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

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

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

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

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California, about social impact, transforming teaching and learning with Cloud technology we've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, we're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems, they're today's problems and learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally, and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent we'll start with you Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. >> Thank you, thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they're always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting, delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, one is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is leaking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders, and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story. >> Thank you so much for the question. So actually my co-founder was invited to speak at an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly you need knowledge and how do you get knowledge well through education. So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not while, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se, from UN, education, and perhaps I'm biased, because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading, and everyone has a smartphone and (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. >> You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning for questions that are nonlinear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain, okay, you got the idea, you're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So for us, we know education technology is not new, right. And education games are not new, but before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) devices, and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. so with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn. So those are the different things that we work on, certainly with it. >> Yeah, and then a motivated community, is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, it is three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how are we going to make this work And so we've.. We have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine said, you know, it needs to be on the Cloud because if it's on the Cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so, the Cloud obviously allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the technology on the AI side as well obviously there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the Cloud, to make better algorithm and better training. >> (indistinct) to come back to both of you on the AI question. I think that's super important. Vincent I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line in the sand is before COVID and after COVID, there's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation is more channels, more data, the more engagement, how are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? >> So there're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the Cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing. And they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Right, We will talk about speed, the agility of the Cloud, and that's why the Cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open and that's where education technology companies and, you know, heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning, you know, online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing giving a solution very, very quickly. >> Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite. I'll just be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the Cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach. Like in fact, there's a, there's a joke here in the United States so with everyone at home the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So Cloud solves that one, you guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that are powered by the Cloud. And a lot of them are powered by the AWS Cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia, or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, you know, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games you're already using and a consumer of the Cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of top computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is, want to make sure that everyone actually is educated on Cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear Cloud strategy, this is the time don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've got to get your solutions. You're born in the Cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset, Janine, we'll start with you. >> So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem. And being able to leverage on Cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective. And how do we get people motivated and all those sort of great things leveraging on game mechanics, social network, and incentives. And then while we do that on the Cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves, everything to AWS Cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and has organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other, even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID we had to really do our best to convince them until (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, you know, we appreciate this opportunity and also we want to help people realize that in order to.. By adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's, what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and, there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform, as it is an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called Hoax Or Not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 25 million people. So that became not only just boring school subjects, but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the Federal Government of Indonesia to talk about (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, it's horizontally scalable, it's network graph. So you can learn, share about news. And this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame, Hugo, your competitive strategy. You're out there now, you got the COVID world. How are you competing? How's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept obviously is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with AI, you know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that you know, education is lifelong, you know, you have a big pot in school, but when you're an adult you learn and, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the Justice Department where, you know, we look at inmate and, and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We're also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against Ed Tech. And often when we talk to other Ed Tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution. We provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really John, what we competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the Cloud gives you speed. And your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> Absolutely. >> Vincent I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick for the folks watching okay and hear about Amazon. They know the history, they know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the Cloud. You get big pay when you're successful, love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) from the Government of Gambia, you know, so how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. >> Yeah. The great enabling technology ecosystem to support you. I think, at the regions too. So the regions do help. I love we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our Cloud Hugo, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, office hour every week. Like you said, Janine with, your tech team talking to a Cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And, you know, on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. >> You know, that's a great point. The AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and education as well, healthcare, how's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. >> John I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS, we have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market, as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place to really deliver.. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work. And in delivering this impact to society. >> The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and the folks at AWS for many, many years, that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you starting to see that blending. And you've got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo. Thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you for having us >> thanks John >> Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual we're remote. We're not in person this year because of the pandemic you're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Thank you for watching. (soft music)

