So it's been a win-win all the way around. So if I could reach any court out there that's kind of on the line of doing it, just do it. >> All right, yeah, great. Sandy. >> Yeah, and John, for us, cloud is the future. I mean every application we have, we're actively working, if it's not already a cloud-based solution, it will be and we're a huge believer in the scalability. But when you look at applications like this, as an example, of Tyler Virtual Court, where it's really a win-win situation. It's better for the court; they can continue to carry on their business; it's better for the citizen because now they can actually take care of something that they weren't going to be able to take care of in the past, and as we continue to find win-win solutions, cloud-based solutions are going to be at the core of that in terms of just how easy it is to access and roll out. So it's a big part of our future and we believe it's a big part of our customers' future, as well. >> Well congratulations. Modernization has positive impacts if done right. More time is freed up to work on maybe personal things and connect those communities and bring people together. Congratulations, Tyler Technologies and the City of Alvin for the Best Remote Work Solution and it's the court system. Get those tickets paid, clear that backlog and now you got all the time in the world, Sonya, to kind of work on other things. What do you do with all your free time? >> I'm going to take a vacation! (laughs) >> Thank you so much for having this conversation and, again, congratulations. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John, thank you. >> Okay this is the CUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier with the Best Remote Work Solution. Thanks for watching. (futuristic marimba music)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services public sector, partner awards program. It's a celebration of AWS, public sectors, partners and their end user customers, where there's been innovation. And we're pleased to have on the show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI, and ML artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial3D is the newest partner and the end user is Belfast hospital. We got Roger Johnson, the CEO of Axial3D, and Dr. Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon, at Belfast hospital, who has been doing amazing things, not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during COVID, making things happen, by solving the problem of the surgical gap and the number of surgeries that you're doing. Really high performance saving lives, congratulations. First of all, congratulations Roger and Dr.Tim Brown, thanks for joining me. >> We're pleasure. >> Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr. Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work, that you're doing. Before we get, into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap, between the number of surgeries, that could take place with COVID. Tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to explain. >> Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible roller coaster, for the last three months. And pretty much all of the transplant programs, across the world who have been affected, by COVID have shut down. But with some pretty innovative and real leadership and team working advances, we've managed to open a program up again and in Belfast, we have about 50 deceased donor transplants a year. Over the last three months, we've just done 90 kidney transplants and pretty much we've cleared, the whole waiting list in Northern Ireland pretty much, for people waiting for a kidney transplant in this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks. But really is a testament to the critical care community, the people that work in intensive care, as to how much they support organ donation. And of course, our donors who have given so selflessly, at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors, and to the amazing amount of people, who have been involved in the teamwork and Belfast at this time. >> That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause for a minute just capture, the number of orders of magnitude, you said it was six to 10 a year and you did nine zero, 90? >> Yeah, so we have done two years work in six weeks, all in the middle of the night as well. So it's been it's been a hard work, so you can see the screen (mumbles). I'm trying to catch up with a minute. But it's been really, really satisfying, and an incredible outcome for our patients. The legacy of this program, is going to last at Belfast for 40 years. >> Brown I want to say congratulations, I'll give you my CUBE award for not changing the world, but saving the world, one person at a time. 90 interviews in six weeks. That's amazing. That's like clearing the waiting list. You're really changing lives there, congratulations. >> That's great, thank you very much. >> Roger, what a great partner and customer you have here. Talk about this award that you guys have, talk about the company. What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >> So I think our motivation for our company, is driven by our partners such as Tim, what they're doing transforms care, and even in these horrific situation are scenarios, we have the moment with COVID think you're hearing the start of an amazing story. Our job is to give surgeons like Tim, the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries. For the last 20 years, surgeons have relied largely on 2D imaging, so CT and MRI scans for being able to plan their surgeries, when in fact modern technology, should apply them much greater insight, before they actually perform their surgery. So we've created a technology, that platforms on AWS that allows us, to turn those traditional, hard to understand 2D images, into micromillimeter precise models of the patient's exact anatomy. The value hopefully to amazing colleagues like Tim, is that instead of trying to interpret what a 2D image CT or MRI scan might mean, he can actually see for the first time before, he opens the patient up exactly what he's going, to find when he starts the surgery, So he can really start planning, and complete that planning before, the surgery actually takes place. So hopefully, that allows a number of benefits result, whether that be shorter operations time, less surgical equipment needing to be brought, into the surgery, hopefully faster surgeries means less risk of infection, for patients means shorter time, means better outcomes the healthcare system but most importantly the patient. >> Awesome, Dr. Brown, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because, you know, the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about, in the tech industry for many years. Now with COVID we were just talking about the successes, you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace, workforces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the Axial3D help you, in your workflows? Are you getting more done? Can you can you give specifics, around the impact to your job? >> Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey to date. And we're still learning our way. It's a journey. And we're trying to work out exactly where this lies. And the fact that COVID has not come along, which has changed our working practices means that, we have to look for different solutions. And this I think, is a very handy solution, to where it's come into my practice over the last three years has been, in terms of complex renal surgery and oncological surgery, where we have for example, a tumor in a kidney where we think my goodness, we're I have to take this kidney out and throw it in the bin because it's very badly diseased. So the index case that we were involved with, was involving a chap who wanted, to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. And but thanks to the imaging that Axial was able, to produce for us, we were able to plan well choose well cut well, and as a result, we took the kidney if we were able to plan, a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself, we were able to repair the kidney and then transplant into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives in one particular case. And it's really grown from there. And we've now been involved, in five or six different real complex cases, where the imaging has changed the outcomes for patients, who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to achieve them, as they comes, I think, the AI interface and the AI solution that we've, we've developed in our partnership with Axial. As I said, it's a journey, and we're still finding our way. But the two insights that I've really got are. The first is that what we want to do is reduce variability. And not just in our, in our observers from the way that we interpret imaging. Traditionally, as Roger said, we look at 2D images, we're now able to sit and look at this imaging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in our head. We can look at them and discuss the different images, with our colleagues in real time. As well as that, which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients, in a partnership, before we've had a bit of an unfair advantage, that we're able to interpret these images. Because we've been trying to get 30 years of getting used, to doing this as professionals, and but the patients are presented, with some incredibly difficult decisions, to make by their own health. And with very little understanding, but my I can hand them a model of their own disease, they're able to understand. And that gives my patient the autonomy, to make the decisions about their own bodies back again, I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys to have, but potential decisions that they have, to make that will affect them for the rest of their lives. >> So the problem you were solving was one, of the technical problems, so you're trying to figure out manually get more insight, into the imaging and to the customer, or the patient in this case, customer the patient can make a better decision. Those are two problem statements. That seemed to be the big ones. Did I miss anything? >> Absolutely, no, he got one, yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, so Axial3D. You guys have a great solution. How did you get here? Tell us about your story. What's the big trajectory for you guys, in terms of this value proposition just seems to be amazing. And again highlights the advantages, how technology really solves a problem, but the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >> So the chance for us is there, or the moment that we have made the leap we have made, is to be able to automatically turn these 2D images into 3D models. So we take each of the slices off of a MRI, or CT scan, using AWS machine learning, we construct 3D, micromillimeter precise representation of an anatomy. That's only possible, first of all, we train the algorithms that we created on the Amazon platform, using over a million pre labeled CT scans. So our system automatically detects a pixel level. What is bone, what is ligament, what is an artery or blood vessel? And with the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with these million images, we've been able to, in effect train our system, to automatically detect the different parts of them, through this micro precise level, that hasn't been previously possible. And this technology, or the ability to create 3D models has existed for maybe 10, or 15 years. But it's needed experts like Tim to during effect, manually code, the 2D image at a pixel level and codify it so some software to turn that into 3D image, typically to either an RS of an expert like Tim to do, and the problem is Tim could only do one at a time. We estimate there are about three million, of these complex surgeries each year in the world, that need benefit greatly from this Enhanced Imaging. And we couldn't get three million months, he's selected that. So we have this process. Now on AWS platform, we have these models in parallel. And each model will take maybe a few minutes, to turn from the CT into the 3D representation. So through the power of the Amazon public cloud, we've been able to provide this powerful machine learning, automated solution that can actually scale, to the demand that we hope to see in the world. >> Dr. Tim Brown talked about the impact because I mean, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS always talks about this, when I interview him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting. This sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved, you essentially have collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >> Yeah, well, I don't know why everyone is doing it. That's the key question it really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all. And what I do is I push a couple of buttons, I input a bit of data and I send it off. And from my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets, it's probably as easy as sending an email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so from my perspective, I'm delighted to say that there's no heavy lifting at all. I get a patient's data, I send the data through to Axial who will then fool me and say, listen, Tim, what is it exactly that you want? There's a great personal service from Axial, and a couple of days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size, 3D representation model, which I can then take to plan and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. As Roger alluded to, in the past, it was hugely time consuming at work, that required a huge amount of training. But now basically, that's been replaced with pushing the button and these supercomputers taken all of my heavy lifting away. And I think this is one of the true representations, of high technology really, really advances, real world solutions. And my patients are the benefactors from this. >> Roger, Dr. Brown lay out the architecture, because first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend, that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this what's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side, say to Belfast as you deploy this, what's kind of involved, can you just take us through high level, I'm actually cloud scale is amazing. No doubt about it. We just talked about that but, what's involved in the architecture side, am I standing up on EC2 is there SageMaker involved me? What's the architecture and then deployment, What does that look like? >> Sure, so can you slide slight step back, one of the challenges when we as the med tech community try and introduce innovation into healthcare into hospitals, the hospitals IT infrastructure network definition, is often pretty locked down. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it into the hospital data system is a huge, often lengthy process that has, to jump through lots of hoops, in terms of a key network compliance, lots of different steps along the journey. And that often was for very good reasons, is a significant barrier, to the timely adoption of innovative technologies like ours. What platforming activity on AWS allies, were just another website. As Dr. Tim has said, his own though his only existence, with Axial3D in terms of interface, is dragging and dropping, the CT scan into our website, into our portal exists locally on the AWS instance, in whichever region we are working with, for example, in the US never leaves the US, we use the public cloud version. In US East, we take advantage of many features within AWS. But SageMaker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced, you know, several years ago, that is the lightest to produce this, this machine learning trained set of algorithms, that allow us to give this disruption. >> And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter is that as well. >> Absolutely, so our journey as Tim said, we're in a journey not only in terms of the technology, and you're very perceptive in terms of, yes, the more we train it, the more we train it, on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trauma types, the better our system gets, at recognizing the specific characteristics of those. But more importantly, this is about journey pipe. Having made this disruption we make the change and transformation of new standards of care pathways, Nazi innovation that we just enable. It's amazing surgical teams like Tim's, that make transformation. >> Dr. Brown now on your side you're sitting there I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes, they want to live. I don't want to throw away kidneys. I don't have to you just solve that problem. Now when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house as a practitioner deploying it? You got two jobs going on. You're kind of doing IT integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other trying to make things happen. You know, what I see this is not a lot of it here. What's the deployment look like? >> Deployment to me is I don't know why ever as doing it, it's such a straightforward, easy situation. And it's, it's remarkable, really. It's such a good solution. I think, part of any sort of change management program, and this, again, is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. That's challenging people's comfort zones. And anytime we need to change, we've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators, we've got early adopters, we've got late adopters. And I think what we're going to see over the next five to 10 years is people recognizing that this technology, is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say, I want a 3D model. And I want to see what this actually looks like. Because basically, that black and white picture you're showing me, doesn't make any sense to me. And I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have consistency of care and the lack of variation in our care across all services. But as well as that the patience, I think, are going to drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's, that's when it becomes an acceptable and normal thing for people, to do when they come into hospital. There'll be shown printout of their 3D printed model of their of their pathology, and that will be used to inform their decision making, for the treatment processes. And that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon and the patient. And that's, that's where we need to be in 21st century it's got to be a collaborative decision making process. And you talked about patient journeys, and, this is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this, that's being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients by correction and variability of health care provision. >> Its a great example, of an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning 3D images saving lives. Congratulations, Tim, Roger, it's phenomenal. Final question as we end this out. What's the scar tissue, pun intended? Well, what did you learn? What are some of the things that you could share with folks, as people look at this and say, this is an example of cloud scale and technology for good? What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks, take a minute to explain each. But Roger, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, sure. So I think a number of lessons for us on this journey. As Tim says, this is a we're at the start of a journey, of understanding the power of what 3D imaging can bring to providing a consistent or less variable care, but also, as Tim also alluded to, in terms of the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding, is one of the huge leap forwards, that we didn't set out initially thinking, we're going to be able to help educate and better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly became apparent. So that was a great lesson. I think that incredible levels of adoption, that we're starting to see across the US across Europe. Because it's so easy to adopt, compared to traditional IT methods. Surgeons just register for a website, and they can start transacting and getting service from us, as opposed to having to have these huge IT programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not the HR system. It's not a finance system, or maybe healthcare was comfortable in using public cloud. This is core hardcore clinical service, clinical diagnosis, clinical education, and the Amazon cloud is enabling that, just wouldn't be possible with this technology, (mumbles) the lessons we're learning are just (mumbles). >> Dr. Tim Brown and take us home and the segment, with your take, lessons learned and advice to others. >> I think the lesson learned are that doctors and healthcare providers are all extremely wary of change of new innovations. Because they feel that already, they're overburdened, and probably my colleagues in the States and across Europe feel like, we're a bit overburdened by all the things that we have to do. And this may potentially have been a more difficult or odds to your workload and actually fact, this makes your workload a lot easier and convincing people and getting people to understand that, this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue it removes the difficulties that have been put in place by organizations. And once people realize that, that's what there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practice and your patients understanding of your practice. And once that, once up, people really realize that, then the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that date because this is going to be the new normal in the next five to 10 years. >> While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplants successfully over six weeks, dwarfs the full year last year, really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger, thank thank you for coming on. Congratulations on being the award winner, a diverse partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for part of this AWS partner awards program. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector partner awards, program put on by the CUBE and AWS public sector partners. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> All right, welcome back to "the Cube's" coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of COVID-19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of "the Cube" and we have here the award winners for the best EDU solution from NorthBay Solutions, Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and the University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton, PhD and Data Privacy Officer of University of Pittsburgh IT. Thanks for coming on gentlemen, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys had got the award for? And talk about how it all came about. >> Yeah, thank you for asking and it's been a pleasure working with Chad and the entire UPitt team. So as we entered this whole COVID situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual, that budgets were very tight, but nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. So we devised a solution which we called jam sessions, AWS jam sessions, and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things, but we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused two week engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad and UPitt team, it was around a data lake and they had been, and Chad will certainly speak to this in much more detail, but the whole notion here was how does a customer get started? How does, a customer prove the efficacy of AWS, prove that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form, in this case, a data lake solution and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint rep prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework, and ideally by the time we're done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work, learn by doing, if you will, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing, and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case would be the implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >> Chad, talk about the relationship with NorthBay Solutions. Obviously you're a customer, you guys are partnering on this, so it's kind of you're partnering, but also they're helping you. Talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >> Yeah, so I would say the challenge that I think a lot of people in my role are faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that I really don't want to invest any further in. So I know the cloud's in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So we had zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said "Because of our inexperience, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn." So what I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our skilling up. You know, what gaps do we have? And AWS has just so many different components that we also needed help just zeroing in on for our need, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to NorthBay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. We made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was of course, to meet our deliverables, but also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how it got started and then I think it was very successful engagement after that. >> Talk about the jam sessions, because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace with rapid innovation, now more than ever with virtual workforces at home, given the situation. You know, rapid agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session? What was the approach? Jim you laid a little bit about it out, but Chad, what's your take on the jam sessions? How does it all work? >> I mean, it was great, because of large teams that NorthBay brought and the variety of skills they brought, and then they just had a playbook that worked. They broke us up into different groups, from the people who'd be making the data pipeline, to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. So that part worked really well, and yes, this rapid iterative development. Like right now with our current kind of process and our current tool, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts, to our data scientists, because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer and I don't want to be giving that answer, so what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we select the right tools so that we can say, "We'll be two weeks from start to finish" and you'll be able to make those data available. So the engagement with NorthBay, the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that once you have the skills and you have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about for us. >> Jim, I'll get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud, when you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, They're pretty savvy, right? They know limitations, but when you get the cloud, it's like if a car versus a horse, right? Got to go from point A to point B, but again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together and what were the key learnings? >> Yeah, so John, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people on the U-PIT side that wanted to really learn and had a thirst for learning. And