>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.