>>from >>around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of pager duty. Summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. Hey, welcome back to Brady. Jeffrey here with the Cube in Palo Alto studios today. And we're talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it. And it's pager duty summit. And we're excited to have from the pager duty team. She's Caroline Gus, the VP of corporate marketing from pager duty. Caroline, Great to see you. >>Hi, Jeff. Great to see you again. >>Absolutely. So, you know, I was thinking before we turn on the cameras we've been doing pager duty for I think this will be like, say, our fourth year that first year was in the cool, um, cruise ship terminal pier. I gotta written appear 27 which was which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the, you know, historic Westin ST Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue, but oh, my goodness. You guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year, year to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that that you could do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space. At least when you're busting out of the seems so First off, Welcome and >>talk a little >>bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from, you know, head of marketing perspective. >>Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's five x the number of people that were able to join us, the Western last year. So we have, uh, we we expect to have 10,000 people registered on attending age duty summit. The second thing is thea share number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50 on again. That's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms, so it's being a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda on. It's very much personalized, you know, developers come to our event. They love our event for the opportunity to learn mixed with their peers, get best practices and hands on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions when we have done previously, and that things like labs and Bird of Feather Sessions and Emma's. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page Julie has, um, many of the Fortune 500 on 4100 customers. We work very closely with CEO CTO, so we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience on I think for us it's really opened up. The potential of this event made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were, As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. >>I think it's such an interesting point. Um, because before you were constrained, right, If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what could go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for these for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard tradeoffs? I could only attend one session at one oclock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this is, you said really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled. You doubled your sessions on and you got five X a number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital vs talking about the things that you can do that are impossible in physical. >>Yeah, I think at the very beginning. Well, first of all, we held our Amir summit events in London in July. So that was great because we got Thio go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the rial removal of hurdles in this process. So, to your point about missing the session because you're attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Pelton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there, live participate in the live Q and A, but equally you have an entire on demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive day. So on the Monday we're on everything on the Tuesday I ask because show up again for life Q and A at the end of their sessions. But after that it's available forever on an on demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content on also the number of people that content in attend, no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, Well, I'll send one or two people to the page duty summit. They could learn all the great innovation from page duty, and they'll bring it back to the team that's completely changed. You know, we have tens of 20 signing up on. All of them are able to get that experience firsthand. >>That's really interesting. I didn't didn't even think about, you know, kind of whole teams being able to attend down instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints, or you can't send your whole team, you know, a way for a conference in a particular area. But the piece to that you're supporting that were over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and and and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's, uh, geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from from from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up, um, the participation to such a much bigger like you said five x five X, and increase in the registration. That's pretty good number. >>That's right. Yeah. I mean, that crossed boundaries gone away. This event is free on DWhite. That's actually meant is, as I say, you know, larger teams from the same company are attending. Uh, In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now to previously. This was very much a community event for, you know, our page duty users on now we actually have a large number of I asked, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also, I think, for our sponsor partners as well, because it's bordering out the audience for both of us. So let's >>talk about sponsors for a minute, because, um, one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is. Okay, I can do the keynotes, and I could do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for, um, you know, training and certification and customer stories, etcetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right sponsors used, you know, go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wander badge. Right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel. That was really important. Well, now those have gone away. Physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, you know, what can they expect? What? What do you know the sponsor experience at pager duty Summit. Since I don't have a little tiny booth at the Westin ST Francis given out swag this year. >>Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time, something that we learned is we used to have very long keynotes. You know, the keynote could be an hour long on involved multiple components and people would stay in that room for a now er on did really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions on that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So zendesk Salesforce, Microsoft some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions. I'm really explain both the partnership with pager duty, but also they're called technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before on we are still repeating the Expo format, so we actually do have on Expo Hall that any time there's breaking between sessions, you could go over to the Expo ball, and it actually runs throughout as well, and you can go in and you can talk to the teams. You can see product demos, so it's very much a virtual version of the Expo Hall where you went and you want around and you picked up a bit of swag, >>so you mentioned keynotes and and Jennifer and and the team has always had a fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank's Luqman and and Eric Juan from Zoom By by Curry, which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But, um, talk tell us a little bit about some of the speakers I know there'll be some some, you know, kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on on some of the people. I will be sharing the stage with Jennifer. >>Absolutely, I said. I think what's really unique about Page duty Summit is that we designed types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, your practitioner, we have something like this from Jones of Honeycombs, who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today, and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have J. Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents, So that's really sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and pager duty really helps them day to day with with that job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who could really learn from a ZA leader. So Bret Taylor, president and CEO of Salesforce, will be joining us on the main stage. You'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world on. Then we have Derrick Johnson. He is president of N A A. C P, and he'll be talking about community engagement and particularly voter engagement, which is such an important topic for us right now. Aan den. We have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use pager duty thio drive change in their organization. So an example would be porches, bro. He runs digital for Fox on, and he's gonna be talking about digital acceleration. How large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now, >>right? Well, you guys have such a developer focus because pager duty, the product of solution, has to integrate with so many other, um, infrastructure, you know, monitoring and, uh, and all of all those different systems because you guys were basically at the front line, you know, sending them the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad, you know, kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years, which is such a key piece of your go to market. >>That's right. I mean, we we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 203 170 integrations on. That's important because we want anyone to be able to use page duty no matter what is in their technology stack technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place, you know, we all are living through digital on working and learning through digital on DSO. The technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we conserve pretty much any set of services that your business. It's using. >>Yeah, we've all seen all the means right about who's who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CEO or or covert. And we all know the answer to toe what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th not at the West End Online and again. What air? What are you hoping? You're kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? >>Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think will be a sense of belonging. Three attendees, the uses, a pager duty. They are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working on. But what that means is responding to incidents we've actually seen. Ah, 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since covert and shelter in place began. Wait 30 >>38% increase in incidents since mid March. >>That's correct. Since the beginning of on bear in mind incidents. Prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the pager duty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform, our platform is a key part of how, but these