>>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 AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>>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.

>>Mhm. >>What? >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector partner awards for today's award for the award of best partner transformation, best global expansion. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich and now I'm very pleased to introduce you to our next guest. They are James Lester Global Managing Director, public Safety attic censure. And Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research of the Seattle Police Department. Welcome gentlemen, it's wonderful to have you on the program. >>Thanks for having us >>terrific. Well, we're going to talk a lot about data and a lot about public safety and how, you know, data analytics analytics is making a big impact um in the public safety world. So do tell us I'd like to start with you James. Uh tell us how X enters intelligent public safety platform turns data into a strategic asset. >>Thanks Natalie. Well, the intelligent public safety platform is all about combining different data sets together and taking a platform approach to using data within public safety. What it does is it allows us to bring a whole host of different types of data together in one place, put that through a series of different analytical transactions and then visualize that information back to where however within the public safety environment needs it and really does four key things. One is, it helps with situational awareness, helps the officer understand the situation that they're in and gives them insight to help support and guide them. Secondly it helps enhance investigations. So how do you join those dots? How do you help navigate and speed up complex investigations by better understanding a range of data sets. And thirdly it really helps with force management and understanding the behavior and the activities within the force and how best to use those critical assets of police officers and police staff themselves. And then finally what it does is it really looks at digital evidence management. How do you actually manage data effectively as an asset within the force? So those are the four key things. And certainly with our work at Seattle we've really focused on that force management area. >>Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. Now let's shift to Lauren tell us how has I PSP you know, really helped your staff make some key contributions towards public safety in the city of Seattle. >>Yeah. Thanks. Uh so you know I think our business intelligence journey started maybe a little in advance of the I. P. S. P. With our partnership With accenture on the data analytics platform. And we've been taking that, say my PSP approach since 2015 as part of our efforts to comply with a federal consent decree. So, you know, I think what what we probably don't understand necessarily is that most police departments build sort of purpose built source systems to onboard data and make good use of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that data is readily available. So, um, you know, we've been able to demonstrate compliance with the elements of a settlement agreement for our consent decree, but we've also been able to do a whole host of research projects designed to better understand how police operate in the criminal logical environment, how they perform and um, and really make the best use of those assets as we have them deployed around the city doing law enforcement work. >>Terrific. Now, James, let's shift to you one of the kind of key dilemmas here in the sectors. You know, how can you utilize these um, new technologies in policing, um, and law enforcement while still building trust with the public? >>Absolutely. I mean, I do think that it is critical that public safety agencies are able to use the benefits of new technology, criminals are using technology in all sorts of different ways. Uh and it's important that policing and public safety organizations are able to exploit the advantages that we now see through technology and the ability to understand and analyze data. But equally, it's critical that these implemented in ways that engage and involve the public, that the way in which the analytics and analysis is conducted is open and transparent, so people understand how the data is being used, uh and also that officers themselves are part of the process when these tools are built and developed, so they gain a thorough understanding of how to use them and how to implement them. So, being open and transparent in the way that these platforms are built is absolutely critical. >>Yeah, that's an excellent point because clearly bad actors are already using data. Um, so we might as well use it to help, you know, the good actors out there and help the public. So in your opinion, Lauren, um, you know, what is the next phase of this kind of model? Um, what are you hoping to do next with this kind of technology? >>So as we use this technology as we understand more about it, we're really building data curiosity within the management group at SPD. So really sort of, I would say the first phase of a business intelligence platform in policing is about orienting people to the problem, how many of these things happen at what time and where do they happen around the city? And then beginning to build better questions from the people who are actually doing the business of delivering police service in the city and the future of that, I think is taking that critical feedback and understanding how to respond with really more intelligence services, predictive services that help to kind of cut through that just general descriptive noise and provide insights to the operation in a city that has About 900,000 dispatches in a year. It's difficult to pinpoint which dispatches are of interest to police managers, which crimes which calls may be of interest to the city at large as they manage public safety and risk management. And so are, you know, sort of future development agenda. Our road map, if you will for the next several years is really focused on developing intelligent processes that make use of all of that data, boil it down to what's critically important and help direct people who are most familiar with the operation. To those uh those events, those critical pieces of insight that might be helpful in allowing them to make better management decisions. >>Yeah. And what what are some of the key areas that you find this platform can be effective in terms of uh you know public safety, certain criminal activities James. >>Um I think the PSP has a wide range of applications so certainly looking at how we can bring a whole range of data together that previously has maybe been locked away in individual silos or separate systems. So public safety agencies are really able to understand what they know and the information that they have and make it much easier to access and understand that information. Um I also think it's allowing us to perform levels of analytics and therefore insight on those data sets, which previously public safety agencies have have struggled to do. Um And in the case of Seattle focusing on the uh force management aspect, I think it's helped them understand the activities and behavior of their workforce um in context and in relation to other events and other activities to a much greater depth than they've been able to do previously. >>Terrific. Well, Lauren obviously, you know, this was a really tough year with Covid. What impact did the pandemic have on your operations and some of your more modern policing efforts? >>Oh, I mean, obviously it radically changed the way that we deploy forces in the organization beginning early in March. Uh you know, like most of the world, we all moved home trying to keep up the pace of development and continue to manage the operation. But as that was happening, you know, people are still living their lives out in the world and out in the city. So we pretty quickly found ourselves trying to adapt to that new use of public spaces, trying to identify problems in an environment that really doesn't look anything like the previous couple of years that we were working in, uh and uh, you know, data and and really sort of the availability of technology that helps too identify what's new and what's interesting and rapidly develop those insights and get them available for police managers was critical and helping us identify things like trends in potential exposure events. So being able to identify uh, you know, just exactly how many calls involve the use of personal protective equipment, use that to forecast potential exposure for our workforce. Be able to track exposure reports in the field to be able to determine whether there are staffing concerns that need to be considered. Uh and all of that. Uh you know, we're able to pretty rapidly prototype and deploy dashboards and tools that help folks, especially the command staff, have kind of a global sense for how the operation is functioning as the environment is literally shifting underneath them as uh, you know, uh the use of public spaces is changing and as dispatch procedures are changing as public policy is changing related to, you know, things like jail booking availability and public health and safety policies. The department was able to stay on top of those key metrics and really make sort of the best minute by minute decisions based in the data. And that's really not something that's been available, uh You know, without sort of the ready availability of data at your fingertips and the ability to rapidly prototype things that direct people to what's important. >>Yeah, thank you for that. Now, James, I'd love to hear your comments on that. I mean, has the pandemic altered or, you know, given you any kind of fresh perspective on uh you know, modern policing efforts using these kinds of platforms? >>Well, I think that the pandemic has shown the importance of using data in new and different ways. I mean, one thing the pandemic certainly did was see a shift in in crime types. You know, traditional street based volume crime declined, where we saw increases in cyber and online crime. And therefore the flexibility that police services have had to have in order to shift how they combat changing crime types has meant that they've had to be able to use data as they say, in new and different ways. And think about how can they be more disruptive in their tactics? How can they get new types of insight and really platforms like the intelligent public safety platform help them become much more flexible and much more nimble and that's certainly something that's been required as a result of the pandemic. >>Yeah, that's really great to hear. Um you know, Lauren going to you, I'd love to hear how specifically I PSP was able to help you uh you know, the Seattle Police department as well as statewide inquiries and end investigations. What kind of enhancements were you able to receive from that? >>Uh Well, you know, I mean in terms of investigations, uh the way that Seattle deploys the intelligent public safety platform, our focus is really primarily on deployment of resources that force management, the accountability, piece of things. And so from our perspective, the ability to onboard new data sources quickly uh and make use of that information in a kind of a rapid sort of responsive function was really critical for us but um you know, certainly and I think as as most communities are exploring new ways of approaching community safety, uh the intelligent public safety platform uh for us was really effective in being able to answer those, those questions that are coming up as as people are reforming the way that policing is deployed in their communities, were able to reach out and see just exactly how many hours are spent on one particular function over another, something that perhaps could be available for a co responder model, or take a look at, you know, this sort of natural experiment that we have out in our criminal logical environment as people are using spaces differently. And as we are approaching enforcement policy differently, being able to take a look at what are the effects of perhaps not arresting people for certain types of crime? Do we see some displacement of those effects across different crime types? Do we see an increase in harm in other areas of the operation? Have we seen you know increases in one particular crime type while another one declines? How is the environment responding these rapid changes and what really is a natural experiment occurring out in the world? >>Yeah I mean it's really incredible um Having all that data at our fingertips and really being able to utilize it to have a fuller perspective of what's really happening right? What what do you think James? >>Yeah. I mean I think being able to really utilize different data sets is something that police forces are seeing to become more and more important. Um They're recognizing that becoming increasingly data lead can really help improve their performance. Um And the challenge to date has really been how do we bring those data sets together but not then require police officers to way through reams and reams of data. I mean the volumes of data now that organizations are having to manage is huge. And so really the power of the I. P. S. P. Is being able to filter through all of that data and really deliver actionable insight. So something that the police officer can go and do something with and really make a difference around. Um And that's something that that's absolutely critical. And modern day policing is increasingly having this data driven evidence based approach to help make it far more effective and really focused on the needs of its citizens. >>Yeah and as you mentioned, I mean the algorithms are really driving this you know, um giving us these actionable insights but how can we ensure that they're acting fairly to all the stakeholders James. I'd like you to answer this please. >>Um Absolutely. I mean, trust and confidence within policing is absolutely paramount. Uh and whilst the use of these sorts of tools, I think is critical to helping keep communities in the public safe. It's very important that these tools are deployed in an open transparent way. And part of that is understanding the algorithms, making sure that algorithmic fairness is built in so that these are tested and any sort of bias or unintended consequences are understood and known and factored in to the way in which the tools are both built and used. Um, and then on top of that, I think it's open, it's important that these are open and transparent, that it's clear how and why departments are using these technologies. And it's also critical that the officers using them are trained and understood how to use them and how to use the insights that they're starting to deliver. >>Yeah, and thanks for mentioning that Lauren, what kind of training are you providing your staff at the Seattle police department And you know, how do you see this evolving in the next few years >>with regard to algorithmic fairness, what kind of training along those lines or training >>with the I. P. S. P. And all these other kinds of technologies that you're embracing now to help with your public safety initiatives? >>Well, you know, I think one of the one of the real benefits to becoming an evidence based organization, a truly evidence led organization is that you don't have to train folks uh to use data. What you have to do is leverage data to make it work and be really infused with their everyday operations. So we, you know, we have police officers and we have managers and we have commanders and they've got a very complex set of tasks that they've been trained to work with. It's really sort of our mission to be trained in, how to identify uh you know, the correct UX UI design, how to make sure that the insights that are being directed to those folks are really tailored to the business they're operating. And so to that extent, the analytical staff that we have is really focused on sort of continuous improvement and constant learning about how we can be mindful of things like bias and the algorithms and the various systems that we're deploying uh and also be up to date on the latest and how police operations really are sort of deployed around the city and ways that we can infuse those various management functions or those police service functions with data and analytics that are just naturally working with people's business sense and they're uh really sort of primary function, which is the delivery of police service >>terrific. Well, James lastly with you um just real quick you know, what are your thoughts in terms of being able to extend the power of I. P. S. P. Beyonce Seattle uh in the broader United States? >>Well I mean I think my PSP has huge applicability to any public safety agency in in the US and beyond and we're already seeing other agencies around the world interested in using it and deploying it um Where they basically want to get uh and be able to utilize a wider range of data where they want to be able to drive greater insight into that that data set um Where they want to be confident in deploying open and fair algorithms um to really make a difference. Um And if we to take the the specific example of the U. S. And the work that we've done with Seattle then I think tools like the intention public safety platform have a huge part to play in the wider reimagining of policing within the US in understanding officer and departmental behavior and actually opening up and sharing information with citizens that increased levels of trust and transparency between public safety agencies and the communities and citizens that they serve. >>And you know, on that note, do you think that I PSP is useful in terms of collaboration efforts, you know, with other police departments, perhaps in other states? Um you know or just just as a global national effort. Lauren, do you see that kind of potential in the future? >>Yeah and actually we do that now. So one of the really sort of powerful things about having all of this data at your fingertips and I would say having this kind of awesome responsibility of being the steward of this type of asset for the community. Um and and really sort of for the industry at large is that we're able to take the data and rapidly develop new research projects with researchers around the world. So the Seattle Police Department maintains a network of about I think we're up to about 55 current researchers and institutions. I think we've got about 33, institutions around the world. People really working on real time problems related to the things that matter to our community right now. And having this data available at our fingertips allows us to rapidly develop data sources. We can actually get on a call with one of our researchers uh and build out a table for them to use or start exploring the data in an ad hoc querying layer layer and, you know, making visualizations and helping the researchers form better questions so that when we develop their data, when we deploy it to them, uh they can pretty quickly get in there. It's in the format that they're looking for, They understand it. They can run some tests and determine whether the data that we provided for them actually meets their needs. And if it doesn't, we can develop a new set pretty quickly. I I think that also that research function, that discovery function that were enabled through the use of these data is actually helping to bring together uh the community of law enforcement around this this idea of Collaborative understanding of how policing works around the city, you know, sorry, around the world. So of 18,000 or so law enforcement agencies in the United States, there is broad variability in people's competency in their use of data, but we're finding that agencies that have access to these types of tools or who are starting to develop access to these tools and the competencies to use them are coming together. Uh and beginning to talk about how we can understand sort of cross cultural and cross regional correlations and patterns that we see across our multiple operations. And although, you know, those are varied uh and and range around the country or even around the world, I think that that collaboration on understanding how policing works, what's normal, what's abnormal, what we can do about it is really going to be powerful in the future. >>Yeah, Well, this is really exciting. Yeah. Well, what are your thoughts? >>I was just going to build on the point that Lauren was making there because I think I think that is a really important one. Um you know, when when you look around the world, the challenges that different public safety and policing agencies face are actually dramatically similar um and the ability for policing organizations to come together and think about how they use data, think about how they use data in a fair and transparent way is something we're really starting to see and that ability to share insight to experiment um and really make sure that you're bringing lots of different insight together to further the way in which police forces all over the world can actually help keep their citizens safe and combat what is an increasingly rapidly and evolving threat. Landscape is something that we see tools like the intelligent public safety platform really helping to do and if one police force starts to use it in a certain way in one jurisdiction and has success there, there is definitely the ability to share that insight with others and get this global pool of understanding and knowledge all furthering the level of safety and security that can be delivered to communities in the public. >>Terrific. Well, thank you both so much for your insights has been really fantastic to hear. You know, how these new technologies are really coming to the aid of public safety officials and helping secure the public. That was Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research at the Seattle police Department and James Schlesser. Global Managing Director, Public Safety at its center. And I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and that was our session for the AWS Global Public uh, partner Awards. Thank you very much for watching. >>Mm