then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in an actual use case that we're trying to jointly implement. A couple of things that we've learned that are really important. One is although we have structure and we have a syllabi and we have sort of a pattern of execution, we can never lose sight of the fact that every customer is different. Every team member is different. And in fact, Chad, in this case had team members, some had more skills on AWS than others. So we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of used our general formula for the two weeks. Week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of AWS, the solution we're building and then week two is really meant to sort of mold the clay together and really take this solution that we're trying to execute around and tailor it to the customer so that we're addressing the specific needs, both from their team member perspective and the institution's perspective in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending the day with a recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge and then when we're addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done, so if there is anxiety, or folks feel like they're falling behind, we want to make sure we knew that, we wanted to address that quickly, either that evening, or the next morning, recalibrate and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that, and Chad and entire U-Pit team did a phenomenal job with this, was really preparation. So we have a set of preliminary set of activities that we work with our customers to sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And since we're doing this virtually, we don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical construct of organizing rooms and chairs and tables and all that. We're doing all that virtually. So Chad and the team were tremendous in getting all the preparatory work done Thinking about what's involved in a data lake, it's the data and security and access and things our team needed to work with their team and the prescription and the formula that we use is really three critical things. One is our team members have to be adept at educating on a virtual whiteboard, in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side development. That's the whole goal and we want team members to build trust and relationships side by side. And then thirdly, and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring, so that as Chad's team members were executing, we could guide them as we go. And really those three ingredients were really key. >> Chad, talk about the data lake and the outcome as you guys went through this. What was the results of the data Lake? How did it all turn out? >> Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we were looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one, prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema mart model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business, but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. So there was a second component of it that I said, I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools, so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say "Hey, by investing in this, here's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it." So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging AWS comprehend was key. And the idea here was there are, unfortunately, it's not as relevant today with COVID, but there are events happening all around campus and how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar. Well, with a price of natural language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major, so that we can then bubble these up to a student "Hey, do you know of all these thousands of events here are the 10 you might be most interested in." We can't do that right now, but using these tools, using the skills that that NorthBay helped us develop by working side by side will help us get there. >> A beautiful thing is with these jam sessions, once you get some success, you go for the next one. This sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this is really kind of what I like about the story is you guys did the jam session, first of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, as you guys looked at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project, right? You can get people together, you go to the cloud, get more agile, get the proof points, show it, double down on it, playbook, check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you? Any expectations that were met, or things that were new that came out of this? 'Cause this is something that is everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this, or deal with current COVID as it evolves? And then when I come out of it, I want to have a growth strategy, I want to have a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, it's a good question and I was a little concerned about it at first, because when we had first begun conversations with NorthBay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. Then of course COVID happened. Our campus is closed, nobody's permitted to be there and so we had to just pivot to a hundred percent virtual. I have to say, I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress. It didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that NorthBay had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it and Jim can certainly talk to that, But those morning stand-ups for each group that's working, the end of day report outs, right? Those were the things I was joining in on I wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication, the transparency that was provided was key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule they already had set up at North Bay, We didn't have any problems having it a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do virtual engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >> You know, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on this, 'cause I think this is a huge point that's not just represented here and illustrated with the example of the success of the EDU solution you guys got the award for, but in a way COVID exposes all the people that have been relying on waterfall based processes. You've got to be in a room and argue things out, or have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time and when you have a virtual space and an agile process, yeah you make some adjustments, but if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully virtually. >> Yeah, it's certainly, you know, the key is always preparation and our team did a phenomenal job at making sure that we could deliver equal to, or better than, virtual experience than we could an on-site experience, but John you're absolutely right. What it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're in a physical room together, but you can't take for granted virtually. Even interpersonal relationships and how those are built and the trust that's built. As much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did really phenomenal AWS work, foundationally it all comes down to trust and as Chad said, transparency. And it's often hard to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that and we spent time with Chad and other team members, understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and the experiential journey, a little bit about them personally. So I think the reality in the in the short and near term is that everything's going to be virtual. NorthBay delivers much of their large scale projects virtually now. We have a whole methodology around that and it's proven actually it's made us better at what we do quite frankly. >> Yeah it definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity in the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and this certainly has been around, the benefits of there, but still you have the mentality of "we have to do it ourselves", "not invented here", "It's a managed service", "It's security". There's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really looked for it. But the reality is is that there are benefits. For the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons with COVID and other reasons, What's your advice to them? Why cloud? What's the bet? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad, as people sitting there going "okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going" What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >> So I would say, and Jim knows this, we at Pitt have a big vision for data, a whole universe of data where just everything is made available and I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right? That's going to evolve over time, so if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver, or I'm going to invest too much money for the value I'm getting. By moving to the cloud, what that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. And then, of course, all the questions about, scalability and extensibility, right? We can just keep growing and if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just stop and we're no longer spending on that particular area and we can direct that money to a different component of the cloud. So just not being locked in to a huge expensive product is really key, I think. >> Jim, your thoughts on why cloud and why now? Obviously it's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayer sitting on the fence? >> Yeah, it's a really important question, John and I think Chad had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is agility. Whether that's agility with respect to if you're in a competitive market place, Agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment we all know we're in, particularly in the IT world. Agility from a cost perspective. So agility is a theme that comes through and through over and over and over again, and as Chad rightfully said, most companies and most organizations they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing, or what the demands are going to be on their services, so agility is really, is really key. And the second one is, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out before you can start and really our mantra in the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing. Pick a use case, pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be and just start the process. You'll learn as you go and not everything is the right fit for cloud. There were some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be be appropriate, but by and large, if you start by doing and in fact, through jam session, learn by doing, you'll start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to them, where they can leverage the best bang for the buck, if you will. And ultimately deliver on the value that IT is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, speed of cost reduction, speed of future rollout. You know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data, right? He and the team are sitting there trying to figure how to give it to them quickly. So speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days. >> Yeah and Chad also mentioned scale too, cause he's trying to scale up as key and again, getting the cloud muscles going for the teams and culture is critical because matching that incentives, I think the alignment is critical point. So congratulations gentlemen on a great award, best EDU solution. Chad, while I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts, but your industry expert PhD hat on, because one of the things we've been reporting on is in the EDU space, higher ed and other areas, with people having different education policies, the new reality is with virtualized students and faculty, alumni and community, the expectations and the data flows are different, right? So you had stuff that people used, systems, legacy systems, kind of as a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again, create that alignment of what can we do development wise, because I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure this kind of thinking going on around "Okay, as we go forward, how do we find out what classes to attend if they're not onsite?" This is another jam session. So I see more and more things happening, pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >> My take, so when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring break to be virtual for our students, like a lot of universities did. And you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that and you find all the weaknesses. And we had finished the engagement, I think, with NorthBay by that point, or were in it and seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, might end up the way I envisioned the future state, I can now point to these specific things and give specific examples about how we would have been able to more effectively respond when these new demands on data came up, when new data flows were being created very quickly and able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. So that was really key and this whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging and at Pitt we're really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and all the technology that's involved in that. And, you know, I've already got, I've had more unique data requests come to my desk since COVID than in the previous five years, you know? >> New patterns, new opportunities to write software and it's great to see you guys focused on that hierarchy of needs. I really appreciate it. I want to just share with you a funny story, not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in