are some people under pressure, so I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation on what are some of the great innovations that make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we don't for that community is that we are offering certification for P. D. You page due to university for free this year. It's of course, with a value of $7500. Last year, you would attend page duty summit on you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit. But you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, you know, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this in this time of pressure, >>right? Right. Well, it is a very passionate community, and, you know, we go to so many events and you can you can really tell it's palatable, you know, kind of what the where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but you know, throughout the year. And I think you know a huge shout out to Jennifer on the culture that she's built there because it is very warm. It's very inclusive, is very positive. And and that energy, you know, kind of goes throughout the whole company and ice the teaser. You know this in something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is, and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call right and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting, Ah, return call and you gotta fix something So you know, a huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, I think, a joke that we make you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation on artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are uncle. >>Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're gonna be doing a bunch of Cube interviews like Normal and, uh, you know, applied artificial intelligence, I think, is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. >>Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. You too. And we'll see you later. Alright. She is Caroline. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

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

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector online summit, which is also virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube, with a great interview. He remotely Jennifer Cronus, who's the general manager with the D. O. D. Account for Amazon Web services. Jennifer, welcome to the Cube, and great to have you over the phone. I know we couldn't get the remote video cause location, but glad to have you via your voice. Thanks for joining us. >>Well, thank you very much, John. Thanks for the opportunity here >>to the Department of Defense. Big part of the conversation over the past couple of years, One of many examples of the agencies modernizing. And here at the public sector summit virtual on line. One of your customers, the Navy with their air p is featured. Yes, this is really kind of encapsulate. It's kind of this modernization of the public sector. So tell us about what they're doing and their journey. >>Sure, Absolutely. So ah, maybe er P, which is Navy enterprise resource planning is the department of the Navy's financial system of record. It's built on S AP, and it provides financial acquisition and my management information to maybe commands and Navy leadership. Essentially keep the Navy running and to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of baby support warfighter. It handles about $70 billion in financial transactions each year and has over 72,000 users across six Navy commands. Um, and they checked the number of users to double over the next five years. So essentially, you know, this program was in a situation where their on premises infrastructure was end of life. They were facing an expensive tech upgrade in 2019. They had infrastructure that was hard to steal and prone to system outages. Data Analytics for too slow to enable decision making, and users actually referred to it as a fragile system. And so, uh, the Navy made the decision last year to migrate the Europe E system to AWS Cloud along with S AP and S two to s AP National Security Services. So it's a great use case for a government organization modernizing in the cloud, and we're really happy to have them speaking at something this year. >>Now, was this a new move for the Navy to move to the cloud? Actually, has a lot of people are end life in their data center? Certainly seeing in public sector from education to modernize. So is this a new move for them? And what kind of information does this effect? I mean, ASAP is kind of like, Is it, like just financial data as an operational data? What is some of the What's the move about it Was that new? And what kind of data is impacted? >>Sure. Yeah, well, the Navy actually issued a Cloud First Policy in November of 2017. So they've been at it for a while, moving lots of different systems of different sizes and shapes to the cloud. But this migration really marked the first significant enterprise business system for the Navy to move to the actually the largest business system. My migrate to the cloud across D o D. Today to date. And so, essentially, what maybe Air P does is it modernizes and standardizes Navy business operation. So everything think about from time keeping to ordering missile and radar components for Navy weapon system. So it's really a comprehensive system. And, as I said, the migration to AWS govcloud marks the Navy's largest cloud migration to date. And so this essentially puts the movement and documentation of some $70 billion worth of parts of goods into one accessible space so the information can be shared, analyzed and protected more uniformly. And what's really exciting about this and you'll hear from the Navy at Summit is that they were actually able to complete this migration in just under 10 months, which was nearly half the time it was originally expected to take different sizing complexity. So it's a really, really great spring. >>That's huge numbers. I mean, they used to be years. Well, that was the minicomputer. I'm old enough to remember like, Oh, it's gonna be a two year process. Um, 10 months, pretty spectacular. I got to ask, What is some of the benefits that they're seeing in the cloud? Is that it? Has it changed the roles and responsibilities? What's what's some of the impact that they're seeing expecting to see quickly? >>Yeah, I'd say, you know, there's been a really big impact to the Navy across probably four different areas. One is in decision making. Also better customer experience improves security and then disaster recovery. So we just kind of dive into each of those a little bit. So, you know, moving the system to the cloud has really allowed the Navy make more timely and informed decisions, as well as to conduct advanced analytics that they weren't able to do as efficiently in the past. So as an example, pulling financial reports and using advanced analytics on their own from system used to take them around 20 hours. And now ah, maybe your API is able to all these ports in less than four hours, obviously allowing them to run the reports for frequently and more efficiently. And so this is obviously lead to an overall better customer experience enhance decision making, and they've also been able to deploy their first self service business intelligence capabilities. So to put the hat, you know, the capability, Ah, using these advanced analytics in the hands of the actual users, they've also experienced improve security. You know, we talk a lot about the security benefits of migrating to the cloud, but it's given them of the opportunity to increase their data protection because now there's only one based as a. We have data to protect instead of multiple across a whole host of your traditional computing hardware. And then finally, they've implemented a really true disaster recovery system by implementing a dual strategy by putting data in both our AWS about East and govcloud West. They were the first to the Navy to do those to provide them with true disaster become >>so full govcloud edge piece. So that brings up the question around. And I love all this tactical edge military kind of D o d. Thinking the agility makes total sense. Been following that for a couple of years now, is this business side of it that the business operations Or is there a tactical edge military component here both. Or is that next ahead for the Navy? >>Yeah. You know, I think there will ultimately both You know that the Navy's big challenge right now is audit readiness. So what they're focusing on next is migrating all of these financial systems into one General ledger for audit readiness, which has never been done before. I think you know, audit readiness press. The the D has really been problematic. So the next thing that they're focusing on in their journey is not only consolidating to one financial ledger, but also to bring on new users from working capital fund commands across the Navy into this one platform that is secure and stable, more fragile system that was previously in place. So we expect over time, once all of the systems migrate, that maybe your API is going to double in size, have more users, and the infrastructure is already going to be in place. Um, we are seeing use of all of the tactical edge abilities in other parts of the Navy. Really exciting programs for the Navy is making use of our snowball and snowball edge capabilities. And, uh, maybe your key that that this follows part of their migration. >>I saw snow cones out. There was no theme there. So the news Jassy tweeted. You know, it's interesting to see the progression, and you mentioned the audit readiness. The pattern of cloud is implementing the business model infrastructure as a service platform as a service and sass, and on the business side, you've got to get that foundational infrastructure audit, readiness, monitoring and then the platform, and then ultimately, the application so a really, you know, indicator that this is happening much faster. So congratulations. But I want to bring that back to now. The d o d. Generally, because this is the big surge infrastructure platform sas. Um, other sessions at the Public sector summit here on the D. O. D is the cybersecurity maturity model, which gets into this notion of base lining at foundation and build on top. What is this all about? The