>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are chris Saks Ceo of think stack and Michael Matthews President Ceo at mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for the cube Natalie. Ehrlich of course. And we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>Terrific. Well delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of mutual credit union? >>It's kind of by chance, Natalie, we're sitting down, we're looking at uh, racks of equipment in our I. T. Room and trying to keep everything up to date, um software updated, become a full time job and all of my staff and sat around and it come to a point where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked we reached out the things that they were a network provider at the time and we said, hey, whatever, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was a W. S. And we explored it and uh we've not looked back. >>Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about think stack, how this uh collaboration happened specifically? >>Well, some of the major gaps that you have is, you know, we're in Vicksburg Mississippi and I would say it's probably not the I. T mecca of the United States and staffing. What was a huge requirement for us if you're gonna make a move such as this, you've got to have the staffing and then along with the staffing is okay if you go out and we hire all these individuals to help help with this journey, are they going to become bored and you know, if we uh personally, if if I asked think stack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us, but that's their job there, there there are parker vendor and so we went out, we asked other vendors that we use and what are the chances of us doing this and it was slim to none. And this type of technology you want, somebody who you can call and and all honesty, I want to be able to call chris and say chris, I'm having a problem versus, you know, one of my team called me and say we're having a problem, I'd rather call it and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gaps in staffing though, Natalie >>what about staffing? >>That was our major gap. >>Oh God, it got it. Well, chris let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain, you know, in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. >>Yeah, for sure. Thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union. They need to keep pace with organizations like Robin Hood and stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you as an organization generally, that's a small nonprofit organization. How do you build the technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw actually, be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at What do you expect. So if you take Michael, for example, you know, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like in? What goals do you have as a credit? You need to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks. Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How how do you work securely efficiently? Um, as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available. And then obviously with, with utmost security. So as we identify and build that picture, uh, we we generally do that with stick figures Natalie so we try to go in and and you know take um different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us uh literally paint a picture. Um and then from there we kind of back into that and say okay in order for you to accomplish these things into Have the organization that you want to have the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that. And that's where we start to then back into that design which typically would include some type of public cloud services like AWS among other technologies from a cyber security perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them To respond and react to whatever the world throws at him over the next 10 years. >>Terrific. Well Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus, that think stack uh you know, is known for >>I think that's what says things take apart. You know, we there's numerous vendors you can go direct, there's there's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, it's not about that, it's about sitting down with chris his team and saying chris this this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but we just this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software. The focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, you know, we're not arty people were in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. >>Yeah, well, chris uh, you know, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key feature set your business apart from the competitive landscape? >>So I think the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are our financial services, they're not technology experts, so you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand, and it can be uh somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems, um but when you boil it down back to that experience level, or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing, that they understand. How is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? It investments are, are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece uh and you know, it's one of those things that can be unappreciated, but its cybersecurity building, our infrastructure's with the tools and the processes and and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there is nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top uh topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you um what were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? >>Well, now we we we expected to have issues in the transition, which we really didn't um, I'll be honest with you, we we expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that this will not work in a W S. Um and we were very surprised that most everything worked on AWS and it worked even better. Um some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you we had were limited on Rackspace I T room is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent service, virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in uh and we would say, hey, we need a new server here. The specs we're putting on this vendor, this is our time frame and we will get an email back the next morning. The servers ready to go where before? We weren't we didn't have that. That that was not an option. The main delay for new projects was to build up time and we weren't expecting that speech. No longer was that we all we expected that hey, we're not in a rush, but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go as soon as you send the request in that we need this server is done uh and its speed up, speed up our time from uh, the idea our concept to going live with projects and we weren't that was something we had to get adjusted to. >>Yeah. And following up on that. What were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? >>All right too. Two things and I don't know if they meet their, meet your that answer your question directly. But so one item we had in in a call, it's been several weeks back is when is the last time that anyone had to call it? Said, hey, I'm not working. My my can't access the server or I can complete dysfunction. And it's not been that way. We we've seen significantly improved up time, not only externally for our members who are logging in to do home banking or any other, any other feature, but internally for our staff we saw and I think it's just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. What that was. I was as the metric we were seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now, it's a power. We had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare. Uh and we were down for a day. Um and if you lose internet today at any business you're down um The emotional side of I tell you, and it's been several years back on July four, we had a major major failure and our entire network was down and we this is prior to us moving to AWS and I'll just tell you I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night. And the last thing I'm worried about is my I. T. Network. I'm not worried about up time, I'm not worried about members, you know, going on facebook or any other social media and saying hey we can't we can't access your site what's going on and we don't have that anymore. And you know, I'm sure we could have had it any other way. But I leave that to the process of us moving from an in house holding everything on premise to moving to AWS, not only did it want to improve the results of those servers were able to back up to do different things, but it is to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I like I said I you can't put a dollar on this peace of mind and that is something I don't think there's any metric out there. You can measure, you can't measure that, but you know me and my team, we see it all the time. So >>Yeah, I agree, a peace of mind is certainly a priceless now Chris Let's move to you if you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide, some of your other clients as well. Just give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about, you know, 24/7 socks um services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience? >>Yeah, for sure. So so obviously we I like to think of us like we design so we come in and we like to help you design and and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network but also routing, switching. So Land Win S T Win various other networking projects equally. It's important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud, help with with productivity suite collaboration tools. Um and then finally, cyber security is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side. Very similar concept of what we do on the, on the cloud side, which is well design the tools and the infrastructure on the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments, um such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Uh look at active directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. Um and then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 x seven socks um with analysts watching that um that are all things that employees watching that board responding and reacting um using our our sin platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven uh network operations center or knocked. Um that is managing both the on site uh tools and network as well as any cloud uh networks that that they may have, keeping them up to date, doing all the routine maintenance, I will say from a cyber security perspective while it's not called the sock, the knock is just as important for cybersecurity as is the knock because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the knock and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. >>Yeah. Terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? >>Yeah, exactly. Um you know, I think that's true of all technology. Um the biggest thing that we can do his look at the systems that you have during that design phase, we not only look at what technology should be should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team, What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps if you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features? Uh Certainly you should keep that in house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in um where you need us. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, um you know, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact, you know, for the credit union industry? If others are not, you know, adopting the same kind of technologies um you know, to secure their cloud strategies. Mhm. >>I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Um Most of our newest vendors are all cloud based. Um And so yes, he's either do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable. It's more up time. It's easier to back up. A lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They try to find a local data center are somewhere secure. And, and we looked at is what's the difference? You know, we, we we don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today. And so what is the difference of movement out of town and move to AWS by moving out of town? I still on the servers. I still leased the space. I still have to go over there. We have to have somebody there at all the time. And I'll be honest with you, I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then, and then it's not working locally and there's a lot of data centers you can, you can move to um I think I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. >>Yeah. Well, Terrific. Do you have any insight or you know, perhaps advice for another credit union who will, you know, like to take the next step? But, you know, as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant, >>I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a, as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this um with chris and several people have so we we we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and and our data is out there in Netherland and who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my dad is higher is held. Um I think it makes people think about a little differently. And and so when when you're if you're thinking about moving, if your if your in house today and you're thinking about how I'm gonna start outsourcing evaluate the cost, what are your ongoing cost, You know, who's gonna service you, Who's going to provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, chris and his team have something unique that I found. Um I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated to chris we're still, we're one of his better customers. I assume, chris me tell you something different in a minute, but we're not just a number, so I wouldn't go into a cube. You know, everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where they're getting a lot bigger than we are now, but they're both small of companies where we're still, we we mean something to them, they care about moving to start versus just checking the box off. And so that's that's been our journey so far. Mhm. >>Yeah. Well, um, so, chris, uh, you know, first I want to know if Michael is one of your better customers, but uh, you know, really what I would I would really like to know is um, you know, what is your like, big sales pitch to? You know, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge. >>Michael is our best client of course because he's here doing this interview with us. No, um, you know, that that's something for us that are those, those human connections are, are, are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But, um, in, in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say at the beginning, which is, you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they, I can't move to the cloud that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's, that's not true. Um, so what we're trying to do in partnership with KWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. Um, one of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness and you know, unfortunately, I think Covid taught us that lesson, but there's, there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on Covid, I feel like that's all we talk about. Um, but if you look at any opportunity, whether it's a I machine learning, um, you know, Blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is, none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty, can tell me where your organization is going to be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess Because you have to build something and designed for something and if you're making that investment, then you're doing that for the next probably 5-7 years. Whereas if you move to amazon you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned or in some cases even scaling back because things have hit a recession, we don't know what the future holds. But if you're in an environment like AWS, then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is that is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are going to survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Yeah. >>Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was chris Saks Ceo of think stack as well as Michael Matthews, the president and Ceo at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks so much. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie or like thanks for >>watching. Mm.