a higher ed university out here in California and it wasn't official business, was just more riffing on the future and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had like an abstraction layer that had leveraged Canvas, Zoom and Discord?" All the kids are on Discord if they're gamers. So you go "Okay, why discord? It's a hang space." People, it's connective tissue. "Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos?" You know, Canvas doesn't support certain things and Canvas is the software that most universities use, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on, but that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. Are you guys having that kind of feeling too? I mean, how do you see this new ideation, rapid prototype? I only think it's going to get faster and accelerated. >> As Chad said, his requests are we're multiplying, I'm sure and people aren't, you know, folks are not willing to wait. We're in a hurry up, 'hurry up, I want it now' mentality these days with both college attendees as well as those of us who are trying to deliver on that promise. And I think John, I think you're absolutely right and I think that whether it be the fail fast mantra, or whether it be can we make even make this work, right? Does it have legs? Is it is even viable? And is it even cost-effective? I can tell you that we do a lot of work in Ed tech, we do a lot of work in other industries as well And what the the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with as a result of COVID, is they've all had to try to innovate. So we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, today, yesterday, not six months from now. So I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that can be sustained, or tolerated any longer and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, "Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How can we go work together side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most robust, but we need it tomorrow." And that's really the spirit of the whole notion of jam session. >> And new expectations means new solutions. Chad, we'll give you the final word. Going forward, you're on this wave right now, you got new things coming at you you're getting that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >> I'm optimistic. It really is, it's an exciting time to be in this role, the progress we've made in the calendar year 2020, despite the challenges we've been faced with, with COVID and budget issues, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my belief that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >> Awesome! Best EDU solution award for AWS public sector. Congratulations to NorthBay Solutions. Jim Keller, president, and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights and again, the wave is here, new expectations, new solutions, clouds there, and you guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session, thanks. >> Thank you, John. Chad, pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. >> See you soon. >> This is "the Cube" coverage of AWS public sector partner awards. I'm John Furrier, host of "the Cube". Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from the >>Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation >>over and welcome to this special cube coverage of AWS Partner Awards show. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. We're here in our Palo Alto, California studio is doing the remote interviews with our quarantine Cruelty during this time of covert were remote with the best remote Work solution award for AWS Partner Awards goes to Tyler Technologies in the city of Alvin Municipal Court. And we have Sandy, Peter's vice president, general manager of virtual courts and in code court system. Sandy's here to talk about that. And Sonya Gates, who is a city of albums. Mutual court court administrator. Welcome. And congratulations for the best promote work solution. We're remote. Congratulations. Okay, so, CNI, I'll start with you. Tyler Technologies, You're the general manager of the encode Court. This is a vert. This is a solution that you're deploying with the city of Alvin to do some things. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing together. What is your group of Tyler do And how is it working with City of Album? >>John Tyler Technologies is just completely focused on ah, local, state and federal government software and services. And, uh, particularly the code court application focuses on municipal court, which is what Sonya is the court administrator for Calvin. We have about 900 clients across the U. S that do that same thing. We had this idea about coming up with a remote solution for, ah, ability for someone toe instead of having to go to court to see a judge that they could do that remotely and really have the same experience. And so we sort of launched off on that Ah, and worked with several different of our clients and came up with a way for for that happens on you. I got involved in it very early on and has been instrumental in helping us continue to make it successful. >>When you talk about the city of albums based court system I've seen with Koven, people are sheltering in place and they're not moving around much. You have to have a solution. Talk about the partnership with Tyler. How did this come together? How do you guys were? Take us through that. >>Well, we we have a great relationship with Tyler Technologies. They are very instrumental in our day to day processing. They send out an email with the idea due to Coben, And as soon as we receive the email, we decided that was the best solution for for our court. And we just immediately jumped on board with it so we could resolve cases and not get behind. >>So the virtual court means okay, I get a ticket, I want to appeal it. No way would show up. And now I can't. So it interfaces and take me through the solution. And what is a best fit involved in some some things on the cloud. >>It definitely is on the cloud, John. And, um and that's exactly right. So if you get ah, you get a citation, sometimes you may want to appeal that sometimes you just wanna find out what your options are, and you are going to go appear before a judge. You can do that remotely now, through this through our application, it supports all the video. You can upload documents, exchange those ah, supporting documents. Ah, and ah. And then it interfaces with our case management system so that a sea change is we made on the case. They're reflected and the defendant can see those. And so it just really the whole idea is remotely being ableto go before the judge find out what your options are. Go through that process. And then at the very end, it gives them a way. The completely take care of that case on Within a few minutes, it could be completely resolved. >>So take us through the city of Alvin's court system there. What's the challenges that you have? Um And what was some of the feedback when you first brought this out? Take us through what happened? >>Well, to be honest, it was for us, it was unknown territory. We were a little nervous. We were a little scared to do something of this sort. But with the situation at hand, we had to figure out something, and this was the best fit for us. There was other options available, but we we prefer to stay within Tyler and utilize the system to its fullest. So that why we just said, Okay, let's do this. I have a judge. That's amazing. That is very tech savvy. And he was on board and my city manager. So just working with Tyler each way. You know, each step of the way, you know, in them comforting us in a sense, you know, to let us know. Hey, it's okay. We're here. Each step of the way will be built this together. And that's kind of where we started with the whole project. >>So this is a low hanging fruit. Obviously, it's not Jury, I'm assuming not a jury kind of situations. More of other non jury activities, right? >>It's the day to day court, you know, non jury. We're not doing any during Charles right now until after the governor allows us. So it's just the regular, you know, pre trials, the attorney dockets, arrangements and those sorts of cases. >>I'd be love to be on the planning sessions As you start to roll out the software for jury selection. We'll go into that kind of like what you're looking to look like, You know, it's going to be a digital surveillance. I don't know. It could be crazy, but this >>is the >>future. This is what we're talking about here. This is cloud scale. One of the benefits of cloud is is taking things and doing experiments. We hear that all the time. What's take us through the judge. So you see these tech savvy of these, like Zoom like, calls it like Is there a workflow trying? Envision what stood up in terms of the encode virtual courtside? Sandy, Sonia, What's What's it like? What's that? Take me through the experience? >>Well, everything's tied in together where a zoom and other options out there it's separated from your software so that, you know, that was one of the parts of going through Tyler with this virtual port is because everything's tied into one. We don't have to enter data or anything. After the dock, it's over. It's all live our forms. As soon as the defendant and the judge make an agreement, it put into TCM where the defendant can see it live, signed the orders and immediately get it back to us. And there's no delay time. There's no downtime, Um, and it's housed in one. So we're not having the mis data or, you know, it eliminates a lot of errors. Clerical errors are cases from being miss, >>and the judge handles everything right. He just he deals with the personal interactions reviews the data the defendant makes >>the clarity do a lot to. He's talking. And as he's talking, we're entering his orders as we speak. >>So it's real time thing. This is true agility. Sadie, this is the future. This is where the solutions start to get the scale. So what's next? What is the vision? How do you guys see the next step? Because, I mean, we all know that, you know, Kobe will be over soon. We hope faster than it's happened. But it will be a hybrid world. And I think this shows a template for efficiency. >>Yes. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And it is the future. We're going to continue to leverage our relationship with AWS, which has just been incredible to this process, and and, uh, we went way beyond what we were expecting just in terms of resource is and, uh, and helping us even just within our own development processes as we as we brought something to scale on in learning how to have a low test and, uh, really build applications that can scale out. And so we believe it is the future. And ah, Sonia makes a great point many times because they live in an area where sometimes there's other natural disasters, like hurricanes that can disrupt what's going on for them. Ah, but then also as you, as you just think about really what I would call a responsibility. As we move forward, we have a responsibility to provide ways that people can take care of things Ah, and not put themselves at risk. And a swee move into the future past Covad. Then s O. We're going to continue to leverage the technology that AWS provides the scalability, the how we can load test and everything. And, uh and it was really a no brainer for us toe run this application on the AWS services for us >>and Sonia. It's also not just about justice, not only getting the folks who are speeding and taking care of the penalties there, but it's also potentially for justice. If someone is not guilty or they want to get business has to continue, right? So this extends into the use case of remote hybrid the future because our work can be distributed now you have efficiencies. This is going to create a connected system which ultimately can be a connected community. >>Yeah, and it's going to reduce the failure to a rate here for court cases. Also, um, so that'll be less warrant more compliant, Um, in the easier. Well, it's a better relationship between us, the court and our defendants because they have the option of not having to leave work or miss appointments. You know, they can still attended their case and do other things that they need to do without taking a spin. A, you know, a couple of hours and sit in a room. And you know the court. >>That's a huge point. Sandy. This is about resource utilization on both sides, not just the court's and the city of Alvin on the municipal side. The citizens, it's efficiency. I mean, how many people don't show up because they can't get out of work or they need to make their paycheck or they have their their family? These need to be met. So all these things play into the psychology of of the way of life. This is digital life, virtualization of of the of life. It really is a big thing. >>Yeah. Yeah, I think I think you're exactly right. I mean you're hitting on some of the some great points. That's exactly right. And when you think about what has to happen for you to go and maybe go before a judge and ah, take off work, you've got to go buy traffic, find parking. You may have to have someone that takes care of your Children. There's there's all sorts of things that you're having to go through just to get down and and be in front of a judge that this can help with. And I think it's just one aspect to your point, really trying to think of, uh, really starting to help government think about how to be more customer centric out of provide some ways for people Teoh take care of of what they need to take care of. Uh and, uh and so we're really trying in your your point about connected communities. Is is a huge key point for us at Tyler, as we think of ways that