CME EMC. What does it mean? >>Yeah, well, I'll tell you, you know, I think the most people know that are U S defense industrial base of what we call the Dev has experienced and continues to experience an increasing number of cyber attacks. So every year, the loss of sensitive information and an election property across the United States, billions each year. And really, it's our national security. And there's many examples for weapons systems and sensitive information has been compromised. The F 35 Joint Strike Fighter C 17 the Empty Nine Reaper. All of these programs have unfortunately, experience some some loss of sensitive information. So to address this, the d o. D. Has put in place, but they all see em and see which is the Cybersecurity Maturity Models certification framework. It's a mouthful, which is really designed to ensure that they did the defense industrial base. And all of the contractors that are part of the Defense Supply Chain network are protecting federal contract information and controlled unclassified information, and that they have the appropriate levels of cyber security in place to protect against advanced, persistent, persistent threats. So in CMC, there are essentially five levels with various processes and practices in each level. And this is a morton not only to us as a company but also to all of our partners and customers. Because with new programs the defense, investor base and supply take, companies will be required to achieve a certain see MNC certification level based on the sensitivity of the programs data. So it's really important initiative for the for the Deal E. And it's really a great way for us to help >>Jennifer. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the phone. I really appreciate it. I know there's so much going on the D o d Space force Final question real quick for a minute. Take a minute to just share what trends within the d o. D you're watching around this modernization. >>Yeah, well, it has been a really exciting time to be serving our customers in the D. And I would say there's a couple of things that we're really excited about. One is the move to tactical edge that you've talked about using out at the tactical edge. We're really excited about capabilities like the AWS Snowball Edge, which helped Navy Ear Key hybrid. So the cloud more quickly but also, as you mentioned, our AWS cone, which isn't even smaller military grades for edge computing and data transfer device that was just under £5 kids fitness entered mailbox or even a small backpacks. It's a really cool capability for our diode, the warfighters. Another thing. That's what we're really watching. Mostly it's DRDs adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning. So you know, Dear D has really shown that it's pursuing deeper integration of AI and ML into mission critical and business systems for organizations like the Joint Artificial Intelligence. Enter the J and the Army AI task force to help accelerate the use of cloud based AI really improved war fighting abilities And then finally, what I'd say we're really excited about is the fact that D o. D is starting Teoh Bill. New mission critical systems in the cloud born in the cloud, so to speak. Systems and capabilities like a BMS in the airports. Just the Air Force Advanced data management system is being constructed and created as a born in the cloud systems. So we're really, really excited about those things and think that continued adoption at scale of cloud computing The idea is going to ensure that our military and our nation maintain our technological advantages, really deliver on mission critical systems. >>Jennifer, Thanks so much for sharing that insight. General General manager at Amazon Web services handling the Department of Defense Super important transformation efforts going on across the government modernization. Certainly the d o d. Leading the effort. Thank you for your time. This is the Cube's coverage here. I'm John Furrier, your host for AWS Public sector Summit online. It's a cube. Virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and getting all the content and share that with you. Thank you for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome back. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube coverage of Amazon Web service Public sectors, online summit Always love. We have phenomenal practitioner discussion. Of course, public sector includes both government agencies, universities, education, broad swath, you know, inside that ecosystem and some really, you know, important and timely discussion we're having. Of course, with the global pandemic Kobe 19 happening. I'm really happy to welcome to the program Wei Li, who is a PhD and principal investigator as well as an assistant professor both Children National Research Institute associated with George Washington University way Thank you so much for joining us. >>Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. We're here. >>Alright. Why don't we start with Ah, give us a little bit of you know, your research focus in general. And you know what projects it is that you're working on these days? Yeah, >>sure. So, yeah, so hello, everyone. So our laboratory is many interested in using computational biology and jim editing approaches to understand human genome and human disease. And we're particularly interesting in one gene editing technology will be called CRISPR screening. So this is a fascinating, high for proven technology because it tells you whether one doctor 20,000 human genes are connected with some certain pieces fit in type in one single experiment. So in the possibly developed some of the widely used every reasons to analyze the swimming data has been downloaded off by over 60,000 times. So it's really popular, and right now there are a couple of going projects. But basically we are trying to, for example, problem in machine learning and data mining approaches to find new clues of human disease from the original mix and screening big data on. We also collaborated with a lot of blacks around the world and to use this technology to use this technology to find new cures and drugs for cancer and other decisions. So this is the basic all the way off our current research programmes. Interns off the Conradi 19 research. I think one of the major projects we are having is that, um, we noticed that Christmas winning and other similar screening methods has been widely used in many years. Many research adapted to study waters infection. So in the past 10 years we have seen people you are using their Christmas screening and our AI suite, for example, to study HIV is a car wires, best bars, Western ire virus, Ebola influencers and also coronavirus. So that raises an interesting question from us if we collect all the screening data together. But these viruses, what a new information can we find that we cannot identify for the single study, for example, coe and identify new patterns or new human genes that are that are common in responsible for many different viruses? Type of all, we can find some genes that I work only for some certain people viruses so more well, we know that there are a lot of drugs that target different genes, and we are particularly interested in, for example, can repurpose some of these drugs to treat different hyper viruses, including Kobe, 18 19. So that's the one of the major profits off ongoing research, right and left ready to call the idea, writing So India. And we hope that we can find some new new Jim functions that after that that are broader, really essential for different hyper viruses. I also new drug targets that can potentially treat existing a new drug existing and new viruses, including compared to 19 >>Yeah, crisper. Shown a lot of promise is definitely a lot of excitement in the research community to be ableto work on this. You talked a little bit about, you know, big data, obviously a lot of computational power required to do some of the things you're talking about. Can you speak a little bit to the partnership between computer science and the medicine? How do you make sure on that? You know, there's that marrying of, you know, the people in the technology focus in the medical space. >>Yeah, so I think, Yeah, my my research background is actually from computer science. I call her on the grand graduates from their committed size. So I know a lot about some of the signs and have arisen. But right now it's quite interesting because our research for focus half on computer science and half on their medicine. So it's a complete heart experience, but it's really super was a super exciting to connect both women in science and medicine together. So I think most of the time we are focusing on the coding and the average analysis on. But at the same time, we also spent a lot of time like interpreting the results. In essence, we need a lot off. Yeah, knowledge from biology and medicine to make sense, to make our results since and interpret double in the end, we hope that our results can be They went into a son, for example, canonical, actionable solutions, including new drugs. >>Yeah, it's if you think about you know, the research space. You know, often you know its projects that you're taking months or years to investigate things for talking about the current code 19 pandemic. Of course, there's a critical need today for fast moving activities. So you know what? What are the outcomes from the cover? 