>>Mhm Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 aws Global Public Sector partner awards. I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and I'm delighted to present our guests. They are Jose Montero, ceo logitech the central America and Rafael Ramirez Product manager. Costa rica Ministry of Education. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >>Think in Italy >>religion and belief. Well, let's start with Rafael. Please tell us about some of the key challenges that are affecting the Ministry of Education in Post A Rekha. >>One of the main challenges was to be able to have a product that is always available to schools that is easy to use for schools and at the same time that the product should be user friendly. That is you don't need so much training for schools to use it more. A few things that we thought of was to consider our client because schools have a very limited connectivity so we could not use very highly tech technologies because that required very huge. Both advanced and our clients, the schools would be subject to a service that was not available to them. One of the main things was to consider the client and how to reach them. Thanks to Ed attack, the ministry made an alliance with a company that thought about the innovation and they recommended different services that we can provide with a cloud through the cloud so that we are able to get to take the service to deliver the service to our clients and then they can use the platform that we are building in an easy way and at the same time to take care of the quality they need. Something important about schools was that while they were using the product, they were getting benefit that made schools to be willing to participate. >>Terrific. Well Jose I'd love it if you could give us some insight on some of the services that you are providing to the ministry. >>Sure. Um, so when, when the ministry approaches and um, and we had the opportunity to work with them um, of course, as an AWS partner, we thought, well, this is couldn't be better, right? And um, so we um, we we started to think on all of the different services that AWS offers in the cloud to provide to the ministry to be able to reach this gap. That has been for a long time where you see still, you know, people using Excel, using access Microsoft access as databases, um, instead of using all of the energy and all of the, the power that the cloud has. So when we approach to them and um, and we were able to um um, to show all of these different services that AWS could um, could provide to the Minister of Education. It was it was a perfect marriage. So, um, we we started to work with uh, with them and I think it's been awesome. This is only the first part of of a project of eight stages, We are currently working on stage two and stage Three, which will come in August and in January of 2020, And, um, but we're we're super happy to to see just in this first face, everything that has come and all of the data that has come to help the Ministry of Education in order to take action in the student's lives. >>Yeah, that's really terrific to hear. Um, you know, I'd love to hear from Rafael further about why he thinks it was so important to have cloud data at the Ministry of Education level. >>Okay, I >>will give you an important example for us in our country. We would rather gather the, collect data in paper and take that to the central office and this would enter into an Excel file. This take around two months to process all this later and make decisions. Mm When we started with the first service, which was to record the number of enrollees of the students, we could pay teachers on time, we could get the number of students and know where we had the biggest needs. So this would make a very innovative solution. And when the pandemic started, we had the first active service. This allowed us to react very quickly and we realized that in the first quarter, 19,000 students were not in in our schools because we were from a face to face service to a virtual service. So we could react very quickly. We plant a strategy with the Ministry of Education that was to come back. That is the idea goes to locate where students were. And in the next four months we could reduce the dropout From 90 students to 18,000 students. After that, we initiated a Another stage to retrieve those 18,000 students back to school. This was thanks to having the information online in some countries that may not have this problem. This might be very little. But for us, this was very, very important because we were able to reach the poll a wrist households so as to bring those students back to the school. >>Terrific. Well, that's really fantastic. Um, you know, in a non covid world, how do you think this technology will really help you, uh, to enhance education within Costa rica? See I can't. The important thing. >>This is important in the idea of this innovative product for us has a strategy of having a single file of the student. This allows us to do a follow up of what the student has done during the different school years and we can identify their lacks the weaknesses and we can see which are the programs that are more appropriate. Was to replicate this in the rest of the country without a centralized file. Like we have now, we are looking to have this traceability of students so as to have strengthened our witnesses and replicate our strength in the rest of the educational system. one of the most important things when you is that this technological unit, this implementation not only reached primary school students, but also preschool kindergarten, primary school, secondary school higher education, technical Education. So we reached every single sector where the Ministry of Education was able to detect where there was a need in the country. >>Yeah, Terrific. Well, I'd love to hear more from our other guest Jose monteiro Ceo of ecotech to central America. Uh, you know, if you could give us a, you know, more insight, more depth on the services that you provide. You, you talked about like an eight step plan. If you could just highlight those eight steps. >>Sure. Um, so part of this aid stages that we're going to be developing and um, and we hope that we'll be working with the Ministry of Education and every single one of them. Um, It causes where it brings a lot of technologies. For example, there's one that were planning on using, which is recognition from AWS. Um, the fact of um, there was, there's a lot of students that come to the country that have no documentation. There's no passports, There's no um, document I. D. There's nothing, right? So it's really hard for a um within the same school system to be able to track these students, right? Because they can they can go, they can come and they can, if they want, they can change their name. They can they can do a lot of things that are maybe are not correct. And um and sometimes it's not even because they want to do something incorrect. It's just that the uh the system or the yeah the the way of doing things manually, it allows us to do these types of changes. So for example, with with the service like recognition have been able to recognize their face or or recognize their um their idea with their with their fingerprints um and and being able to a um to interact and give give an actual recognition as the word says to this student. It's amazing. It's amazing technology that allows the Ministry of Education and the students to have a voice to have a presence even though they don't have their actual documentation because of whatever reason. Um There is something behind this that helps them um b be valuable and the b at the same time, a present in the in the system. Right? And so and and with with not only that, but with the grading with um with the attendance, with with the behavior with um with a lot of things that we're creating within these stages. Uh It's gonna be, for example, let me give you a quick example. Um There's, for example, the system that we've created for the dropouts. Um The student doesn't come one day, two days, three days and automatically. Now it'll, it'll become an alert and it will start to shot emails and alerts to the different people involved in order to see, hey listen, this student has not come for the last week, two classes. Um, we need you to go and see what's going on, Right? So this is maybe it is something very small, but it can, it can change people's life and they can change students lives and um, and, and the fact of, of knowing where they are, how they are, how are they doing, how their grades are, where we can help them and activate these different types of alerts that, um, that the system allows them to, um, to do that. It helps incredibly, the life of the student in the future, of this, of this student. And uh, in that exact, that is exactly what we're trying to do here. At the end. It's not only, um, it's okay, all of the technological and all of the different efforts that we're doing, but at the end, that's what it matters. It's, it's the student, right? It's it's the fact that, um, that he can come and he can finish his school, he can graduate, he can go to college, he can, he can become an, uh, an entrepreneur and, and be some, some day here and I at AWS conference and give him give a conference, and, and and that is exactly what the Ministry of Education is looking at, what we are looking at the project per se. >>Yeah, I mean, that's a really excellent point that you're making. I mean, this technology is helping real people on the ground and actually shaping their lives for the better. So, I mean, it's really incredible, you know, I'd love to hear more now from Rafael, just a bit what insight he can provide to other ministries, who, you know, also, you know, ministers of Education, who also would consider implementing this kind of technology and also his own experience um with this project in the AWS. >>Well, the connectivity for us is really important, not only with within the institutions of the Ministry of Education, but we also have connections with the Ministry of Health, we also have connections with the software called Sienna Julia, which allows the identification of people within the country and the benefits provided by the stage. So the country where all by little is incorporating the pieces and these cloud services, we have found that before we developed everything AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem and instead of on the solution of the technology, because services are already available. So at the country level, other ministries are incorporating these services nowadays, for covid management, the Minister of Health has a set of applications that allowed to set links between people that has positive. So this has allowed us to associate the situation with that particular student in our classrooms. So little by little services are converting education and other services into a need that allows us to focus on the problem instead of on technological solutions because services are already there for us to consume >>terrific. You know, I'd love to now shift to our other guest um Jose could you give us some insight what is the next phase for your business when you look at 2021? You know, it's gonna be, I mean, we hope it's going to be a wonderful year. Uh post Covid. Uh you know, what's your vision? >>It's it's interesting that you're saying that Natalie um education has changed Covid has um has put an acceleration to um has accelerated the the whole shift of the technological change in in education. It will not, well I hope it will not go back to the same before Covid. Um it's all of these technologies that are being created that are being organized, that are being it developed um for education specifically um an area where everything has been done the same for a long time. Um we need it, it's crazy to say this, but we needed a Covid time in order to accelerate this type of of organizations right in and now like ministry, the ministries of Education, like like the Minister of Education of Costa rica, they've had this for a long time and they've they've been thinking of the importance of making changes and everything, but until now it became a priority. Why? Because they realized that without these technologies with another pandemic, oh boy, we're going to see the effects of this and, and, and it's going to affect a lot of countries and a lot of students. Um, but it's gonna help to accelerate and understand that for example, internet, it has to be a worldwide access, just like water or electricity is in some, in our countries right now. You know, the fact of a student not having internet, um, we're taking away lot of development for this student. So I believe that after this post covid time education is going to continue to do a lot of changes and you and you'll see this and you'll see this in all of the areas in elementary, in preschool, in university, in high school. Um, you're going to see the changes that this is, um, is starting to do and we've seen it and we've seen it, but now it's going to be at a 23 or four X. So we're pretty excited. We're pretty excited what what the world it's gonna what the world's gonna bring to this table and to this specific area which is education. >>Yeah. That's really terrific to hear a silver lining in this pandemic. And just real quick uh final thoughts from rafael, are you looking to ramp up further? Uh you know, in light of what Jose has said, you know, to ramp up the digital transformation process? >>Yes, I believe this is an opportunity. The country is facing the opportunity, the resistance that we had in the sector of education, the current emergency situation. And they need to use virtual tools Have flattened these curves and narratives. Since 2000 and 20, Costa Rica started a very strong uh teach that trainer process that every four years ago it was very difficult to set to involve all teachers. But nowadays all teachers want to get trained. So we are getting there with virtual trainings with new tools, with the implementation and the use of technology in the classroom. So these kinds of emergencies somehow we have to uh, we know the pain but we know that also the gain of this whole idea of this whole situation. So this opportunity for change is something that we have to take advantage of. Thanks to these cloud services, I believe this is nowadays available and the country realized that these things are closer than what we thought of. An innovation is here to stay and I believe we have to exploit this a little by little >>terrific. Well gentlemen, thank you so much for your insights, loved hearing about the innovations taking place in the classroom, especially overseas in Costa rica. And that of course was Rafael Ramirez, the Product Manager, Costa rica, Ministry of Education, as well as Jose monteiro, the ceo of Ecotech D central America. And of course, I'm Natalie ehrlich, your host for the cube for today's session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks very much for watching. >>Mhm.