we can help a community be more connected for sure. >>Well, you know, I'm huge into whole civic relationships and having a productive government and having citizens be served for that reasons and having it be a community. And this and now more than ever, transparency is helpful, right? This only helps things. So you guys are doing a really great job of one enabling a work environment remotely. In this case, it's for the courts to be operational. Is they need to be, But it clearly can extend. So, Sanjay, I gotta ask you the question. I'd love to get your commentary on surprises when you rolled this out. You know where people like Oh, my God, no one's ever going to use it or it's just too techy. Or has there been any pleasant surprises or things that surprised you that you didn't think was gonna happen to >>give us >>some kind of commentary on some observations that you've seen from from remote working, rolling out the best remote work solution? >>It's been very interesting. Um, we read our actual first defendant. He was elderly, and so we were kind of concerned. Okay, well, we know how to connect, you know, and he did amazing. So that's kind of where we knew if if we could reach the older generation and he can connect all these younger defendants and you know, younger people what shouldn't have any issues. So he was, you know, we explained to him, Hey, you're our first defendant. This is new to us. It's new to you. And he did awesome. So that kind of gave us the confidence we needed to pursue it even more and push it out there and give the defendants options. There's been, um we've looked. Some people forget, and so do I. That were on camera. And, you know, we see up with this, um, they forget their vehicle, you know, made it a few bumps, but it was like walking in the background. Yeah. Um, so it's been It's been an experience, but a pleasant experience. And it gave us where we didn't want a backlog of cases. There are over and having the virtual option through Tyler has We were like, Oh, it first started. We got behind until we launched about. We had about 800 cases we got behind on. And then as soon as we launched out virtual port. Now we're caught up, my courts running smooth, everything's great, and there's no backlog of cases. >>Clear. The backlog of the question I want to ask is that elderly first a user that did he or she get an early adopter discount on the sentence? >>Fine. Yeah, I was shocked. >>I kind of resent the elderly remark. I think he's referring to me. >>No, no, no, he was and he was in his eighties. >>Okay, I feel I feel young men while you guys congratulations. I like to get your parting thoughts. Just with cloud technology. A lot of other folks out there are looking at re imagining public service specifically around these times where there's a lot of emotional stress, like you got back long. You don't want to have the court get back. You can see that people don't want tickets hanging out there. But that kind of encapsulate people's feelings right now. And I think remote citizenship is coming. Just your thoughts on how you see this as a beginning starting point for cloud computing enabling the efficiencies, the solutions and the applications for more connected community experience. So we'll start with you. >>Okay. Um, I can see this. This is the way we're going to keep things. We like the option. The flexibility that are defendants or citizens have, um it it's opened our eyes And if you're if there's other courts out there that are kind of hesitant to go ahead and jump in and do it, I strongly recommend Just do it. It's It's scary in the very beginning because a lot of us, we're not used to it. But after you get through it and you go through the changes, it's It's so working in the end and you'll see such a more of a compliance for both sides and you know, it reduces the stress on staff. Having to send out Mel notice is, you know, for fire to appears and stuff of that sort produced warrants. So it's been a win win all the way around. Um, so if I could reach any court out there, that's kind on the line of doing that. Just just do it, >>Alright? Yeah, great. Sandy >>Gun and yeah, John. For us, Cloud is the future. I mean, every every application we have. Ah, we're actively working. If it's not already a cloud based solution, it will be Ah, and And we're a huge believer in the scalability. But But when you look at applications like this is as an example, Ah Tyler, virtual court, where it's really a win win situation. It's it's better for the court. They can continue to carry on their business. It's better for the citizen because now they can actually take care of something that they weren't going to be able to take care of in the past. And, Ah, and as we continue to find Win Win, uh, solutions cloud based solutions, they're going to be at the core of that in terms of just how easy it is to say excess and roll out. So it's a big part of our future, and we believe it's a big part of of our customer future as well. >>Well, congratulations. Modernization has positive impacts if done right, more times freed up to work on maybe personal things and connect those communes and bring people together. Congratulations. Tyler Technologies in the City of Album for the best remote work solution. It's the court system. Get those tickets paid, clear that backlog. And now you've got all the time in the world. So you take I work on other things. What do >>you do with your free time? I'm gonna take a vacation. Thank >>you so much. For thanks. Conversation and again. Congratulations. Thanks for time. >>Thank you. >>Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partners. Awards show I'm John Furrier with best remote work solution. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Welcome to the >>Special Cube program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Partner Awards program. It's a celebration of AWS public sectors partners and their end user customers where there's been innovation and we're pleased to have on this show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI and ML Artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial three D is the partner, and the end user is Belfast Hospital. He got Roger Johnson, the CEO of actual three D, and Dr Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon at Belfast Hospital, who has been doing amazing things not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during Covic making things happen by solving the problem of the surgical gap in the number of surgeries that you're doing really high performance saving lives. Congratulations. First of all, congratulations. Roger. Dr Kimberly. Thanks for joining me. >>Re pleasure. >>Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work that you're doing before we get into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap between the number of surgeries that could take place with Cove. It, um, tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to >>explain. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible rollercoaster for the last three months, pretty much all of the transplant programs across the world who have been affected by Coupet of shut down but with some pretty innovative on the grill leadership team Working advances with managed to open a program up again. And and Belfast, we have a bytes and 50 to 50 disease donor transplants year over the last three months, with just a 90 90 kidney transplants. Pretty much we've cleared the whole waiting list in Northern Ireland, pretty much for people waiting for a kidney transplant at this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks, but it really is a testament to the critical care community. People that work in intensive care is the high marks, a support organ donation. Of course, our donors who have given so selflessly at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors into the amazing people who have been involved in the team. Mark belt faster this time. >>That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause from and just captured the number of order of magnitude. You said it was 6 to 10 year and you didn't 90 90. >>Yeah, so six weeks basically Teoh, two years work in six weeks old in the middle of the night as well. So it's been It's been hard of hard work, so you can see the sleeplessness. I'm trying to catch up with a minute, but it's been really, really satisfying. An incredible I come for patients and legacy of this of this, the program is gonna last about faster. 40 years. >>Well, I want to say congratulations. I'll give you my Cube Award for not changing the world but saving the world. One person at a time. 90 interviews and six weeks. That's amazing. That's like thinking clearing the waiting list. You really changing lives there. Congratulations. >>That's very kind of you. Thank you very much. >>Roger. Good. A great partner and customer. You have here. Talk about this award. You guys have talked about the company? What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >>Yes, So I think our motivation for our company is driven by our partners, such such as? In what they're doing transforms care And even in these horrific situation, our scenarios. We have the moment with Kobe. Think you're hearing the start of the amazing story our job is to give Surgeons liked him the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries For the last 20 years, surgeons of relied largely on two D imaging, so C, t and memory scans or for being able to plan their surgeries when it's murdered, technology should apply them much greater insight or they actually perform the surgery. So we've created a technology that platforms on AWS that allows us to turn those traditional hard to understand to the images into micro millimeter precise models off the patients exact anatomy. The value hopefully, two amazing colleagues like Tim is that instead of trying to interpret what a two D image CD or memory scan might mean he can actually see for the first time before he opens the patient up exactly what he's going to find when when he when he starts the surgery. So he immediately start to complete that planning before the surgery actually takes. So hopefully that analyze a number of benefits to results without the shorter operations. Find less surgical meeting we brought into the surgery. Hopefully, faster Surgeries names last risk of infection For patients being shorter Time means most >>awesome. Dr. Brian, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because you know the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about in the tech industry for many years now, with code we were just talking about. The success is you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace work, forces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the actual three D help you and your work flows? Are you getting more done? Can you give specifics around the impact to your job? >>Yeah, it's a bit It's been a fantastic journey to date. We're still learning away. It's a journey. We're trying to work out exactly where this lies in. The fact that Kubla does not come along, which has changed, or working practices, that means that we have to look for different solutions on this, I think, is very 100 solution to amend. My practice over the last three years has been in terms of complex and real surgery on oncological surgery, where we have, for example, a tumor and kidney where we think, my goodness, we're gonna have to take this kidney I and throw it in the bin because it's very badly disease. So the index case that we were involved with that was building a child who wanted to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. But thanks to the imaging that Excel was able to produce for us, we were able to plan Well, geez, well cut well and as a result of kidney, I really plan a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself. We really repair kidney and then transplant it into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives on one particular case on, and it's really grown from there on. We've been involved in five or six different, really complex cases where the imaging has changed the outcomes for our patients who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to. Chief insight comes, I think, the AI interface on the AI solution we've developed in our partnership with the Excel. As I said, it's a journey and we're still finding our way. But to insights that I've really got our the first is that what we want to do is reduce variability, not just in our in our observers, from the way that we interpret imaging tradition is what you're saying is, look a two D images. We're now able to sit and look at this, emerging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in your head, we can look at them and discuss the different images with our colleagues in real time, a zealous that which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients and a partnership. Before we had a bit of an unfair advantage that we're able to interpret these images because 20 or 30 years of getting used to doing this as professionals. But the patients are presented with some incredibly difficult decisions to make by their own health and with very little understanding that. But now I can handle the model of their own disease very easy to understand, and that gives my patient autonomy to make the decisions about their own bodies back again. And I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys have about potential decisions that they have to make that more effective for the rest of their lives. >>So the problem you're solving was one of the technical problem. So you're trying to figure out manually, get more insight into the the imaging