19 aspects of of what you're working on. What are some of the outcomes that we might be able to help patients survivability and other things regarding, You know, this specific disease? >>Yeah, So I think there are two major are I would say there are two major benefits from their outcome of our research project. So the first the first thing is that we hope to find some genes that have that can be potentially drug targets. So if they are existing drug second heavily genes, then that would be perfect because we don't need to do anything. Apologies. We just need to try that. Extend existing drugs Toe cabinet is James and in the end, we hope that these drugs can have the broad on the wire. I would say the broad answer. Borrow activity. That means that and you leave, for example, if these drugs can be potentially used to treat Cooley 19 and sometimes in in several years later in the future if there's a new virus coming out. Hopefully they were doing like they're it's already the drugs that target known Gene. Hopefully, that's there were assume the noon numerous that never happened in something the future. But I hope that when the new risk is coming, we already have the new drugs to track it this way. Already have existing drugs to target these viruses, so that's one part and the alibis that way. We have, like, spend a lot of kind of, for example, collecting the genomics and screening data, and we are hoping that our research results can be freely accessible around the road by many different researchers in different laps. So that's why we are rely on AWS to build up there to process and to analyze the data as well as to, uh, to build up an integrated database and websites such that are the outcomes off our projects can be freely accessible around the world. Many other researchers. >>Yeah, great. I'm glad you connected the dots for us. For aws can you speak a little bit too? Obviously, Cloud has, you know, the ability for us to use, you know, nearly infinite computational capabilities. What's specific about AWS helps you along that project. Uh, let's start there. >>Yeah, So I think our AWS really helps us a lot because we developed on average and process their screening data actually takes, like, two or three days to Christmas one data. But if you were talking about, like, tens or hundreds or even thousands off the screen data existing, the high high performance cross team doesn't really help because it takes maybe years to finish. AWS provides, like flexible computing resources, especially the easy two instance that we can quickly deploy and process in military short amount of time. So our estimation is that we can reduce the amount of Time Media 2% to process the poverty Christmas. We need data from months to just a few days. So that's one part and the other guys that we are trying to build up the website and database, as I mentioned before, with which we host a large amount of data. And I think in that sense, AWS and the commuting instance as well as the AWS RDS service really helped us a lot because we don't need to worry too much about. There's a lot of the details of the after deployment off their database and the website. We just go ahead and use that as a service is really straightforward and save us a lot of kind of effort. >>Yeah, and you talk about the sharing of data. Information is so important, But of course it would, talking about medical data highly regulated. So you know what's important to the cloud to make sure that you can share with all the other researchers yet still make sure that there is the security and compliance that is required? >>Yeah, so yeah, that's a really good question. So right now, we don't really need to do if the patient information because all the data we get this from the public domain, it's It's both on the human sound lines, not on human patients. So we don't have their concerns about the privacy protections at this moment. But I think in the future, if you want to integrate genomics state our reach, this screen indeed A, which is already in my research plan. I think the highly secure AWS system actually really provided a really nice for us to do this job. >>Can you give us a little bit? Look forward as to where do you see this research going? What applicability is there before? What you're doing now? Both. You know, as this current pandemic plays out as well as applicability beyond Corp in 19. >>Yeah, sure, I think I think one of their major focus off our current, The company in 19 project is that we hope to find some drug targets tohave the broader under fire activity. So I think in the future, if they knew where it's coming out of the estimated locally in the 19 we hope that we are well prepared for that. I think in the future they're sharing as well as collateral cloud computing. You'll be becoming more and more important as you can see that most of us are working from home right now. So it's really critical to require us to have the platform toe accelerate accelerating sharing between research labs and around the world. And I think many different. I think aws provides this really nice preference for us to do this job well. >>Wei Li, thank you so much for sharing with our audience your updates, really important work. We wish your team the best of luck and hope that you also stay safe. >>Yeah, thank you so much. >>Alright, Stay with us for more coverage from AWS Public sector Summit online. I'm stew Minimum And thanks as always for watching the Cube >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to the coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit virtual. I'm John for host of theCUBE. We're here in theCUBE studios, quarantine crew here talking to all the guests remotely as part of our virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector. So I've got a great guest here talking about data science, weather predictions, accurate climate modeling, really digging into how cloud is helping science. Dr. Chelle Gentemann, who is a senior scientist at Farallon Institute is my guest. Chelle, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little about your research. It's fascinating how, I've always joked in a lot of my interviews, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you need super computers to do all these calculations. But now with cloud computing, it opens up so much more on the research side and the impact is significant. You're at an awesome Institute, the Farallon Institute, doing a lot of stuff in the sea and the ocean and a lot of your things. What's your focus? >> I study the ocean from space, and about 71% was covered by ocean. 40% of our population in the globe actually lives within 100 kilometers of the coast. The ocean influences our weather, it influences climate, but it also provides fisheries and recreational opportunities for people. So it's a really important part of the earth system. And I've been focused on using satellites. So from space, trying to understand how the ocean influences weather and climate >> And how new is this in terms of just state of the art? Fairly new, been around for a while? What's some of the progress for the state of the art we're involved in. >> I started working on satellite data in the 90s during school, and I liked the satellite data cause it's the interface of sort of applied math, computer science and physics. The state of the art is that we've really had remote sensing around for about 20, 30 years. But things are changing because right now we're having more sensors and different types of instruments up there and trying to combine that data is really challenging. To use it, our brain is really good in two and three dimensions, but once you get past that, it's really difficult for the human brain to try and interpret the data. And that's what scientists do. Is they try and take all these multidimensional data sets and try to build some understanding of the physics of what's going on. And what's really interesting is how cloud computing is impacting that. >> It sounds so exciting. The confluence of multiple disciplines kind of all right there, kind of geek out big time. So I've got to ask you, in the past you had the public data set program. Are you involved in that? Do you take advantage that research? How is some of the things that AWS is doing help you and is that public data set part of it? >> It's a big part of it now. I've helped to deploy some of the ocean temperature data sets on the cloud. And the way that AWS public data sets as sort of has potential to transform science is the way that we've been doing science, the way that I was trained in science was that you would go and download the data. And most of these big institutions that do research, you start to create these dark repositories where the institutions or someone in your group has downloaded data sets. And then you're trying to do science with these data, but you're not sure if it's the most recent version. It makes it really hard to do reproducible science, because if you want to share your code, somebody also has to access that data and download it. And these are really big data sets. So downloading it could take quite a long time. It's not very transparent, it's not very open. So when you move to a public data set program like AWS, you just take all of that download out of the equation. And instantly when I share my code now, people can run the code and just build on it and go right from there, or they can add to it or suggest changes. That's a really big advantage for trying to do open science. >> I had a dinner with Teresa Carlson who is awesome. She runs the Public Sector Summit for AWS. And I remember this was years ago and we were dreaming about a future where we would have national parks in the cloud or this concept of a Yosemite-like beautiful treasure. Physical place you could go there. And we were kind of dreaming that, wouldn't it be great to have like these data sets or supercomputer public commons. It sounds like that's kind of the vibe here where it's shareable and it's almost like a digital national park or something. Is that it's a shared resource. Is that kind of happening? First of all, what do you react to that? And what's your thoughts around that dream? And does this kind of tie to that? >> Yeah, I think it ties directly to that. When I think about how science is still being done and has been done for the past sort of 20 years, we had a real change about 20 years ago when a lot of the government agencies started requiring their data to be public. And that was a big change. So then we got, we actually had public data sets to work with. So more people started getting involved in science. Now I see it as sort of this fortress of data that in some ways have prevented scientists from really moving rapidly forward. But with moving onto the cloud and bringing your ideas and your compute to the data set, it opens up this entire Pandora's box, this beautiful world of how you can do science. You're no longer restricted to what you have downloaded or what you're able to do because you have this unlimited compute. You don't have to be at a big institution with massive supercomputers. I've been running hundreds of workers analyzing