>> Hi, I'm Natalie Ehrlich and welcome to the AWS startup showcase presented by The Cube. We have an amazing lineup of great guests who will share their insights on the latest innovations and solutions and leveraging cloud scale data in AI, security and life sciences. And now we're joined by the co-founders and co-CEOs of The Cube, Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Thank you gentlemen for joining me. >> Hey Natalie. >> Hey Natalie. >> How are you doing. Hey John. >> Well, I'd love to get your insights here, let's kick it off and what are you looking forward to. >> Dave, I think one of the things that we've been doing on the cube for 11 years is looking at the signal in the marketplace. I wanted to focus on this because AI is cutting across all industries. So we're seeing that with cybersecurity and life sciences, it's the first time we've had a life sciences track in the showcase, which is amazing because it shows that growth of the cloud scale. So I'm super excited by that. And I think that's going to showcase some new business models and of course the keynotes Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO Data bricks pushing a billion dollars in revenue, clear validation that startups can go from zero to a billion dollars in revenues. So that should be really interesting. And of course the top venture capitalists coming in to talk about what the enterprise dynamics are all about. And what about you, Dave? >> You know, I thought it was an interesting mix and choice of startups. When you think about, you know, AI security and healthcare, and I've been thinking about that. Healthcare is the perfect industry, it is ripe for disruption. If you think about healthcare, you know, we all complain how expensive it is not transparent. There's a lot of discussion about, you know, can everybody have equal access that certainly with COVID the staff is burned out. There's a real divergence and diversity of the quality of healthcare and you know, it all results in patients not being happy, and I mean, if you had to do an NPS score on the patients and healthcare will be pretty low, John, you know. So when I think about, you know, AI and security in the context of healthcare in cloud, I ask questions like when are machines going to be able to better meet or make better diagnoses than doctors? And that's starting. I mean, it's really in assistance putting into play today. But I think when you think about cheaper and more accurate image analysis, when you think about the overall patient experience and trust and personalized medicine, self-service, you know, remote medicine that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, disease tracking, language translation, I mean, there are so many things where the cloud and data, and then it can help. And then at the end of it, it's all about, okay, how do I authenticate? How do I deal with privacy and personal information and tamper resistance? And that's where the security play comes in. So it's a very interesting mix of startups. I think that I'm really looking forward to hearing from... >> You know Natalie one of the things we talked about, some of these companies, Dave, we've talked a lot of these companies and to me the business model innovations that are coming out of two factors, the pandemic is kind of coming to an end so that accelerated and really showed who had the right stuff in my opinion. So you were either on the wrong side or right side of history when it comes to the pandemic and as we look back, as we come out of it with clear growth in certain companies and certain companies that adopted let's say cloud. And the other one is cloud scale. So the focus of these startup showcases is really to focus on how startups can align with the enterprise buyers and create the new kind of refactoring business models to go from, you know, a re-pivot or refactoring to more value. And the other thing that's interesting is that the business model isn't just for the good guys. If you look at say ransomware, for instance, the business model of hackers is gone completely amazing too. They're kicking it but in terms of revenue, they have their own they're well-funded machines on how to extort cash from companies. So there's a lot of security issues around the business model as well. So to me, the business model innovation with cloud-scale tech, with the pandemic forcing function, you've seen a lot of new kinds of decision-making in enterprises. You seeing how enterprise buyers are changing their decision criteria, and frankly their existing suppliers. So if you're an old guard supplier, you're going to be potentially out because if you didn't deliver during the pandemic, this is the issue that everyone's talking about. And it's kind of not publicized in the press very much, but this is actually happening. >> Well thank you both very much for joining me to kick off our AWS startup showcase. Now we're going to go to our very special guest Ali Ghodsi and John Furrier will seat with him for a fireside chat and Dave and I will see you on the other side. >> Okay, Ali great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase, our second edition, second batch, season two, whatever we want to call it it's our second version of this new series where we feature, you know, the hottest startups coming out of the AWS ecosystem. And you're one of them, I've been there, but you're not a startup anymore, you're here pushing serious success on the revenue side and company. Congratulations and great to see you. >> Likewise. Thank you so much, good to see you again. >> You know I remember the first time we chatted on The Cube, you weren't really doing much software revenue, you were really talking about the new revolution in data. And you were all in on cloud. And I will say that from day one, you were always adamant that it was cloud cloud scale before anyone was really talking about it. And at that time it was on premises with Hadoop and those kinds of things. You saw that early. I remember that conversation, boy, that bet paid out great. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> So I've got to ask you to jump right in. Enterprises are making decisions differently now and you are an example of that company that has gone from literally zero software sales to pushing a billion dollars as it's being reported. Certainly the success of Data bricks has been written about, but what's not written about is the success of how you guys align with the changing criteria for the enterprise customer. Take us through that and these companies here are aligning the same thing and enterprises want to change. They want to be in the right side of history. What's the success formula? >> Yeah. I mean, basically what we always did was look a few years out, the how can we help these enterprises, future proof, what they're trying to achieve, right? They have, you know, 30 years of legacy software and, you know baggage, and they have compliance and regulations, how do we help them move to the future? So we try to identify those kinds of secular trends that we think are going to maybe you see them a little bit right now, cloud was one of them, but it gets more and more and more. So we identified those and there were sort of three or four of those that we kind of latched onto. And then every year the passes, we're a little bit more right. Cause it's a secular trend in the market. And then eventually, it becomes a force that you can't kind of fight anymore. >> Yeah. And I just want to put a plug for your clubhouse talks with Andreessen Horowitz. You're always on clubhouse talking about, you know, I won't say the killer instinct, but being a CEO in a time where there's so much change going on, you're constantly under pressure. It's a lonely job at the top, I know that, but you've made some good calls. What was some of the key moments that you can point to, where you were like, okay, the wave is coming in now, we'd better get on it. What were some of those key decisions? Cause a lot of these startups want to be in your position, and a lot of buyers want to take advantage of the technology that's coming. They got to figure it out. What was some of those key inflection points for you? >> So if you're just listening to what everybody's saying, you're going to miss those trends. So then you're just going with the stream. So, Juan you mentioned that cloud. Cloud was a thing at the time, we thought it's going to be the thing that takes over everything. Today it's actually multi-cloud. So multi-cloud is a thing, it's more and more people are thinking, wow, I'm paying a lot's to the cloud vendors, do I want to buy more from them or do I want to have some optionality? So that's one. Two, open. They're worried about lock-in, you know, lock-in has happened for many, many decades. So they want open architectures, open source, open standards. So that's the second one that we bet on. The third one, which you know, initially wasn't sort of super obvious was AI and machine learning. Now it's super obvious, everybody's talking about it. But when we started, it was kind of called artificial intelligence referred to robotics, and machine learning wasn't a term that people really knew about. Today, it's sort of, everybody's doing machine learning and AI. So betting on those future trends, those secular trends as we call them super critical. >> And one of the things that I want to get your thoughts on is this idea of re-platforming versus refactoring. You see a lot being talked about in some of these, what does that even mean? It's people trying to figure that out. Re-platforming I get the cloud scale. But as you look at the cloud benefits, what do you say to customers out there and enterprises that are trying to use the benefits of the cloud? Say data for instance, in the middle of how could they be thinking about refactoring? And how can they make a better selection on suppliers? I mean, how do you know it used to be RFP, you deliver these speeds and feeds and you get selected. Now I think there's a little bit different science and methodology behind it. What's your thoughts on this refactoring as a buyer? What do I got to do? >> Well, I mean let's start with you said RFP and so on. Times have changed. Back in the day, you had to kind of sign up for something and then much later you're going to get it. So then you have to go through this arduous process. In the cloud, would pay us to go model elasticity and so on. You can kind of try your way to it. You can try before you buy. And you can use more and more. You can gradually, you don't need to go in all in and you know, say we commit to 50,000,000 and six months later to find out that wow, this stuff has got shelf where it doesn't work. So that's one thing that has changed it's beneficial. But the second thing is, don't just mimic what you had on prem in the cloud. So that's what this refactoring is about. If you had, you know, Hadoop data lake, now you're just going to have an S3 data lake. If you had an on-prem data warehouse now you just going to have a cloud data warehouse. You're just repeating what you did on prem in the cloud, architected for the future. And you know, for us, the most important thing that we say is that this lake house paradigm is a cloud native way of organizing your data. That's different from how you would do things on premises. So think through what's the right way of doing it in the cloud. Don't just try to copy paste what you had on premises in the cloud. >> It's interesting one of the things that we're observing and I'd love to get your reaction to this. Dave a lot** and I have been reporting on it is, two personas in the enterprise are changing their organization. One is I call IT ops or there's an SRE role developing. And the data teams are being dismantled and being kind of sprinkled through into other teams is this notion of data, pipelining being part of workflows, not just the department. Are you seeing organizational shifts in how people are organizing their resources, their human resources to take advantage of say that the data problems that are need to being solved with machine learning and whatnot and cloud-scale? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you're right. SRE became a thing, lots of DevOps people. It was because when the cloud vendors launched their infrastructure as a service to stitch all these things together and get it all working you needed a lot of devOps people. But now things are maturing. So, you know, with vendors like Data bricks and other multi-cloud vendors, you can actually get much higher level services where you don't need to necessarily have lots of lots of DevOps people that are themselves trying to stitch together lots of services to make this work. So that's one trend. But secondly, you're seeing more data teams being sort of completely ubiquitous in these organizations. Before it used to be you have one data team and then we'll have data and AI and we'll be done. ' It's a one and done. But that's not how it works. That's not how Google, Facebook, Twitter did it, they had data throughout the organization. Every BU was empowered. It's sales, it's marketing, it's finance, it's engineering. So how do you embed all those data teams and make them actually run fast? And you know, there's this concept of a data mesh which is super important where you can actually decentralize and enable all these teams to focus on their domains and run super fast. And that's really enabled by this Lake house paradigm in the cloud that we're talking about. Where you're open, you're basing it on open standards. You have flexibility in the data types and how they're going to store their data. So you kind of provide a lot of that flexibility, but at the same time, you have sort of centralized governance for it. So absolutely things are changing in the market. >> Well, you're just the professor, the masterclass right here is amazing. Thanks for sharing that insight. You're always got to go out of date and that's why we have you on here. You're amazing, great resource for the community. Ransomware is a huge problem, it's now the government's focus. We're being attacked and we don't know where it's coming from. This business models around cyber that's expanding rapidly. There's real revenue behind it. There's a data problem. It's not just a security problem. So one of the themes in all of these startup showcases is data is ubiquitous in the value propositions. One of them is ransomware. What's your thoughts on ransomware? Is it a data problem? Does cloud help? Some are saying that cloud's got better security with ransomware, then say on premise. What's your vision of how you see this ransomware problem being addressed besides the government taking over? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Let me start by saying, you know, we're a data company, right? And if you say you're a data company, you might as well just said, we're a privacy company, right? It's like some people say, well, what do you think about privacy? Do you guys even do privacy? We're a data company. So yeah, we're a privacy company as well. Like you can't talk about data without talking about privacy. With every customer, with every enterprise. So that's obviously top of mind for us. I do think that in the cloud, security is much better because, you know, vendors like us, we're investing so much resources into security and making sure that we harden the infrastructure and, you know, by actually having all of this infrastructure, we can monitor it, detect if something is, you know, an attack is happening, and we can immediately sort of stop it. So that's different from when it's on prem, you have kind of like the separated duties where the software vendor, which would have been us, doesn't really see what's happening in the data center. So, you know, there's an IT team that didn't develop the software is responsible for the security. So I think things are much better now. I think we're much better set up, but of course, things like cryptocurrencies and so on are making it easier for people to sort of hide. There decentralized networks. So, you know, the attackers are getting more and more sophisticated as well. So that's definitely something that's super important. It's super top of mind. We're all investing heavily into security and privacy because, you know, that's going to be super critical going forward. >> Yeah, we got to move that red line, and figure that out and get more intelligence. Decentralized trends not going away it's going to be more of that, less of the centralized. But centralized does come into play with data. It's a mix, it's not mutually exclusive. And I'll get your thoughts on this. Architectural question with, you know, 5G and the edge coming. Amazon's got that outpost stringent, the wavelength, you're seeing mobile world Congress coming up in this month. The focus on processing data at the edge is a huge issue. And enterprises are now going to be commercial part of that. So architecture decisions are being made in enterprises right now. And this is a big issue. So you mentioned multi-cloud, so tools versus platforms. Now I'm an enterprise buyer and there's no more RFPs. I got all this new choices for startups and growing companies to choose from that are cloud native. I got all kinds of new challenges and opportunities. How do I build my architecture so I don't foreclose a future opportunity. >> Yeah, as I said, look, you're actually right. Cloud is becoming even more and more something that everybody's adopting, but at the same time, there is this thing that the edge is also more and more important. And the connectivity between those two and making sure that you can really do that efficiently. My ask from enterprises, and I think this is top of mind for all the enterprise architects is, choose open because that way you can avoid locking yourself in. So that's one thing that's really, really important. In the past, you know, all these vendors that locked you in, and then you try to move off of them, they were highly innovative back in the day. In the 80's and the 90's, there were the best companies. You gave them all your data and it was fantastic. But then because you were locked in, they didn't need to innovate anymore. And you know, they focused on margins instead. And then over time, the innovation stopped and now you were kind of locked in. So I think openness is really important. I think preserving optionality with multi-cloud because we see the different clouds have different strengths and weaknesses and it changes over time. All right. Early on AWS was the only game that either showed up with much better security, active directory, and so on. Now Google with AI capabilities, which one's going to win, which one's going to be better. Actually, probably all three are going to be around. So having that optionality that you can pick between the three and then artificial intelligence. I think that's going to be the key to the future. You know, you asked about security earlier. That's how people detect zero day attacks, right? You ask about the edge, same thing there, that's where the predictions are going to happen. So make sure that you invest in AI and artificial intelligence very early on because it's not something you can just bolt on later on and have a little data team somewhere that then now you have AI and it's one and done. >> All right. Great insight. I've got to ask you, the folks may or may not know, but you're a professor at Berkeley as well, done a lot of great work. That's where you kind of came out of when Data bricks was formed. And the Berkeley basically was it invented distributed computing back in the 80's. I remember I was breaking in when Unix was proprietary, when software wasn't open you actually had the deal that under the table to get code. Now it's all open. Isn't the internet now with distributed computing and how interconnects are happening. I mean, the internet didn't break during the pandemic, which proves the benefit of the internet. And that's a positive. But as you start seeing edge, it's essentially distributed computing. So I got to ask you from a computer science standpoint. What do you see as the key learnings or connect the dots for how this distributed model will work? I see hybrids clearly, hybrid cloud is clearly the operating model but if you take it to the next level of distributed computing, what are some of the key things that you look for in the next five years as this starts to be completely interoperable, obviously software is going to drive a lot of it. What's your vision on that? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, so Berkeley, you're right for the gigs, you know, there was a now project 20, 30 years ago that basically is how we do things. There was a project on how you search in the very early on with Inktomi that became how Google and everybody else to search today. So workday was super, super early, sometimes way too early. And that was actually the mistake. Was that they were so early that people said that that stuff doesn't work. And then 20 years later you were invented. So I think 2009, Berkeley published just above the clouds saying the cloud is the future. At that time, most industry leaders said, that's just, you know, that doesn't work. Today, recently they published a research paper called, Sky Computing. So sky computing is what you get above the clouds, right? So we have the cloud as the future, the next level after that is the sky. That's one on top of them. That's what multi-cloud is. So that's a lot of the research at Berkeley, you know, into distributed systems labs is about this. And we're excited about that. Then we're one of the sky computing vendors out there. So I think you're going to see much more innovation happening at the sky level than at the compute level where you needed all those DevOps and SRE people to like, you know, build everything manually themselves. I can just see the memes now coming Ali, sky net, star track. You've got space too, by the way, space is another frontier that is seeing a lot of action going on because now the surface area of data with satellites is huge. So again, I know you guys are doing a lot of business with folks in that vertical where you starting to see real time data acquisition coming from these satellites. What's your take on the whole space as the, not the final frontier, but certainly as a new congested and contested space for, for data? >> Well, I mean, as a data vendor, we see a lot of, you know, alternative data sources coming in and people aren't using machine learning< AI to eat out signal out of the, you know, massive amounts of imagery that's coming out of these satellites. So that's actually a pretty common in FinTech, which is a vertical for us. And also sort of in the public sector, lots of, lots of, lots of satellites, imagery data that's coming. And these are massive volumes. I mean, it's like huge data sets and it's a super, super exciting what they can do. Like, you know, extracting signal from the satellite imagery is, and you know, being able to handle that amount of data, it's a challenge for all the companies that we work with. So we're excited about that too. I mean, definitely that's a trend that's going to continue. >> All right. I'm super excited for you. And thanks for coming on The Cube here for our keynote. I got to ask you a final question. As you think about the future, I see your company has achieved great success in a very short time, and again, you guys done the work, I've been following your company as you know. We've been been breaking that Data bricks story for a long time. I've been excited by it, but now what's changed. You got to start thinking about the next 20 miles stair when you look at, you know, the sky computing, you're thinking about these new architectures. As the CEO, your job is to one, not run out of money which you don't have to worry about that anymore, so hiring. And then, you got to figure out that next 20 miles stair as a company. What's that going on in your mind? Take us through your mindset of what's next. And what do you see out in that landscape? >> Yeah, so what I mentioned around Sky company optionality around multi-cloud, you're going to see a lot of capabilities around that. Like how do you get multi-cloud disaster recovery? How do you leverage the best of all the clouds while at the same time not having to just pick one? So there's a lot of innovation there that, you know, we haven't announced yet, but you're going to see a lot of it over the next many years. Things that you can do when you have the optionality across the different parts. And the second thing that's really exciting for us is bringing AI to the masses. Democratizing data and AI. So how can you actually apply machine learning to machine learning? How can you automate machine learning? Today machine learning is still quite complicated and it's pretty advanced. It's not going to be that way 10 years from now. It's going to be very simple. Everybody's going to have it at their fingertips. So how do we apply machine learning to machine learning? It's called auto ML, automatic, you know, machine learning. So that's an area, and that's not something that can be done with, right? But the goal is to eventually be able to automate a way the whole machine learning engineer and the machine learning data scientist altogether. >> You know it's really fun and talking with you is that, you know, for years we've been talking about this inside the ropes, inside the industry, around the future. Now people starting to get some visibility, the pandemics forced that. You seeing the bad projects being exposed. It's like the tide pulled out and you see all the scabs and bad projects that were justified old guard technologies. If you get it right you're on a good wave. And this is clearly what we're seeing. And you guys example of that. So as enterprises realize this, that they're going to have to look double down on the right projects and probably trash the bad projects, new criteria, how should people be thinking about buying? Because again, we talked about the RFP before. I want to kind of circle back because this is something that people are trying to figure out. You seeing, you know, organic, you come in freemium models as cloud scale becomes the advantage in the lock-in frankly seems to be the value proposition. The more value you provide, the more lock-in you get. Which sounds like that's the way it should be versus proprietary, you know, protocols. The protocol is value. How should enterprises organize their teams? Is it end to end workflows? Is it, and how should they evaluate the criteria for these technologies that they want to buy? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I, you know, it's very simple, try to future proof your decision-making. Make sure that whatever you're doing is not blocking your in. So whatever decision you're making, what if the world changes in five years, make sure that if you making a mistake now, that's not going to bite you in about five years later. So how do you do that? Well, open source is great. If you're leveraging open-source, you can try it out already. You don't even need to talk to any vendor. Your teams can already download it and try it out and get some value out of it. If you're in the cloud, this pay as you go models, you don't have to do a big RFP and commit big. You can try it, pay the vendor, pay as you go, $10, $15. It doesn't need to be a million dollar contract and slowly grow as you're providing value. And then make sure that you're not just locking yourself in to one cloud or, you know, one particular vendor. As much as possible preserve your optionality because then that's not a one-way door. If it turns out later you want to do something else, you can, you know, pick other things as well. You're not locked in. So that's what I would say. Keep that top of mind that you're not locking yourself into a particular decision that you made today, that you might regret in five years. >> I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your with our community and The Cube. And as always great to see you. I really enjoy your clubhouse talks, and I really appreciate how you give back to the community. And I want to thank you for coming on and taking the time with us today. >> Thanks John, always appreciate talking to you. >> Okay Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Data bricks, a success story that proves the validation of cloud scale, open and create value, values the new lock-in. So Natalie, back to you for continuing coverage. >> That was a terrific interview John, but I'd love to get Dave's insights first. What were your takeaways, Dave? >> Well, if we have more time I'll tell you how Data bricks got to where they are today, but I'll say this, the most important thing to me that Allie said was he conveyed a very clear understanding of what data companies are outright and are getting ready. Talked about four things. There's not one data team, there's many data teams. And he talked about data is decentralized, and data has to have context and that context lives in the business. He said, look, think about it. The way that the data companies would get it right, they get data in teams and sales and marketing and finance and engineering. They all have their own data and data teams. And he referred to that as a data mesh. That's a term that is your mock, the Gany coined and the warehouse of the data lake it's merely a node in that global message. It meshes discoverable, he talked about federated governance, and Data bricks, they're breaking the model of shoving everything into a single repository and trying to make that the so-called single version of the truth. Rather what they're doing, which is right on is putting data in the hands of the business owners. And that's how true data companies do. And the last thing you talked about with sky computing, which I loved, it's that future layer, we talked about multi-cloud a lot that abstracts the underlying complexity of the technical details of the cloud and creates additional value on top. I always say that the cloud players like Amazon have given the gift to the world of 100 billion dollars a year they spend in CapEx. Thank you. Now we're going to innovate on top of it. Yeah. And I think the refactoring... >> Hope by John. >> That was great insight and I totally agree. The refactoring piece too was key, he brought that home. But to me, I think Data bricks that Ali shared there and why he's been open and sharing a lot of his insights and the community. But what he's not saying, cause he's humble and polite is they cracked the code on the enterprise, Dave. And to Dave's points exactly reason why they did it, they saw an opportunity to make it easier, at that time had dupe was the rage, and they just made it easier. They was smart, they made good bets, they had a good formula and they cracked the code with the enterprise. They brought it in and they brought value. And see that's the key to the cloud as Dave pointed out. You get replatform with the cloud, then you refactor. And I think he pointed out the multi-cloud and that really kind of teases out the whole future and landscape, which is essentially distributed computing. And I think, you know, companies are starting to figure that out with hybrid and this on premises and now super edge I call it, with 5G coming. So it's just pretty incredible. >> Yeah. Data bricks, IPO is coming and people should know. I mean, what everybody, they created spark as you know John and everybody thought they were going to do is mimic red hat and sell subscriptions and support. They didn't, they developed a managed service and they embedded AI tools to simplify data science. So to your point, enterprises could buy instead of build, we know this. Enterprises will spend money to make things simpler. They don't have the resources, and so this was what they got right was really embedding that, making a building a managed service, not mimicking the kind of the red hat model, but actually creating a new value layer there. And that's big part of their success. >> If I could just add one thing Natalie to that Dave saying is really right on. And as an enterprise buyer, if we go the other side of the equation, it used to be that you had to be a known company, get PR, you fill out RFPs, you had to meet all the speeds. It's like going to the airport and get a swab test, and get a COVID test and all kinds of mechanisms to like block you and filter you. Most of the biggest success stories that have created the most value for enterprises have been the companies that nobody's understood. And Andy Jazz's famous quote of, you know, being misunderstood is actually a good thing. Data bricks was very misunderstood at the