and to the customer or the patient. This case customer, the patient. I can make a better decision. Those are two problems, statements that seem to be the big ones that I missed. Anything? >>Absolutely, absolutely. >>Okay, so actual three d you guys have a great solution? How >>did you >>get here? Tell us about your story. What's what's What's the big trajectory for you guys? In terms of the value proposition, it seems to be amazing and again highlights. The advantages of technology really solves the problem. But the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >>Yes, so the chance for us is there or the development that we have made. The lately, we admit, is to be able to automatically turn these two D images into three D models. So we take each of the slices off of memory or cities. Using AWS is machine learning. We construct three D macro millimeter precise representation of For me. That's only possible. First of all, we treat the algorithms that we created on Amazon platform using over a 1,000,000 pre labeled CDs. Consume our system automatically detect. Yeah, it's a level. What is bone? What is ligament? What is on our earlier vessel? With the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with with these 1,000,000 images we've been able to in effect, tree and our system automatically detect the parts of me with this micro service level that hasn't been previously possible. This technology, or the ability to create three D models, has existed for maybe 10 or 15 years, but it's it's needed. Experts like him who were, in effect manually code the two D image pixel level and could affect so some software and turn it into a three D image. Typically, too, it's in ours, often expert like them to do. And the problem is, Tim could only do one of the time. We estimate there about three million of these complex surgeries each year in the world that need open effort from greatly from this enhanced imaging. And we couldn't get 33 million under these, especially. And that. So we have this process no on the AWS platform, with dozens of these models in parallel, and each more will take maybe a few minutes to turn from the CD into the into the three D representation. So through the park off the Amazon Public cloud, we've been able to provide this this powerful machine learning automated solution that can actually scale toe man >>Dr Brian talk about the impact because, I mean Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, always talks about this. When I interviewed him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting this sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved. You essentially have a collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >>Yeah, well, I don't know why. Every minute. That's that's That's the key question. It really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all, and what I do is I push a couple buttons. I put a bit of data, and I send it off. From my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets is probably a ZTE sending email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so, from from my perspective, I'm delighted to say there's no heavy lifting until I get a patient's data. I send data through to excel, who will then fool me and say, Listen to what is it exactly that we want to have a personal service from actual on? A couple days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size three D representation model, will check and then take to plan on and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. A Z Roger alluded to in the past. It was hugely time consuming work that required a huge amount of training. But basically that's being replaced with a push of a button on. These supercomputers have taken all of my heavy lifting away on, and I think this is one of the true representation. Zoff technology really, really advances real world solutions and my patients are benefactors. From this >>Roger Dr Brown. Lay out the architecture because, first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this. What's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side? Say it to Belfast as you deploy this. What's kind of involved in you? Just take us through high level. I must be cloud scales. Amazing, No doubt about it. We just talked about that. But what's involved in the architecture side of my standing? A bunch PC two's Is there sage maker involvement? What's the architecture and then deployment? What does that look like? >>Sure, So again, a slight step back. One of the challenges when, when we is the MedTech community try and introduce innovation into health and hospitals that the hospitals i t. Infrastructure network definition is often very locked on. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it in the hospital data system. That is a huge, often lengthy process that has to be done through lots of hoops in terms off Hey, network a compliance. Lots of different steps along the journey and that often wants from a good reasons, is a significant barrier to the timely adoption off innovative technologies in the cars. What a what a platform a selfie on AWS allies were just another website, as Tennis said, is, uh, only that, though his only existence with actual three D in terms of the interface is dragging and dropping the CT scan into our website into a portal portal exists quickly on the AWS instance. In one of our region, we are working with a little in the US. Never leave the US We use the the public client version in US East. We take advantage of many features within AWS, but a sage maker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced know several years ago that was like juice this this machine learning trained set of algorithms that allow us to give this disruption. >>And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter. Or is that as well? >>Absolutely. So our journey is, As Tim said, we're on a journey not only in terms off the technology and you're very receptive. In terms of yes, the more we train it, the more we treated on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trouble types, the better our system gets recognizing the specific characteristics of those. More importantly, this is about a journey I having made this disruption, we make the change and transformation off new standards of care pathways. That's the innovation that we just enable. It's amazing. Surgical teams like hymns. Let me transformation >>Dr Brown on your side. You're sitting there. I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes. They want to live. I don't want to throw away kitty, so I don't have to you to solve that problem that when when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house is a practitioner. Deploying it. You've got you've got two jobs going. You're kind of doing I t integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other, trying to make things happen. You know what I see? This is not a lot of I t here. What's the deployment? Looks like. >>Yeah, deployment means I don't know. Why ever announces doing that. Such a straightforward, easy situation. It's that's remarkable. Ready? It's such a good solution, and I think part of any sort of change management program, and this again is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. It's challenging people's comfort zones on any time we need to do change. We've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators go early, adopters will lead the doctors, and I think what we're going to see over the next 5 to 10 years is people are recognizing that this technology is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say I'm on the three D model and I want to see what this actually looks like because basically not black and white picture you're showing me doesn't make any sense to me and I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have a consistency of care on the lack of variation in our care across across old old services. But as well is that patients? I think we're gonna drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's that's when it becomes an acceptable normal thing for people to do. When they come in the hospital, they'll be sure print tight off their three d printed like moral off their pathology. I'm not a huge demand for their decision making for treatment processes, and that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon on the patient. That's that's where we need to be in the 21st century. It's it's going to be a collaborative decision making process. You talked about the pressures, journeys and this This is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients buying a correction and variability of healthcare provision. >>That's a great example is an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Three D images saving lives Congratulations, Tim Rogers. Phenomenal Final question As we end this out, what's the scar tissue pun intended? You know, What did you learn? What was some of the things that you could share with folks as people look at this and say This is an example of cloud scale and the technology for good. What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks? Take a minute to explain the split. Roger. We'll start with you. >>Yeah, sure. So I think a number off lessons for us on this journey Assistances, This is Ah, we're at the start of a journey of understanding the power off the what three d imaging can bring just to providing a consistent use variable care, but also as a stem also alluded to in terms of off the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding is one of the huge leap forwards that way. Didn't set out initially thinking we're going to be able to help educate on better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly part. So that was a great lesson. I think there is incredible levels of adoption that we're starting to see across the US across Europe because it's so easy to adopt. Compared to traditional methods, surgeons registered for Canadian start transacting and instead of us almost as opposed to having to have these huge I t programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not me. HR system. It's not a finance system. Or maybe a healthcare was comfortable. And using public like this is core hard core clinical services, clinical diagnosis. Clinical education on the Amazon cloud is enabling that it just wouldn't be possible with this technology we started. Actually, the lessons were learning or just just >>Dr Tim Brown and take us home and the segment with your take lessons learned and advice to others. >>I think the lessons learned are the doctors and health care providers are all extremely wary off change of new innovations because they feel that already they're overburdened. Probably my colleagues in the states and across Europe perfectly like they were a bit over, burdened by all the things that we have to do, and this may potentially have been more difficult or wants to your workloads. And actually, let's make your workload along each year convincing people and getting people to understand that this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue, removes the difficulties that have been put in place by by organizations on once. People realize that, that's what that there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practices, your patients understanding of your practice, and we'll stop so people really realize that the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that day because this this is going to be the new normal in the next 5 to 10 years. >>While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplant successfully over six weeks dwarfs the full year, last year really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger think Thank you for coming on Corrections on being the award winner. Eight of his partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for this 80 s partner awards program. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay, I'm John Furrier. We're covering the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program put on by the Cube and AWS Public Sector Partners. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Docker con live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >>Okay, everyone. Welcome back. We're in between segments, we just had Sydney from engine on Jenny, Peter. We're getting down to the last stretch. So our last little segment, before we go to the full wrap up where Jenny, you're going to give away the awards, Peter going to give it away. The awards for the captains, the community. How are you guys feeling? >>Right? Um, I'm feeling great. Peter, how about you? >>Awesome. It's been, it's been fun. Well, Peter, your internet celebrity. Now I hear, I don't know. Is there a special tweet we want to show? I think so. Okay. You see that tweet? It says you're internet famous. Your mom and dad are watching your presentation. Jenny, can you read that? Yeah. >>Yeah. And to be fair, right? They didn't tweet it. They, uh, they watched either session and, and joined and typed in the comments, even though, uh, they had to ask if he was speaking English. Cause they didn't understand anything. He was saying. >>I saw in the chat, I saw my dad's name go by and just, >>I feed her, but wait a minute. And then my wife >>Came in later, said, yeah, your mom and dad are watching your talk. Do we, do we ever stop parenting? >>I don't. Well, I had the opposite effect. I was in one of the sessions and I see a great comment. I'm like, who wrote this? It's my son, Alec farrier, like son, get out of the chat. He said, it's a dope. He said, it's a dope session. It could have been worse. Went in totally random. So it was good. Just look at it, which everywhere the cube and dr. Khan, what a great, uh, no boundaries, age geography has been. I'm really blown away guys. I really gotta say I'm super impressed with the community content program you put together. It's been so much fun. I learned so much. And so appreciate it. Thank you. >>Oh, thank you. I have to agree. Uh, Amanda silver said earlier that coding is the, and you know, Docker con is a team sport too. Uh, I have to take some time to think all the people, uh, that have participated in helped make this event so great. And we'll definitely do it again as we give out the community awards at the end. Okay. I guess 40 minutes from now, but thank you to the doctor theme. Um, many of them have been awakened for hours and hours, hours helping engage and have a great time. Thank you. Okay. Okay. An awesome platform. Rocks scheduling is next level. Um, and the captains, right? I don't know if anyone's had the chance that's watching to go check out the captain stream, especially Brett Fisher. Who's been on all day and he's been so involved in helping us plan to make sure that this is a conversation and not a large webinar. Right. Um, and then our sponsors, we could not have done this without our sponsors. They've been delivering great talks. They're all on demand, uh, except for the one coming up. So make sure to catch those. They'll have giveaways as well, um, that you can, that you can join into two more speakers. You've done awesome, uh, content and production. And then of course the thoughtfulness of the community, right. Thank you for bringing it here today, around the world. >>That's awesome. And I always just say the content presentations were really, really good. The graphics there's templates, but the work that was put into the video and the demos really just next level, as you said. So really just great. I mean, that makes the conference is the presentation. So those talks were engaging. Um, the comments were awesome. Again, I learned a ton and I love love when it's dynamic like that. Uh, Peter, you gotta be psyched developer relations, any, any new insights on the, uh, from the devs? >>Oh, it was great. Great talks. A lot of great. And I was really, really surprised with the chat that the interaction was tremendous. Uh, and I can't believe I used tremendous, but we'll just skip that anyways. Um, but also check out, uh, hashtag Docker con jobs. If you're looking for a job or if you have openings, please, please, uh, hashtag that in your, in your tweets, um, want to help the community out as much as possible. There's a ton of work out there. Just gotta help connect everybody and love to be part of that for sure. >>Yeah. Just so you know, in case you missed the Justin Warren who was live said on live cube, Docker TV, that if he gets 500 upvotes on Linux for Docker, desktop, I think it was. Or was it hub? Might've been desktop. I think he'll triage it out. So there it is. >>All right. I hope the internet heard that cause that's a popular one for sure. Yeah. >>He was on the record and he leaned in on that too. He said it like that. So he meant cool. Any other, uh, shout outs? I mean, I thought Brad was great. Um, the, his, uh, posse, uh, captains were amazing. Um, good feedback there. So gruesome some great chit chatter on that. Um, I didn't have a chance to peek into the session because we're hosting these mainstreams, but yeah. What are you hearing on the captains? >>Uh, tons of knowledge being dropped on that channel for sure. And really great in depth conversations there, uh, answering questions, interacting with the audience. Uh, and you know, a lot of these captains are teachers, uh, as their, as their day job. And a lot of them have, uh, fabulous Docker and Kubernetes content and are running sales right now. So if you do want learn more, if you like, what you heard today, definitely check out right? The horses are on sale this week or under $10, a huge investment in your future. And then Manning books is also running a promotion, a DTW Docker 20 for 40% off their content and a dr. Popkin Elton Stoneman, Jeff Nicola they'll have content there as well. And then Nigel, uh, is, is, has a number of training, uh, courses and, and books as well to check out. Um, and then the captains are running a charity stream. Awesome. People have been donating all day. It's been awesome. Uh, Docker's going to make sure that we reach our $10,000 goal. They wanted to announce that as well. >>I noticed cockroach labs had a similar thing for women for coding. They had another kind of virtual bag swipe. So check them out. They're donating cash as well to women who code. Okay. >>Right. >>Which is very cool. Um, anything else that we missed? Swag giveaways? >>I have one little, um, little comment, a little secret. So I don't know if anybody's caught it yet, Jenny, but if you go back and watch the, the, uh, you know, with Scott, there might be a surprise in there and anybody that finds it first and tweets me might have something for you. >>So Easter egg in there. Is there something going on there? >>I went on, I don't know. I'm just, just saying, >>Okay. All right. Check out the keynote. That was a pro tip right there for everyone's watching. So if you're watching this stream right now, as we get into our awesome next segment, which is going to be really one of my favorites, the children's cancer Institute, this was not only a moving segment from an impact standpoint, but talking about the people that interns and young developers really solving a big problem with Docker, this is a really high impact statement. So that segment, so, so watch it guys. Thanks so much. We'll see. On the wrap up after this next segment, of course, does the catalog of content in the schedule when it's not streaming, it becomes a catalog. So if you're watching it, check out all the sessions, we'll see you in the wrap up.

>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020. brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome to DockerCon 2020. I'm John Furrier here in the DockerCon virtual studios. It's CUBE studios it's theCUBE virtual meets DuckerCon 2020 virtual event with my coach, Jenny Barocio and Peter McKee, as well as Brett Fisher, over on the captains who's doing his sessions. This is the wrap up of the long day of continuous amazing action packed DockerCon 2020. Jenny and Peter, what a day we still got the energy. We can go another 24 hours, let's do it now. This is a wrap up. So exciting day, tons of sessions, great feedback. Twitter's on fire the chats and engagements are on fire, but this is the time where we do the most coveted piece, the community awards, so Jenny, this is the time for you to deliver the drum roll for the community awards, take it away. >> Okay, (mumbles) It's the past few years and have been able to recognize those in the community that deliver so much to everyone else. And even though we're wrapping up here, there is still other content going on because we just couldn't stop till five o'clock. Peter what's happening right now? >> Yeah, so over in the Devs in Action channel, we have earning Docker Daemon with rootless mode. That's still going on, should be a great talk. And then in the How To channel, we have transforming open source into live service with Docker. They're still running now, two great talks. >> Awesome, and then the captains are still going. I think they probably started the after party already, although this channel's going to wait till, you know, 30 more minutes for that one. So if you're an after party mode, definitely go check out after we announced the awards, Brett and Marcos and Jeff and the captain's channel. So, we have some great things to share. And I mentioned it in my last segment, but nothing happens without the collective community. DockerCon is no exception. So, I really just want to take a moment again to thank the Docker team, the attendees, our sponsors and our community leaders and captains. They've been all over the virtual conference today, just like they would have been at a real conference. And I love the energy. You know, as an organizer planning a virtual event, there's always the concern of how it's going to work. Right, this is new for lots of people, but I'm in Florida and I'm thrilled with how everyone showed up today. Yeah, for sure. And to the community done some excellent things, Marcus, over them in the Captain's channel, he has built out PWD play with Docker. So, if you haven't checked that out, please go check that out. We going to be doing some really great things with that. Adding some, I think I mentioned earlier in the day, but we're adding a lot of great content into their. A lot more labs, so, please go check that out. And then talking about the community leaders, you know, they bring a lot to the community. They put there their free time in, right? No one paying them. And they do it just out of sheer joy to give back to the community organizing events. I don't know if you ever organized an event Jenny I know you have, but they take a lot of time, right? You have to plan everything, you have to get sponsors, you have to find out place to host. And now with virtual, you have to figure out how you're going to deliver the feel of a meetup in virtually. And we just had our community summit the other day and we heard from the community leaders, what they're doing, they're doing some really cool stuff. Live streaming, Discord, pulling in a lot of tools to be able to kind of recreate that, feel of being together as a community. So super excited and really appreciate all the community leaders for putting in the extra effort one of these times. >> Yeah, for really adapting and continuing in their mission and their passion to share and to teach. So, we want to recognize a few of those awesome community leaders. And I think we get to it right now Peter, are you ready? >> Set, let's go for it, right away. >> All right, so, the first community leaders are from Docker Bangalore and they are rocking it. Sangam Biradar, Ajeet singh Raina and Saiyam Pathak, thank you all so much for your commitment to this community. >> All right, and the next one we have is Docker Panang. Thank you so much to Sujay Pillai, did a great job. >> Got to love that picture and that shirt, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, next up, we'd love to recognize Docker Rio, Camila Martins, Andre Fernande, long time community leaders. >> Yeah, if I ever get a chance that's. I have a bunch of them that I want to go travel and visit but Rio is on top of list I think. >> And then also-- >> Rio maybe That could be part of the award, it's, you get to. >> I can deliver. >> Go there, bring them their awards in person now, as soon as we can do that again. >> That would be awesome, that'd be awesome. Okay, the next one is Docker Guatemala And Marcos Cano, really appreciate it and that is awesome. >> Awesome Marcos has done, has organized and put on so many meetups this last year. Really, really amazing. All right, next one is Docker Budapest and Lajos Papp, Karoly Kass and Bence Lvady, awesome. So, the mentorship and leadership coming out of this community is fantastic and you know, we're so thrilled to write, now is you. >> All right, and then we go to Docker Algeria. Yeah we got some great all over the country it's so cool to see. But Ayoub Benaissa, it's been great look at that great picture in background, thank you so much. >> I think we need we need some clap sound effects here. >> Yeah where's Beth. >> I'm clapping. >> Lets, lets. >> Alright. >> Last one, Docker Chicago, Mark Panthofer. After Chicago, Docker Milwaukee and Docker Madison one meet up is not enough for Mark. So, Mark, thank you so much for spreading your Docker knowledge throughout multiple locations. >> Yeah, and I'll buy half a Docker. Thank you to all of our winners and all of our community leaders. We really, really appreciate it. >> All right, and the next award I have the pleasure of giving is the Docker Captain's Award. And if you're not familiar with captains, Docker captains are recognized by Docker for their outstanding contributions to the community. And this year's winner was selected by his fellow captains for his tireless commitment to that community. On behalf of Docker and the captains. And I'm sure the many many people that you have helped, all 13.3 million of them on Stack Overflow and countless others on other platforms, the 2020 tip of the Captain's Hat award winner is Brandon Mitchell, so so deserving. And luckily Brandon made it super easy for me to put together this slide because he took his free DockerCon selfie wearing his Captains' Hat, so it worked out perfectly. >> Yeah, I have seen Brandon not only on Stack Overflow, but in our community Slack answering questions, just in the general area where everybody. The questions are random. You have everybody from intermediate to beginners and Brandon is always in there answering questions. It's a huge help. >> Yeah, always in there answering questions, sharing code, always providing feedback to the Docker team. Just such a great voice, both in and out for Docker. I mean, we're so proud to have you as a captain, Brandon. And I'm so excited to give you this award. All right, so, that was the most fun, right? We get to do the community awards. Do you want to do any sort of recap on the day? >> What was your favorite session? What was your favorite tweet? Favorite tweet was absolutely Peter screenshotting his parents. >> Mom mom my dear mom, it's sweet though, that's sweet. I appreciate it, can't believe they gave me an award. >> Yeah, I mean, have they ever seen you do a work presentation before? >> No, they've seen me lecture my kids a lot and I can go on about life's lessons and then I'm not sure if