in my realm. Over two or 300 gigabytes of data on a $36 Raspberry Pi that I was playing around with my kids. That's transformative. That allows anyone to access data. >> And if you think about what it would have to do to do that in the old days, stack and spike servers. Call, first of all, you'll get the cash, buy servers, rack them and stack them, connect to a download of nightmare. So I got to ask you now with all this capability, first of all, you're talking to someone who loves the cloud. So I'm pretty biased. What are you doing now with the cloud that you couldn't do before? So certainly the old way from a provisioning standpoint, check, done. Innovation, bars raised. Now you're creative, you're looking at solutions, you're building enabling device like a Raspberry Pi, almost like a switch or an initiation point. How has the creativity changed? What can you do now? What are some of the things that are possible that you're doing? >> I think that you can point to within some of the data sets that have already gone on the cloud are being used in these really new, different ways. Again, it points to this, when you don't have access to the data, just simply because you have to download it. So that downloading the data and figuring out how to use it and figuring out how to store it is a big barrier for people. But when things like the HF Radar data set went online. Within a couple of months, there was a paper where people were using it to monitor bird migration in ways that they'd never been able to do before, because they simply hadn't been able to get the data. There's other research being done, where they've put whale recordings on the cloud and they're using AI to actually identify different whales. It's using one data set, but it's also the ability to combine all these different data sets and have access to them at the same time and not be limited by your computer anymore. Which for a lot of science, we've been limited by our access to compute. And that when you take away that, it opens all these new doors into doing different types of research with new types of data, >> You could probably correlate the whale sounds with the temperature and probably say, hey, it's cold. >> Chelle: Exactly. >> I'm making that up. But that's the kind of thing that wouldn't be possible before because you'd have to get the data set, do some math. I mean, this is cool stuff with the ocean. I mean, can you just take a minute to share some, give people an insight in some of the cool projects that are being either thought up or dreamed up or initiated or done or in process or in flight, because actually there's so much data in the ocean. So much things to do, it's very dynamic. There's a lot of data obviously. Share, for the folks that might not have a knowledge of what goes on. What are you guys thinking about? >> A lot of what we're thinking about is how to have societal impact. So as a scientist, you want your work to be relevant. And one of the things that we found is that the ocean really impacts weather at scales that we simply can't measure right now. So we're really trying to push forward with space instrumentation so that we can monitor the ocean in new ways at new resolutions. And the reason that we want to do that is because the ocean impacts longterm predictability in the weather forecast. So a lot of weather forecasts now, if you look out, you can go on to Weather Underground or whatever weather site you want. And you'll see the forecast goes out 10 days and that's because there's not a lot of accuracy after that. So a lot of research is going into how do we extend into seasonal forecast? I'm from Santa Rosa, California. We've been massively impacted by wildfires. And being able to understand how to prepare for the coming season is incredibly important. And surprisingly, I think to a lot of people, the ocean plays a big role in that. The ocean can impact how much storm systems, how they grow, how they evolve, how much water they actually got. Moisture they pick up from the ocean and then transport over land. So if you want to talk about, it's really interesting to talk about how the ocean impacts our weather and our seasonal weather. So that's an area where people are doing a lot of research. And again, you're talking about different data sets and being able to work together in a collaborative environment on the cloud is really what's starting to transform how people are working together, how they're communicating and how they're sharing their science. >> I just hope it opens up someone's possibilities. I want to get your vision of what you think the breakthroughs might be possible with cloud for research and computing. Because you have kind of old school and new school. Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy calls it old guard, new guard. The new guard is really more looking for self provisioning, auto-scaling, all that. Super computer on demand, all that stuff at your fingertips. Great, love that. But is there any opportunity for institutional change within the scientific community? What's your vision around the impact? It's not just scientific. It also can go to government for societal impact. So you start to see this modernization trend. What's your vision on the impact of the scientific community with cloud? >> I think that the way the scientific community has been organized for a long time is that scientists that are at an institute. And a lot of the research has been siloed. And it's siloed in part because of the way the funding mechanism works. But that inhibits creativity and inhibits collaboration. And it inhibits the advancement of science. Because if you hold onto data, you hold on to code. You're not allowing other people to work on it and to build on what you do. The traditional way that scientists have moved forward is you make a discovery, you write up a paper, you describe it in a journal article, and then you publish that. Then if someone wants to build on your research, they get your journal article, they read it. Then they try to understand what you did. They maybe recode all of your analysis. So they're redoing the work that you did, which is simply not efficient. Then they have to download the data sets that you access. This slows down all of science. And it also inhibits bringing in new data sets again because you don't have access to them. So one of the things I'm really excited about with cloud computing is that by bringing our scientific ideas and our compute to the data, it allows us to break out of these silos and collaborate with people outside of our institution, outside of our country, and bring new ideas and new voices and elevate everyone's ideas to another level. >> It brings the talent and the ideas together. And now you have digital and virtual worlds, cause we've been virtualized with COVID-19. You can create content as a community building capability or your work can create a network effect with other peers. And is a flash mobbing effect of potential collaboration. So work, work forces, workplaces, work loads, work flows, kind of are interesting or kind of being changed in real time. You were just talking about speed, agility. These are technical concepts being applied to kind of real world scenarios. I mean your thoughts on that. >> I now work with people like right now, I'm working with students in Denmark, Oman, India, France, and the US. That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. And we're able to bring all these different voices together, which it really frees up science and it frees up who can participate in science, which is really fun. I mean, I'm a scientist. I do it because it's really, really fun. And I love working with other people. So this new ability that I've gained in the last couple of years by moving onto the cloud has really accelerated all the different types of collaborations I'm involved with. And hopefully accelerating science as a whole. >> I love this topic. It's one of my passion areas where it's an issue I've been scratching for over a decade too. Is that content and your work is an enabler for community engagement because you don't need to publish it to a journal. It's like waterfall mentality. It's like you do it. But if you can publish something or create something and show it, demo it or illustrate it, that's better than a paper. If you're on video, you can talk about it. It's going to attract other people, like-minded peers can come together. That's going to create more collaboration data. That's going to create more solidarity around topics and accelerate the breakthroughs. >> For our last paper, we actually published all the software with it. We got a digital firewall for the software, published the software and then containerized it so that when you read our paper, at the bottom of the paper, you get a link. You go to that link, you click on a button and you're instantly in our compute environment, you can reproduce all of our results. Do the error propagation analysis that we did. And then if you don't like something, go ahead and change it or add onto it or ask us some questions. That's just magical. >> Yeah, it really is. And Amazon has been a real investor and I got to give props to Teresa Carlson and her team and Andy Jassy, the CEO, because they've been investing in credits and collaborating with groups like Jet Propulsion Lab, you guys, everyone else. Just space has been a big part of that. I see Bezos love space. So they've been investing in that and bringing that resource to the table. So you've got to give Amazon some props for that. But great work that you're doing. I'm fascinated. I think it's one of those examples where it's a moonshot, but it's doable. It's like you can get there. >> Yeah, and it's just so exciting. I'm the lead on a proposal for a new science mission to NASA. And we are going all in with the cloud computing. So we're going to do all the processing on the cloud. We want to do the entire science team on the cloud and create a science data platform where we're all working together. That's just never happened before. And I think that by doing this, we multiply the benefits of all of our analysis. We make it faster and we make it better and we make it more collaborative. So everyone wins. >> Sure, you're an inspiration to many. I'm so excited