beginning and no one kind of knew who they were but they did it right. And so the enterprise buyers out there, don't be afraid to test the startups because you know the next Data bricks is out there. And I think that's where I see the psychology changing from the old IT buyers, Dave. It's like, okay, let's let's test this company. And there's plenty of ways to do that. He illuminated those premium, small pilots, you don't need to go on these big things. So I think that is going to be a shift in how companies going to evaluate startups. >> Yeah. Think about it this way. Why should the large banks and insurance companies and big manufacturers and pharma companies, governments, why should they burn resources managing containers and figuring out data science tools if they can just tap into solutions like Data bricks which is an AI platform in the cloud and let the experts manage all that stuff. Think about how much money in time that saves enterprises. >> Yeah, I mean, we've got 15 companies here we're showcasing this batch and this season if you call it. That episode we are going to call it? They're awesome. Right? And the next 15 will be the same. And these companies could be the next billion dollar revenue generator because the cloud enables that day. I think that's the exciting part. >> Well thank you both so much for these insights. Really appreciate it. AWS startup showcase highlights the innovation that helps startups succeed. And no one knows that better than our very next guest, Jeff Barr. Welcome to the show and I will send this interview now to Dave and John and see you just in the bit. >> Okay, hey Jeff, great to see you. Thanks for coming on again. >> Great to be back. >> So this is a regular community segment with Jeff Barr who's a legend in the industry. Everyone knows your name. Everyone knows that. Congratulations on your recent blog posts we have reading. Tons of news, I want to get your update because 5G has been all over the news, mobile world congress is right around the corner. I know Bill Vass was a keynote out there, virtual keynote. There's a lot of Amazon discussion around the edge with wavelength. Specifically, this is the outpost piece. And I know there is news I want to get to, but the top of mind is there's massive Amazon expansion and the cloud is going to the edge, it's here. What's up with wavelength. Take us through the, I call it the power edge, the super edge. >> Well, I'm really excited about this mostly because it gives a lot more choice and flexibility and options to our customers. This idea that with wavelength we announced quite some time ago, at least quite some time ago if we think in cloud years. We announced that we would be working with 5G providers all over the world to basically put AWS in the telecom providers data centers or telecom centers, so that as their customers build apps, that those apps would take advantage of the low latency, the high bandwidth, the reliability of 5G, be able to get to some compute and storage services that are incredibly close geographically and latency wise to the compute and storage that is just going to give customers this new power and say, well, what are the cool things we can build? >> Do you see any correlation between wavelength and some of the early Amazon services? Because to me, my gut feels like there's so much headroom there. I mean, I was just riffing on the notion of low latency packets. I mean, just think about the applications, gaming and VR, and metaverse kind of cool stuff like that where having the edge be that how much power there. It just feels like a new, it feels like a new AWS. I mean, what's your take? You've seen the evolutions and the growth of a lot of the key services. Like EC2 and SA3. >> So welcome to my life. And so to me, the way I always think about this is it's like when I go to a home improvement store and I wander through the aisles and I often wonder through with no particular thing that I actually need, but I just go there and say, wow, they've got this and they've got this, they've got this other interesting thing. And I just let my creativity run wild. And instead of trying to solve a problem, I'm saying, well, if I had these different parts, well, what could I actually build with them? And I really think that this breadth of different services and locations and options and communication technologies. I suspect a lot of our customers and customers to be and are in this the same mode where they're saying, I've got all this awesomeness at my fingertips, what might I be able to do with it? >> He reminds me when Fry's was around in Palo Alto, that store is no longer here but it used to be back in the day when it was good. It was you go in and just kind of spend hours and then next thing you know, you built a compute. Like what, I didn't come in here, whether it gets some cables. Now I got a motherboard. >> I clearly remember Fry's and before that there was the weird stuff warehouse was another really cool place to hang out if you remember that. >> Yeah I do. >> I wonder if I could jump in and you guys talking about the edge and Jeff I wanted to ask you about something that is, I think people are starting to really understand and appreciate what you did with the entrepreneur acquisition, what you do with nitro and graviton, and really driving costs down, driving performance up. I mean, there's like a compute Renaissance. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that at the edge, because it's got to be low power, it has to be low cost. You got to be doing processing at the edge. What's your take on how that's evolving? >> Certainly so you're totally right that we started working with and then ultimately acquired Annapurna labs in Israel a couple of years ago. I've worked directly with those folks and it's really awesome to see what they've been able to do. Just really saying, let's look at all of these different aspects of building the cloud that were once effectively kind of somewhat software intensive and say, where does it make sense to actually design build fabricate, deploy custom Silicon? So from putting up the system to doing all kinds of additional kinds of security checks, to running local IO devices, running the NBME as fast as possible to support the EBS. Each of those things has been a contributing factor to not just the power of the hardware itself, but what I'm seeing and have seen for the last probably two or three years at this point is the pace of innovation on instance types just continues to get faster and faster. And it's not just cranking out new instance types because we can, it's because our awesomely diverse base of customers keeps coming to us and saying, well, we're happy with what we have so far, but here's this really interesting new use case. And we needed a different ratio of memory to CPU, or we need more cores based on the amount of memory, or we needed a lot of IO bandwidth. And having that nitro as the base lets us really, I don't want to say plug and play, cause I haven't actually built this myself, but it seems like they can actually put the different elements together, very very quickly and then come up with new instance types that just our customers say, yeah, that's exactly what I asked for and be able to just do this entire range of from like micro and nano sized all the way up to incredibly large with incredible just to me like, when we talk about terabytes of memory that are just like actually just RAM memory. It's like, that's just an inconceivably large number by the standards of where I started out in my career. So it's all putting this power in customer hands. >> You used the term plug and play, but it does give you that nitro gives you that optionality. And then other thing that to me is really exciting is the way in which ISVs are writing to whatever's underneath. So you're making that, you know, transparent to the users so I can choose as a customer, the best price performance for my workload and that that's just going to grow that ISV portfolio. >> I think it's really important to be accurate and detailed and as thorough as possible as we launch each one of these new instance types with like what kind of processor is in there and what clock speed does it run at? What kind of, you know, how much memory do we have? What are the, just the ins and outs, and is it Intel or arm or AMD based? It's such an interesting to me contrast. I can still remember back in the very very early days of back, you know, going back almost 15 years at this point and effectively everybody said, well, not everybody. A few people looked and said, yeah, we kind of get the value here. Some people said, this just sounds like a bunch of generic hardware, just kind of generic hardware in Iraq. And even back then it was something that we were very careful with to design and optimize for use cases. But this idea that is generic is so, so, so incredibly inaccurate that I think people are now getting this. And it's okay. It's fine too, not just for the cloud, but for very specific kinds of workloads and use cases. >> And you guys have announced obviously the performance improvements on a lamb** does getting faster, you got the per billing, second billings on windows and SQL server on ECE too**. So I mean, obviously everyone kind of gets that, that's been your DNA, keep making it faster, cheaper, better, easier to use. But the other area I want to get your thoughts on because this is also more on the footprint side, is that the regions and local regions. So you've got more region news, take us through the update on the expansion on the footprint of AWS because you know, a startup can come in and these 15 companies that are here, they're global with AWS, right? So this is a major benefit for customers around the world. And you know, Ali from Data bricks mentioned privacy. Everyone's a privacy company now. So the huge issue, take us through the news on the region. >> Sure, so the two most recent regions that we announced are in the UAE and in Israel. And we generally like to pre-announce these anywhere from six months to two years at a time because we do know that the customers want to start making longer term plans to where they can start thinking about where they can do their computing, where they can store their data. I think at this point we now have seven regions under construction. And, again it's all about customer trice. Sometimes it's because they have very specific reasons where for based on local laws, based on national laws, that they must compute and restore within a particular geographic area. Other times I say, well, a lot of our customers are in this part of the world. Why don't we pick a region that is as close to that part of the world as possible. And one really important thing that I always like to remind our customers of in my audience is, anything that you choose to put in a region, stays in that region unless you very explicitly take an action that says I'd like to replicate it somewhere else. So if someone says, I want to store data in the US, or I want to store it in Frankfurt, or I want to store it in Sao Paulo, or I want to store it in Tokyo or Osaka. They get to make that very specific choice. We give them a lot of tools to help copy and replicate and do cross region operations of various sorts. But at the heart, the customer gets to choose those locations. And that in the early days I think there was this weird sense that you would, you'd put things in the cloud that would just mysteriously just kind of propagate all over the world. That's never been true, and we're very very clear on that. And I just always like to reinforce that point. >> That's great stuff, Jeff. Great to have you on again as a regular update here, just for the folks watching and don't know Jeff he'd been blogging and sharing. He'd been the one man media band for Amazon it's early days. Now he's got departments, he's got peoples on doing videos. It's an immediate franchise in and of itself, but without your rough days we wouldn't have gotten all the great news we subscribe to. We watch all the blog posts. It's essentially the flow coming out of AWS which is just a tsunami of a new announcements. Always great to read, must read. Jeff, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. That's great. >> Thank you John, great to catch up as always. >> Jeff Barr with AWS again, and follow his stuff. He's got a great audience and community. They talk back, they collaborate and they're highly engaged. So check out Jeff's blog and his social presence. All right, Natalie, back to you for more coverage. >> Terrific. Well, did you guys know that Jeff took a three week AWS road trip across 15 cities in America to meet with cloud computing enthusiasts? 5,500 miles he drove, really incredible I didn't realize that. Let's unpack that interview though. What stood out to you John? >> I think Jeff, Barr's an example of what I call direct to audience a business model. He's been doing it from the beginning and I've been following his career. I remember back in the day when Amazon was started, he was always building stuff. He's a builder, he's classic. And he's been there from the beginning. At the beginning he was just the blog and it became a huge audience. It's now morphed into, he was power blogging so hard. He has now support and he still does it now. It's basically the conduit for information coming out of Amazon. I think Jeff has single-handedly made Amazon so successful at the community developer level, and that's the startup action happened and that got them going. And I think he deserves a lot of the success for AWS. >> And Dave, how about you? What is your reaction? >> Well I think you know, and everybody knows about the cloud and back stop X** and agility, and you know, eliminating the undifferentiated, heavy lifting and all that stuff. And one of the things that's often overlooked which is why I'm excited to be part of this program is the innovation. And the innovation comes from startups, and startups start in the cloud. And so I think that that's part of the flywheel effect. You just don't see a lot of startups these days saying, okay, I'm going to do something that's outside of the cloud. There are some, but for the most part, you know, if you saw in software, you're starting in the cloud, it's so capital efficient. I think that's one thing, I've throughout my career. I've been obsessed with every part of the stack from whether it's, you know, close to the business process with the applications. And right now I'm really obsessed with the plumbing, which is why I was excited to talk about, you know, the Annapurna acquisition. Amazon bought and a part of the $350 million, it's reported, you know, maybe a little bit more, but that isn't an amazing acquisition. And the reason why that's so important is because Amazon is continuing to drive costs down, drive performance up. And in my opinion, leaving a lot of the traditional players in their dust, especially when it comes to the power and cooling. You have often overlooked things. And the other piece of the interview was that Amazon is actually getting ISVs to write to these new platforms so that you don't have to worry about there's the software run on this chip or that chip, or x86 or arm or whatever it is. It runs. And so I can choose the best price performance. And that's where people don't, they misunderstand, you always say it John, just said that people are misunderstood. I think they misunderstand, they confused, you know, the price of the cloud with the cost of the cloud. They ignore all the labor costs that are associated with that. And so, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about the cloud tax. I just think the pace is accelerating. The gap is not closing, it's widening. >> If you look at the one question I asked them about wavelength and I had a follow up there when I said, you know, we riff on it and you see, he lit up like he beam was beaming because he said something interesting. It's not that there's a problem to solve at this opportunity. And he conveyed it to like I said, walking through Fry's. But like, you go into a store and he's a builder. So he sees opportunity. And this comes back down to the Martine Casada paradox posts he wrote about do you optimize for CapEx or future revenue? And I think the tell sign is at the wavelength edge piece is going to be so creative and that's going to open up massive