it's the same thing but yeah. >> I don't think so. >> No they have never see me. >> Peter you got to get the awards for the kids. That's the secret to success, you know, and captain awards and the community household awards for the kids. >> Yeah, well I am grooming my second daughter, she teaches go to afterschool kids and never thought she would be interested in programming cause when she was younger she wasn't interested in, but yes, super interested in now I have to, going to bring her into the community now, yeah. >> All right, well, great awards. Jenny is there any more awards, we good on the awards? >> Nope, we are good on the awards, but certainly not the thank yous is for today. It's an absolute honor to put on an event like this and have the community show up, have our speakers show up have the Docker team show up, right? And I'm just really thrilled. And I think the feedback has been phenomenal so far. And so I just really want to thank our speakers and our sponsors and know that, you know, while DockerCon may be over, like what we did today here and it never ends. So, thank you, let's continue the conversation. There's still things going on and tons of sessions on demand now, you can catch up, okay. >> One more thing, I have to remind everybody. I mentioned it earlier, but I got to say it again go back, watch the keynote. And I'll say at this time there is an Easter egg in there. I don't think anybody's found it yet. But if you do, tweet me and might be a surprise. >> Well you guys-- >> Are you watching your tweet feed right now? Because you're going to get quite a few. >> Yeah, it's probably blowing up right now. >> Well you got to get on a keynote deck for sure. Guys, it's been great, you guys have been phenomenal. It's been a great partnership, the co-creation this event. And again, what's blows me away is the global reach of the event, the interaction, the engagement and the cost was zero to attend. And that's all possible because of the sponsors. Again, shout out to Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure Engine X, Cockroach Labs and sneak of Platinum sponsors. And also we had some ecosystem sponsors. And if you liked the event, go to the sponsors and say hello and say, thank you. They're all listed on the page, hit their sessions and they really make it possible. So, all this effort on all sides have been great. So, awesome, I learned a lot. Thanks everyone for watching. Peter you want to get a final word and then I'll give Jenny the final, final word. >> No again, yes, thank you, thank you everybody. It's been great, theCUBE has been phenomenal. People behind the scenes has been just utterly professional. And thank you Jenny, if anybody doesn't know, you guys don't know how much Jenny shepherds this whole process through she's our captain internally making sure everything stays on track and gets done. You cannot even imagine what she does. It's incredible, so thank you, Jenny. I really, really appreciate it. >> Jenny, take us home, wrap this up 2020, dockerCon. >> All Right. >> In the books, but it's going to be on demand. It's 365 days a year now, come on final word. >> It's not over, it's not over. Community we will see you tomorrow. We will continue to see you, thank you to everyone. I had a great day, I hope everyone else did too. And happy DockerCon 2020, see you next year. >> Okay, that's a wrap, see on the internet, everyone. I'm John, for Jenny and Peter, thank you so much for your time and attention throughout the day. If you were coming in and out, remember, go see those sessions are on a calendar, but now they're a catalog of content and consume and have a great evening. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Melon Yen, founder and partner of operator Collective Madeleine, Welcome to the Cube. Thank you so much. So tell us a little bit about your background. >>So Operator Collective is actually my fourth organization that been apart of starting, and all of them have had an aspect of it that had a strong community to it. And so that was one of the reasons why, um, as you hear about in a second, I could put together this kind of crazy idea for a fund that looks like no other. >>Um, So what inspired you to start this company? And how did you navigate getting funding? >>Sure. So? So, because that operator collective is my fourth company. The 1st 1 was actually a nonprofit. The 2nd 1 was a venture backed company that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years, and the 3rd 1 was something called Faster, which is the world's largest B two b B two b community for SAS Softwares of service, the company that was a venture backed startup that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years. Even though I helped launch it, I didn't actually officially joined as an employee until about 18 months in, and by that time it's employees 65 I noticed a number of things, which is there were largely homogenous group of people who were there before me, all really great people. But you tend to know people like you and the hyper growth stages of startups. You tend to turn around and say, Who can I get? And so you and you turn to the people that you know, And so you end up with companies that look like yourself and so spent a lot of time looking at what was going on in the venture world, which is that in the area that I focus on, which is enterprise and software enterprise software. It is over 90% male in terms of veces as well as founders and the world revolves around in the venture world revolves around veces and founders. And so I looked around and said, Well, where the operators, the people who build and grow and scale up these companies, they're largely not. They're not efficiently and effectively part of this ecosystem and then second, where the women and people of color And so but as I started to dig in more and talk to people, what I realized was that the VCs and founders actually wanted to bring in the operators. They wanted to bring in the people with different backgrounds, but the network's didn't naturally overlap. And so I thought, there's got to be a way to bring them in, because I know the operators and the operators also want to participate. But the system isn't optimized to make it efficient or friendly are comfortable for them to be able to participate. So that's why I decided to put operator collective together. >>Wow, So you are key noting today for cloud. Now, um, what has this experience been like? And what is the main message you want to give to the award winners and to the cloud now community. >>So it's incredibly inspiring to be with all of the women who are being honored tonight as well as, frankly, the organizers. The organization itself Cloud now is incredibly impactful. And so one of the reasons I was so excited to be asked is a number of the women who were being honored. I either know or have heard of. And the recognition is something that is very important because we need to tell the stories and recognize these people who are not. Maybe the usual suspects, the ones who maybe not our everyday names. And so I was super excited to be here. >>So you were talking about how it's about 90% male in the VC and founder community, Um, in one of your articles, which are amazing, by the way you said, Don't let the excuse of cultural fit be a vehicle for perpetuating sameness, and I thought that was so profound. So, um, are you still seeing this notion of cultural fit being a huge issue and if so, what can be done? Teoh mitigate it? Yeah, I think there's >>more awareness now of the fact that if you hire for cultural fit, you'll end up with 65 people who are exactly like you. And that's not optimizing for a successful company because right there studies that show that diverse teams outperform out innovate, homogeneous teams. But what's also interesting is the same study says that, but homogeneous teams are more certain that they've gotten to the right answer, even if they've got into the answer less less often than the diverse teams. And so when you have people who are just like you, then everyone agrees with each other than you don't realize that. Maybe there's another way of looking at something and so cultural fit is is a warning sign. I think to say that. Okay, well, there just like me, I'm very comfortable sometimes. Being uncomfortable is good. >>That's a great message. I think it's really hard to to say like, Oh, I'm okay with being comfortable. Um, so in, in in in one of your other articles, you bring up this idea of, um, don't check all the boxes, but rather fill in the gaps. So can you explain more about that? >>Yeah. So the idea behind that is, if you look for only the typical candidates. The ones who maybe think of a startup founder went to Stanford. Where's the hoodie? Right? Did computer science then that's fine. There are plenty of those people who have been successful, but you're ignoring all the people who didn't. And so, in fact, I'm the beneficiary of people who were willing to not just check all the boxes because I >>didn't >>check any of the boxes. If you look at, if you look at my background, I should not have been able to raise. Is the first time fund and a first time fund manager to be able to raise a $50 million fund because I'm a um Ah, let's see, I'm a solo GP, right? So, General partner who hasn't been a VC before with the first time fund, I don't have the traditional venture background. My previous background was I was an intellectual property attorney. Um, then help start a company as a result of that and then and then also when you check the boxes, 40% of the seas went to Stanford or Harvard, and when you look at the numbers, I didn't check all the boxes, but precisely because I didn't check all the boxes, I was able to actually look at this differently and say, Hey, that's not the model that that I want to build. And frankly, if I tried to build the same model that everyone else did, my background so doesn't look like anything. I wouldn't have been successful. And by taking it and saying, Look, I'm gonna build a model that's totally different from the ground up that allowed me to build a platform in a community that looked like no one else is as a result of that was able to raise money from institutional investors, for instance, which very rarely back first time funds. And so, by not checking all the boxes, um, I was able to build a model, but by other people also saying, Look, she doesn't check any of our typical boxes. But we >>would like this >>idea because it's so different than everyone else is. We will. We are now, you know, part of the fund >>and sometimes different is good, and it's what's what's needed? Absolutely. Um, so speaking of that, um, in terms of operator collective, what workplace environment are you trying to strive for. >>So what we say is we seek to back founders from all backgrounds who believe you share are believed that culture, diversity and operational excellence are a key part of building truly great companies. So we strive to be inclusive way. We strive to have a variety of backgrounds. We use a lot of the tools that of the companies, because we focus only on enterprise and B two B software and technology and infrastructure. And so we also try to use a lot of those tools. So we are mostly women team and we are distributed team. We largely work out of our homes and we work a lot on Zoom and we all a lot of us have kids too, and so what we do is we adjust the schedule so we can do drop off in the morning. We work like crazy, right? We work long hours, but we also do it so that people can can take their kids to doctor's appointments or pick up their kids at the end of the day. But we what was important to me was that we created environment that worked with our busy lives, and it wasn't that we were trying to take, take take these incredibly talented women and make it fit into just the corporate norm. Because you can have an incredibly successful work relationship. I mean, you can have an incredibly successful, um career if you don't have to sacrifice everything else in your life for it, >>right? Right. And that balance is so important. Um, so what advice would you give to aspiring female entrepreneurs who maybe have, ah, not so technical background or who are struggling to navigate in this male dominated industry. >>So one of the things >>I talked about in my keynote today was was that you never get this right. You're never going to raise a fund. If if you do this, you're never gonna raise a fund. And so when you're starting a company, you will go when you talk to a lot of people as you should, because you will get lots of great information. Ah, lot of people are going to say, Well, you're never gonna have a You're never going to start a company if you don't have a technical co founder never going to start a company. If you're gonna try to do X and So while you some might say, Well, you should just ignore those people actually say, Don't ignore those people because they are saying that other people are going to think that too. But think of a way to counter that. And that actually help make the operator collective business model stronger. Because we said Okay, we know that's gonna be the mindset. Let's turn it around and actually make this a strength. And so, for female founders or any founders, what I would say is listen to a lot of people talk to a lot of people here what they have to say. Ultimately, trust your instinct. Trust your gut. And because you know what's best for the company that you're trying to build. >>Great words of advice. Melon. Thank you so much for being on the Cube. Thank you >>so much for having me. Absolutely. >>I'm Sonita Gari. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.