to do this interview with you. I love what you said earlier at the beginning about your focus of being in computer science, physics, space. That confluence is multiple disciplines. Not everyone can have that. Some people just get a computer science degree. Some people get, I'm premed, or I'm going to do biology. I'm going to do this. This notion of multiple disciplines coming together is really what society needs now. Is we're converging or virtualizing or becoming a global society. And that brings up my final question. Is something I know that you're passionate about creating a more inclusive scientific community because you don't have to be the, just the computer science major. Now, if you have all three, it's a multi-tool when you're a multiple skill player. But you don't have to be something to get into this new world. Because if you have certain disciplines, whether it's math, maybe you don't have computer science but it's quick to learn. There's frameworks out there, no code, low code. So cloud computing supports this. What's your vision and what's your opinion of how more inclusivity can come into the scientific community? >> I think that, when you're at an institution or at a commercial company or a nonprofit, if you're at some sort of organized institution, you have access to things that not everyone has access to. And in a lot of the world, there's trouble with internet connectivity. There is trouble downloading data. They simply don't have the ability to download large data sets. So I'm passionate about inclusivity because I think that, until we include global voices in science, we're not going to see these global results that we need to. We need to be more interdisciplinary. And that means working with different scientists in different fields. And if we can all work together on the same platform that really helps explode interdisciplinary science and what can be done. A lot of science has been quite siloed because you work at an institution. So you talked to the people one door down, or two doors down or on the same floor. But when you start working in this international community and people don't have to be online all the time, they can write code and then just jump on and upload it. You don't need to have these big, powerful resources or institutions behind you. And that gives a platform for all types of scientists, that all types of levels to start working with everyone. >> This is why I love the idea of the content and the community being horizontally scalable. Because if you're stuck around a physical institution or space, you kind of like have group think, or maybe you have the same kind of ideas being talked about. But here, when you pull back the remote work with COVID-19, as an example, it highlights it. The remote scientist could be anywhere. So that's going to increase access. What can we do to accept those voices? Is there a way or an idea or formula you see that people could, assuming there's access, which I would say, yes. What do we do? What do you do? >> I think you have to be open and you have to listen. Because, if I ask a question into the room where my colleagues work, we're going to come up with an answer. But we're going to come up with an answer that's informed by how we were trained in science and what fields we know. So when you open up this box and you allow other voices to participate in science, you're going to get new and different answers. And as a scientist, you need to be open to allowing those voices to be heard and to acting on them and including them in your research results and thinking about how they may change what you think and bring you to new conclusions. >> Machine learning has been a part. I know your work in the past, obviously cloud you're a big fan, obviously can tell. Proponent of it. Machine learning and AI can be a big part of this too, both on not only sourcing new voices and identifying what's contextually relevant at any given time, but also on the science-side machine learning. Because if we can take a minute to give your thoughts on the and relevance of machine learning and AI, because you still got the humans and you got machines augmenting each other, that relationship is going to be a constant conversation point going forward. Is there data about the data and what's the machines doing? What's your thoughts on all of these? Machine learning and AI as an impact. >> It's funny you say impact. So I work with this NASA IMPACT project, which is this interdisciplinary team that tries to advance science, and it's really into machine learning and AI. One of the difficulties when you start to do science is you have an idea like, okay, I want to study tropical storms. And then you have to go and wade through all these different types of data to identify when events happened and then gather all the data from those different events and start to try and do some analysis. They're working and they've been really successful in using AI to actually do this sort of event identification. So what's interesting and how can we use AI and machine learning to identify those interesting events and gathering everything together for scientists to then try and bring for analysis? So AI is being used in a lot of different ways in science. It's being used to look at these multi-dimensional problems that are just a little bit too big for our brains to try and understand. But if we can use AI and machine learning to gather insights into certain aspects of them, it starts to lead to new conclusions and it starts to allow us to see new connections. AI and machine learning has this potential to transform how we do science. Cloud computing is part of that because we have access to so much more data now. >> It's a real enabling technology. And when you have enabling technology, the power is in the hands of the creative minds. And it's really what you can think up and what you can dream up and that's going to come from people. Phenomenal. Final question for you, to kind of end on a light note. Dr. Chelle Gentemann here, senior scientist at the Farallon Institute. You're doing a lot of work on the ocean, space, ocean interaction. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Or you you've worked on that you think would be worth sharing. >> There's a couple of things. I have to think about what's the most fun. Right now, I'm working on doing some analysis with data. We had a big, huge international field campaign this winter off of Barbados, there were research festival, rustles and aircraft. There were sail drones involved, which are these autonomous robotic vehicles that go along the ocean surface and measure air-sea interactions. Right now we're working on analyzing that data. So we have all of this ground truth data. We're bringing in all the satellite observations to see how we can better understand the earth system in that region with a specific focus on air-sea interactions over the ocean where when it rains, you get the salinity stratification. When there's strong solar, you get diurnal stratification. So you have upper ocean stratification and heat and salinity. And how those impact the fluxes and how the ocean impacts the heat and moisture transport into the atmosphere, which then affects weather. So again, this is this multidimensional data set with all these different types of both ground truth data, satellite data that we're trying to bring together and it's really exciting. >> It could shape policy, it could shape society. Maybe have a real input into global warming. Our behaviors in the world, sounds awesome. Plus, I love the ground truth and the observational data. It sounds like our media business algorithm, we got to get the observation, get the truth, report it. Sounds like there's something in there that we could learn from. (both giggling) >> Yeah, it's very interesting cause you often find what you see from a distance is not quite true up close. >> I can tell you that we as in media as we do a lot of investigative journalism. So we appreciate that. Dr. Chelle Gentemann, senior scientist at the Farallon Institute, here as part of AWS Public Sector Summit. Thank you so much for time. What a great story. We'll keep in touch. Love the sails drone. Great innovation. And continue the good work, I'm looking forward to checking in later. Thanks for joining. >> Thanks so much. It was nice talking to you. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here in our studios covering the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit virtual. This is theCUBE virtual bringing you all the coverage with Amazon and theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Hi, I'm stupid man. And this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sectors Summit Online. We've done this show for many years. Of course, this this time it's online rather than in person in the District of Washington D. C Happy to welcome to the program First time guest. Very good partner of Aws is from Salesforce is Casey Coleman. She is the senior vice president of Global Government Solutions, together with sales work. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>All right. So first of all, maybe if you could give us a little bit of level set your role at Salesforce and obviously, you know, a long partnership with Amazon. Tell us a little bit about that. >>Yes. My role at Salesforce is to work with our customers in the public sector globally and really help them map out their digital transformation. You know, it's an ongoing journey and we help them understand how to how to break that down into actionable steps and really transformed what they're doing to serve their constituents and citizens better. >>Excellent. So it of course said that the public sector show a lot about the leverage of govcloud and the other services. All the compliance that goes into that ahead of this event you had Ah, new update at Salesforce in partnership with AWS. Talk to us about it's the government cloud plus s o. You know what's entailed there? Uh, and, uh, tell us how AWS and Salesforce work together to launch this solution. >>Yeah, thanks Do. We are so excited to announce the launch of govcloud Plus, which is sales force is a customer 3 60 crm platform that runs on Amazon Web services in the govcloud in their govcloud environment. And we've just received a provisional 80 0 provisional authority to operate from the FEDRAMP program office at the high security level. So we are announcing govcloud Plus is fed ramp. I'm ready to go generally available and ready for customers. >>Excellent. Maybe bring us inside. You know what's different about how government agencies leverage sales force most companies out there, You know, Salesforce is a critical piece off how they manage, you know, number one, they're salesforce marketing and lots of other pieces, anything specific that we should understand about the public sector. >>Yeah, it's a great question because even our name Salesforce sounds like a commercial kind of thing to do. Governments don't think of themselves as selling, but if you break down to a level of detail about what governments actually do, it is the same kind of functions case management, its benefits delivery. It's communications and outreach. It's all the same kind of function that are necessary for commercial organizations to drive. And so that's what we do. We translate that into government ready terms so that they can serve child welfare, health information delivery record, former information, all kinds of services for the constituents of the public sector. And they might call them customers. They might call them citizens, residents constituent. But it's those they >>Yeah, well, what one of the things about Salesforce is, as you said, it's not just, you know, a sales tool. There's so much you've got a very broad and deep ecosystem. Their asses Well, as you know, people that know how to use it, they get underneath the covers. You know, when I think of not only a sales force. You know, the first company that I probably thought of and heard about that it was SAS. But if you talk about the AP economy, if you talk about how things integrate, Salesforce does a lot for developers. So I know one of the other pieces you had. There's everybody knows Dream Force. Maybe not as many people know, that trailhead DX show that that that Salesforce has had for developers. So bring us a little bit inside. What would Salesforce is doing for developers? And, of course, the government angle along those lines, too? >>Yeah, there's a lot going on in the developer world. We were glad to be able to host a virtual version of our trailhead developer conference and announced a lot of exciting new developments, including salesforce anywhere, which is really bringing an immersive voice, video and chat environment to collaborate in the developer environment and into the delivery environment. And you bring that into the public sector. And the benefits are amazing because one of the key challenges with government is keeping up with the pace of the public expectations. In a pace of change in the commercial world, all of the shop and bank and live on our mobile devices. And governments are being faced with the same expectations from the public to do any time anywhere personalized delivery as the code rapid development environments that force offers give public sector I t team the ability to quickly and respond to changing conditions like the code 19 pandemic and roll out applications that are not only fast to develop into boy but they also benefit from being in the govcloud environment. And so the compliance is party built in and that's another key challenges. Often it rises. The public sector is not almost building new applications and making sure they're secure with Salesforce all built in >>Yeah, sounds sounds a lot of sis similarity to what we hear in the private sector, of course, that the balance between what it is doing and how we enable developers, of course security, you mentioned super important anything specifically from the government sector that you'd say, Well, that might be different from what we see in the general enterprise world. >>You know, the but security is top of mind for the public sector, always because they're dealing with the most sensitive data they're dealing with the public trust and trust is really the currency of government. They're not dealing in profit and market share, but they are dealing in a public trust and protecting information like financial data, health data, personal data. And so it's essential that the government had the best in class commercial tools to make sure they are providing world class security for for their their constituents in their mission. And that's one reason we're so excited to be partnering with AWS on Golf Club was because Amazon AWS has already deployed the Fed Ramp I version of their infrastructures of service. And so, by riding on top of that, we inherit all of those existing controls at our own Fed ramp controls. And our customers benefit from the best in class security from two of the most trusted name in public Cloud >>Great. You know, absolutely. Govcloud has been a real boon for the entire industry. When it talks about how government agencies they're leveraging cloud, you talked about sitting on top of ah govcloud the government cloud plus, you know, leverages some of the certifications and like, can you bring us inside a little bit? How long did this effort take? to get anything specific in the integrations were, you know, functionality that that you might be able to highlight about this joint effort. >>Yeah, we've been working on for some time now because it's it's essential to really think from the ground up. And this is not just re platform ing our cloud solutions on AWS. It is rethinking the whole architecture so that we really are organically taking advantage of infrastructure services that AWS provides. So it is a really deep integration. And it's not only a technical tech, integration is the strategic partnership, and you're going to see a lot more now that's coming from both of us about the integration capabilities we're bringing together and a lot of the work we're going to be doing to continue to bring innovation to our joint customers. >>Excellent. You made reference to the pandemic. Uh, what are you hearing from your customers? How does this new offering impact them and support them both? Today is they're reacting to what happens as well as you know, going forward as we progress. >>Yes. Do you know the coveted 19 pandemic really exposed fault line in government programs that weren't scale to meet this demand. We saw website crashing when people were going to them and just overwhelming them with questions about the health situation. We saw benefits programs that only works where people could come in and sign up in a fly in person and obviously with government offices shut down, that wasn't an option. And a lot of government workers were sent home to tell a work without much notice, and their infrastructure just couldn't support it. And so just in general, there are a lot of breakdown along the way. But the good news is that a lot of public sector organizations and programs making that pivot quickly. For example, we worked with one state agency that experienced a 400% spikes in demand for applications for unemployment benefits. It makes sense people are out of work. They need unemployment benefit. But they just couldn't respond to that kind of surging demand. So we worked with them along with AWS and in less than a week stood up a virtual contact center with chatbots so that could meet the demand and provide those vital services to their residents at a time of real needs. So there's a lot to the optimistic about in the middle of this crisis, there is a lot of transformation happening. This kind of forcing function is producing a lot of innovation, transformation. And I think it's really going to make a fundamental shift in how we re imagined government in the future. >>Yeah. Okay, so you're absolutely right that this pandemic has shown a real spotlight on where you know what works and what doesn't, Um, and I think about not only government, but you know, a lot of how finances were often times you have your plans in place, you have your budgets in place. You have, you know, funding cycles. So you know what? What our sales force and Amazon doing to help those you talk about. They have to ramp things up a weight where they financially ready for this. Some companies Oh, wait. I have to temporarily dial things down. That's not in my 12 month or 36 month plan. So are there things that you're doing to help customers, you know, short term in and long term? Are you seeing some? Some change in how people think about their planning and how they could be ready for what change happens out there. >>Yeah, you know, one of the big findings from this whole experience, not just in the public sector but across every industry has been that digital transformation may in the past has been viewed as a nice to have. It is now really the only way to connect and serve both customers and employees, and so digital First, digital transformation is rapidly becoming an urgent imperative because this situation is is not going away overnight. And even when we get back to some state of normal, it's going to be different. It's a digital first and being able to move quickly to roll out services rapidly, to be able to start small and then scale rapidly. These are things that benefit any organization, whether it's government or commercial. >>Excellent. Okay, so I'll let you have the final word. What people want. What you want people to have is their take away of salesforce is participation in the AWS public sector online event. >>We are just so excited to be here with AWS to jointly come to our customers with govcloud plus the fed ramp. I authorized environment for the best in class theory, M and customer and employee services. Our partnership with AWS is one that we're excited about. You're going to see a lot more announcements coming to. It's not only a technology integration, it's also a strategic partnership. And we think our customers jointly. Just going to be really excited about the development. So thank you for the time and glad to be here. >>All right, well, thank you so much. Casey. Congratulations on the government cloud plus launch. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about it. >>Thank you. >>Alright. Be sure to stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube at AWS Public Sector Summit online. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)