opportunities. I think that's the place to watch. That's the place I'm watching. And I think startups going to come out of the woodwork because that's where the action will be. And that's just Amazon at the edge, I mean, that's just cloud at the edge. I think that is going to be very effective. And his that's a little TeleSign, he kind of revealed a little bit there, a lot there with that comment. >> Well that's a to be continued conversation. >> Indeed, I would love to introduce our next guest. We actually have Soma on the line. He's the managing director at Madrona venture group. Thank you Soma very much for coming for our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and I'm great to be here and will have the opportunity to spend some time with you all. >> Well, you have a long to nerd history in the enterprise. How would you define the modern enterprise also known as cloud scale? >> Yeah, so I would say I have, first of all, like, you know, we've all heard this now for the last, you know, say 10 years or so. Like, software is eating the world. Okay. Put it another way, we think about like, hey, every enterprise is a software company first and foremost. Okay. And companies that truly internalize that, that truly think about that, and truly act that way are going to start up, continue running well and things that don't internalize that, and don't do that are going to be left behind sooner than later. Right. And the last few years you start off thing and not take it to the next level and talk about like, not every enterprise is not going through a digital transformation. Okay. So when you sort of think about the world from that lens. Okay. Modern enterprise has to think about like, and I am first and foremost, a technology company. I may be in the business of making a car art, you know, manufacturing paper, or like you know, manufacturing some healthcare products or what have you got out there. But technology and software is what is going to give me a unique, differentiated advantage that's going to let me do what I need to do for my customers in the best possible way [Indistinct]. So that sort of level of focus, level of execution, has to be there in a modern enterprise. The other thing is like not every modern enterprise needs to think about regular. I'm competing for talent, not anymore with my peers in my industry. I'm competing for technology talent and software talent with the top five technology companies in the world. Whether it is Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google, or what have you cannot think, right? So you really have to have that mindset, and then everything flows from that. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise side again, you've seen many ways of innovation. You've got, you know, been in the industry for many, many years. The old way was enterprises want the best proven product and the startups want that lucrative contract. Right? Yeah. And get that beach in. And it used to be, and we addressed this in our earlier keynote with Ali and how it's changing, the buyers are changing because the cloud has enabled this new kind of execution. I call it agile, call it what you want. Developers are driving modern applications, so enterprises are still, there's no, the playbooks evolving. Right? So we see that with the pandemic, people had needs, urgent needs, and they tried new stuff and it worked. The parachute opened as they say. So how do you look at this as you look at stars, you're investing in and you're coaching them. What's the playbook? What's the secret sauce of how to crack the enterprise code today. And if you're an enterprise buyer, what do I need to do? I want to be more agile. Is there a clear path? Is there's a TSA to let stuff go through faster? I mean, what is the modern playbook for buying and being a supplier? >> That's a fantastic question, John, because I think that sort of playbook is changing, even as we speak here currently. A couple of key things to understand first of all is like, you know, decision-making inside an enterprise is getting more and more de-centralized. Particularly decisions around what technology to use and what solutions to use to be able to do what people need to do. That decision making is no longer sort of, you know, all done like the CEO's office or the CTO's office kind of thing. Developers are more and more like you rightly said, like sort of the central of the workflow and the decision making process. So it'll be who both the enterprises, as well as the startups to really understand that. So what does it mean now from a startup perspective, from a startup perspective, it means like, right. In addition to thinking about like hey, not do I go create an enterprise sales post, do I sell to the enterprise like what I might have done in the past? Is that the best way of moving forward, or should I be thinking about a product led growth go to market initiative? You know, build a product that is easy to use, that made self serve really works, you know, get the developers to start using to see the value to fall in love with the product and then you think about like hey, how do I go translate that into a contract with enterprise. Right? And more and more what I call particularly, you know, startups and technology companies that are focused on the developer audience are thinking about like, you know, how do I have a bottom up go to market motion? And sometime I may sort of, you know, overlap that with the top down enterprise sales motion that we know that has been going on for many, many years or decades kind of thing. But really this product led growth bottom up a go to market motion is something that we are seeing on the rise. I would say they're going to have more than half the startup that we come across today, have that in some way shape or form. And so the enterprise also needs to understand this, the CIO or the CTO needs to know that like hey, I'm not decision-making is getting de-centralized. I need to empower my engineers and my engineering managers and my engineering leaders to be able to make the right decision and trust them. I'm going to give them some guard rails so that I don't find myself in a soup, you know, sometime down the road. But once I give them the guard rails, I'm going to enable people to make the decisions. People who are closer to the problem, to make the right decision. >> Well Soma, what are some of the ways that startups can accelerate their enterprise penetration? >> I think that's another good question. First of all, you need to think about like, Hey, what are enterprises wanting to rec? Okay. If you start off take like two steps back and think about what the enterprise is really think about it going. I'm a software company, but I'm really manufacturing paper. What do I do? Right? The core thing that most enterprises care about is like, hey, how do I better engage with my customers? How do I better serve my customers? And how do I do it in the most optimal way? At the end of the day that's what like most enterprises really care about. So startups need to understand, what are the problems that the enterprise is trying to solve? What kind of tools and platform technologies and infrastructure support, and, you know, everything else that they need to be able to do what they need to do and what only they can do in the most optimal way. Right? So to the extent you are providing either a tool or platform or some technology that is going to enable your enterprise to make progress on what they want to do, you're going to get more traction within the enterprise. In other words, stop thinking about technology, and start thinking about the customer problem that they want to solve. And the more you anchor your company, and more you anchor your conversation with the customer around that, the more the enterprise is going to get excited about wanting to work with you. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise and developer equation because CSOs and CXOs, depending who you talk to have that same answer. Oh yeah. In the 90's and 2000's, we kind of didn't, we throttled down, we were using the legacy developer tools and cloud came and then we had to rebuild and we didn't really know what to do. So you seeing a shift, and this is kind of been going on for at least the past five to eight years, a lot more developers being hired yet. I mean, at FinTech is clearly a vertical, they always had developers and everyone had developers, but there's a fast ramp up of developers now and the role of open source has changed. Just looking at the participation. They're not just consuming open source, open source is part of the business model for mainstream enterprises. How is this, first of all, do you agree? And if so, how has this changed the course of an enterprise human resource selection? How they're organized? What's your vision on that? >> Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, John, in my mind the first thing is, and this sort of, you know, like you said financial services has always been sort of hiring people [Indistinct]. And this is like five-year old story. So bear with me I'll tell you the firewall story and then come to I was trying to, the cloud CIO or the Goldman Sachs. Okay. And this is five years ago when people were still like, hey, is this cloud thing real and now is cloud going to take over the world? You know, am I really ready to put my data in the cloud? So there are a lot of questions and conversations can affect. The CIO of Goldman Sachs told me two things that I remember to this day. One is, hey, we've got a internal edict. That we made a decision that in the next five years, everything in Goldman Sachs is going to be on the public law. And I literally jumped out of the chair and I said like now are you going to get there? And then he laughed and said like now it really doesn't matter whether we get there or not. We want to set the tone, set the direction for the organization that hey, public cloud is here. Public cloud is there. And we need to like, you know, move as fast as we realistically can and think about all the financial regulations and security and privacy. And all these things that we care about deeply. But given all of that, the world is going towards public load and we better be on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. And the second thing he said, like we're talking about like hey, how are you hiring, you know, engineers at Goldman Sachs Canada? And he said like in hey, I sort of, my team goes out to the top 20 schools in the US. And the people we really compete with are, and he was saying this, Hey, we don't compete with JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley, or pick any of your favorite financial institutions. We really think about like, hey, we want to get the best talent into Goldman Sachs out of these schools. And we really compete head to head with Google. We compete head to head with Microsoft. We compete head to head with Facebook. And we know that the caliber of people that we want to get is no different than what these companies want. If you want to continue being a successful, leading it, you know, financial services player. That sort of tells you what's going on. You also talked a little bit about like hey, open source is here to stay. What does that really mean kind of thing. In my mind like now, you can tell me that I can have from given my pedigree at Microsoft, I can tell you that we were the first embraces of open source in this world. So I'll say that right off the bat. But having said that we did in our turn around and said like, hey, this open source is real, this open source is going to be great. How can we embrace and how can we participate? And you fast forward to today, like in a Microsoft is probably as good as open source as probably any other large company I would say. Right? Including like the work that the company has done in terms of acquiring GitHub and letting it stay true to its original promise of open source and community can I think, right? I think Microsoft has come a long way kind of thing. But the thing that like in all these enterprises need to think about is you want your developers to have access to the latest and greatest tools. To the latest and greatest that the software can provide. And you really don't want your engineers to be reinventing the wheel all the time. So there is something available in the open source world. Go ahead, please set up, think about whether that makes sense for you to use it. And likewise, if you think that is something you can contribute to the open source work, go ahead and do that. So it's really a two way somebody Arctic relationship that enterprises need to have, and they need to enable their developers to want to have that symbiotic relationship. >> Soma, fantastic insights. Thank you so much for joining our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and thank you John. It was always fun to chat with you guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> John we would love to get your quick insight on that. >> Well I think first of all, he's a prolific investor the great from Madrona venture partners, which is well known in the tech circles. They're in Seattle, which is in the hub of I call cloud city. You've got Amazon and Microsoft there. He'd been at Microsoft and he knows the developer ecosystem. And reason why I like his perspective is that he understands the value of having developers as a core competency in Microsoft. That's their DNA. You look at Microsoft, their number one thing from day one besides software was developers. That was their army, the thousand centurions that one won everything for them. That has shifted. And he brought up open source, and .net and how they've embraced Linux, but something that tele before he became CEO, we interviewed him in the cube at an Xcel partners event at Stanford. He was open before he was CEO. He was talking about opening up. They opened up a lot of their open source infrastructure projects to the open compute foundation early. So they had already had that going and at that price, since that time, the stock price of Microsoft has skyrocketed because as Ali said, open always wins. And I think that is what you see here, and as an investor now he's picking in startups and investing in them. He's got to read the tea leaves. He's got to be in the right side of history. So he brings a great perspective because he sees the old way and he understands the new way. That is the key for success we've seen in the enterprise and with the startups. The people who get the future, and can create the value are going to win. >> Yeah, really excellent point. And just really quickly. What do you think were some of our greatest hits on this hour of programming? >> Well first of all I'm really impressed that Ali took the time to come join us because I know he's super busy. I think they're at a $28 billion valuation now they're pushing a billion dollars in revenue, gap revenue. And again, just a few short years ago, they had zero software revenue. So of these 15 companies we're showcasing today, you know, there's a next Data bricks in there. They're all going to be successful. They already are successful. And they're all on this rocket ship trajectory. Ali is smart, he's also got the advantage of being part of that Berkeley community which they're early on a lot of things now. Being early means you're wrong a lot, but you're also right, and you're right big. So Berkeley and Stanford obviously big areas here in the bay area as research. He is smart, He's got a great team and he's really open. So having him share his best practices, I thought that was a great highlight. Of course, Jeff Barr highlighting some of the insights that he brings and honestly having a perspective of a VC. And we're going to have Peter Wagner from wing VC who's a classic enterprise investors, super smart. So he'll add some insight. Of course, one of the community session, whenever our influencers coming on, it's our beat coming on at the end, as well as Katie Drucker. Another Madrona person is going to talk about growth hacking, growth strategies, but yeah, sights Raleigh coming on. >> Terrific, well thank you so much for those insights and thank you to everyone who is watching the first hour of our live coverage of the AWS startup showcase for myself, Natalie Ehrlich, John, for your and Dave Vellante we want to thank you very much for watching and do stay tuned for more amazing content, as well as a special live segment that John Furrier is going to be hosting. It takes place at 12:30 PM Pacific time, and it's called cracking the code, lessons learned on how enterprise buyers evaluate new startups. Don't go anywhere.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to today's session of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, the Next Big Thing in AI, Security & Life Sciences. Today we're joined by Abacus Insights for the Life Sciences track, I'm your host, Natalie Ehrlich. Now we're going to be speaking about creating an innovation enabling data environment to accelerate your healthcare analytics journey, and we're now joined by our guests Krishna Kottapalli, chief commercial officer as well as Sumant Rao, chief product officer, both working at Abacus Insights, thank you very much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well let's kick off with our theme Krishna, how can we create innovation enabling data environments in order to facilitate the healthcare analytics? >> Yeah, so I think if you sort of think about this that is a lot of data proliferating inside the healthcare system, and whether it's through the internal sources, external sources, devices, patient monitoring platforms, and so on, and all of this carries yeah all of these essentially carry, have useful data and intelligence, right, and essentially the users are looking to get insights out of it to solve problems. And we're also seeing that the journey that our clients are going through is actually a transformation journey, right so they are thinking about how do we seamlessly interact with our stakeholders, so their stakeholders being members and providers, so that they don't get frustrated and feel like they're interacting with multiple parts of the health plan, right, we typically when you call the health plan you feel like you're calling five different departments, so they want to have a seamless experience, and finally, I think the whole, you know, the data being you know, in the ecosystem within the patients, payers, and providers being able to operate and interact has intelligence. So what we, what we think about this is how do we take all of this and help our clients you know, digitize their, you know, path forward and create a way to deliver, you know enable them to do meaningful analytics. >> Well Sumant, when you think about your customers what are the key benefits that Abacus is providing? >> So that's a good question, so primarily speaking, we approach this as, you know a framework that drives innovation that enables data and analytics. I mean, that's really what we're trying to do here. What Abacus does though, is this is slightly different is how we think about this. So we firmly believe that data analytics is not a linear journey, I mean, you cannot say that, oh I'll build my data foundation first and then, you know have the data and then they shall come that's not how it works. So for us, the way Abacus approaches this is, we focus really heavily on the data foundation part of it first. But along the way in the process, a big part of our value statement is we engage and make sure we are driving business value throughout this piece. So, so general message is, you know make sure innovation for the sake of innovation data is not how you're approaching this, but think about your business users, get them engaged, have it small, milestone driven progress that you make along the way. So, so generally speaking, it's we're not tryna be just a platform who moves bits and bytes of information. The way we think about this is you know we'll help you along this journey, there are steps that happen that take you there. And because of which, the message to most of our customers is you focus on your core competence. You know your business, you have nuances in the data, you have nuances on needs that your customers need, you focus on that. The scale that Abacus brings because this is what we do day in day out is more along area of re-usability. So if within our customers, they've got data assets how do we reuse some of that? How does Abacus re-use the fact that because of our of what we do, we actually have data assets that, you know, we can bring data to life quickly. So, so general guidelines, right, so first is don't innovate for the sake of innovating. I mean, that's not going to get you far, respect the process that this is not a linear path, there's always value that's happening throughout the process, and that's, you know, Abacus will work closely with you to make sure you recognize that value. The second part is within your organization, you have assets. There's like major data assets, there's IP, there's things that can leverage that Abacus will do. And because we are a platform, what we focus on is configurability. We've done this for, I mean, a lot of us on the Abacus team come from healthcare space, we have got big payer DNA, we get this, and what we also know is data rules change. I mean, you know, it's really hard when you build a system that's tightly built and you cannot change and you cannot adapt as data rules change, so we've made that part of it easier. We have, we understand data governance, so we work closely with our payers data governance teams to make sure that part of it happens. And I think the last part of this which is really important, this in the context of this conversation is, all of this is good stuff, I mean, you've got massive data foundation, you've got, you know, healthcare expertise flowing in, you've got partnerships with data governance, all that is great. If you don't have best-in-class infrastructure supporting all of that, then you really, you will really have issues Erlich. I mean, that's just the way it works, and this is why, you know, we're built on the AWS stack which kind of helps us, and also helps our clients along with their cloud journey. So it's kind of an interesting set of events in terms of you know, again, I'm going to repeat this because it's important that we don't innovate for the sake of innovating, re-use your assets, leverage your existing IP, make things configurable, data changes, and then leverage best in class infrastructure, so Abacus strategy progresses across those four dimensions. >> And I mean, that's an excellent point about healthcare data being really nuanced and you know, Krishna would love to get your insights on what you see are the biggest opportunities in healthcare analytics now. >> Yeah, so the biggest opportunities are, you know there are two, we think about it in two dimensions, right, one is really around sort of the analytics use cases, and second is around the operational use cases, right, so if you think about a payer they're trying to solve both, and we see because of, you know, our the way we think about data, which is close to near real time, we are able to essentially serve up our clients with, you know helping them solve both their use cases. So think of this that, when you're a patient, you go to you know, you go to a CVS to do something, and then you go to your doctor's office to do something, right, to be, to be able to take a test. If all of these are known, to your payer care management team, if you will, in close to near real time then know, right, where you've been, what you can do how to be able to sort of intervene and so on and so forth, so from a next best action and operational use cases we see a lot of them emerging, new thanks to the cloud as well as thanks to infrastructure, which can do sort of near real time. So that's our own sort of operational use cases if you will. If, when you think about the analytics right, so, you know, every, all payers struggle with this, Which is you have limited dollars to be able to intervene with you know, a large set of population, right so every piece of data that you know, have about your patient, about the specific provider so on and so forth is able to actually, you know give you analytics to be able to intervene or engage if you will, with the patient in a very one-to-one manner. And what we find is at the end of the day if the patient is not engaged in this and the member or the patient is not engaged, you know in the healthcare, you know, value chain, if you will, then your dollars go to waste, and we feel that, in essentially both of these type of use cases can be sorted up really well with, with a unified data platform, as well as with upstack analytics. >> And now Sumant, I'd love to hear from you, you know you're really involved with the product, how do you see the competitive landscape? How do you make sure that your product is the best out there? >> So I think, I think a lot of that is we think about ourselves across three, three vectors. Talk about it as core platform, which is at a very minimal level of description, it's really moving bits and bytes from point A to point B. That's one part of it, right, and I think there's a, it's a pretty crowded space, it's a whole bunch of folks out there trying to, you know demonstrate that they can successfully land data from one point to the other. We do that too, we do that at scale. Where you'd start differentiating and pulling away from the pack is the second vector, which is enrichment. Now, this is where again, it's you have to understand healthcare data to really build a level of respect for how messy it can get. And you have to understand it and build it in a way where it's easy to keep up with the changes. We spend a lot of time, you know in building out a platform to do that so that we can implement data quickly. I mean, you know, for Abacus to bring a data source to life in less than 45 days, it's pretty straightforward. And it's you're talking on an average 6 or 12 months across the rest. Because we get this, we've got a library of rules, we understand how to bring this piece, so we start pulling away from the competitors, if you may. More along the enrichment vector, because that's where we think, getting high quality rules, getting these re-used, all of this is part of it, but then we bring another level of enrichment where we have, you know, we use public data sets, we use a reference data sets, we tie this, we fill in the blanks in the data. All of this is the end state, let's make the data shovel-ready for analytics. So we do all of that along the way, so now applying our expertise, cleansing data, making sure it's the gaps are all filled out and getting this ready and then comes the next part where we tie this data out. Cause it's one thing to bring in multiple sources quickly at scale high speed and all that good stuff, which is hard work, but you know, it's, it's expected now at the same time how do you put all that together in a meaningful manner with which we can actually, you know, land it and keep it ready? So that's two parts. So first is, the platform, the nuts and bolts, the pipes, all that is good stuff, the second is the enrichment. The third side, which is really where we start differentiating is distribution. We have a philosophy that, you know, really the mission of the whole company was to get data available. To solve use cases like the one Krishna just talked about. So rather than make this a massive change management program that takes five years to implement, and really scares your end users away, our philosophy is like let's have incremental use case all on the way, but let's talk to the users, let them interact with data as easy as they can. So we've built our partnerships on our distribution hub, which makes it easy, so an example is if you have someone in the marketing team, who really wants to analyze a particular population to reach out to them, and all they know is tableau, it is great. It should be as simple as saying, look what's the sliver of data you need to get your job done, how do you interact? So we've our distribution hub, is really is the part where, users come in, interact with the data with you know, we will meet you where you are is the underlying principle and that's how it operates. So, so I think on the first level of platform, yeah a crowded space everyone's fighting for that piece, the second part of it is enrichment where we really start pulling away using our expertise, and then at the end of it you've got the distribution part where you know you just want to make it available to users, and, you know, a lot of work has gone into getting this done but that's how we work. >> And if I could add a couple more things, Natalie, so the other thing is security, right so the reason that healthcare, healthcare players have not gone to the cloud until about three four years back, is the whole concern about security so we have invested a ton of resources and money to make sure that our platform is run in the most secure manner, and giving confidence to our clients, and it's an expensive process, right, even though you're on AWS you have to have your own certification that, so that that gives us a huge differentiator, and the last but not least is how we actually approach the whole data management deployment process, which is, our clients think about us in two dimensions, total cost of ownership, but typically 50 to 60% of what it would cost internally, and secondly, time to value, right, you can't have an infinitely long deployment cycle. So we think about those two and actually put our skin in the game and tie our, you know, tie our success to total cost of ownership and time to value. >> Well, just really quick in 1-2 sentences, would love to get your insight on Abacus's defining contribution to the future of cloud scale. >> Go ahead, Sumant. >> So as I see it, I think so part of it is we've got some of our clients who are payers and we've got them along their cloud journey trusting one of their key assets which is data, and letting us drive it. And this is really driven by domain expertise, a good understanding of data governance, and a great understanding of security, I mean, combining all of this, we've actually got our clients sitting and operating on, you know pretty significant cloud infrastructure successfully day in day out. So I think we've done our part as far as, you know helping folks along that journey. >> Yeah and just to close it out I would say it is speed, right, it is speed to deployment, you don't have to wait. You know, we have set up the infrastructure, set up the cloud and the ability to get things up and running is literally we think about it in weeks, and not months. >> Terrific, well, thank you both very much for insights, fantastic to have you on the show, really fascinating to hear about how Abacus is leveraging healthcare data expertise on its platform , to drive robust analytics, and of course, here we were joined by Abacus Insights, Krishna Kottapalli, the chief commercial officer, as well as Sumant Rao, the chief product officer, thank you again very much for your insights on this program and this session of the AWS Startup Showcase. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm. Yes one. >>Hello and welcome. Today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I am pleased to introduce our very next guests. Their names are a lean black S. V. P. Public sector at culebra and Marco Timon are Chief Enterprise Architect at the HQ. D. A. Office of business transformation at the U. S. Army. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich, we're going to be discussing the award for best partner transformation. Best data led migration. Thank you both for joining the program. >>Thank you for having us. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>Well, a lien, why is it important to have a data driven migration? >>You know, migrations to the cloud that are simply just a lift and ship does take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud but not really about how to innovate and leverage what truly the AWS cloud has to offer. Um so a data led migration allows agencies to truly innovate and really kind of almost reimagine how they make their mission objectives and how they leverage the cloud, you know, the government has, let's face it mountains of data, right? I mean every single day there's more and more data and you you can't pick up a trade magazine that doesn't talk about how data is the new currency or data is the new oil. Um, so you know, data to have value has to be usable, right? So you to turn your data into knowledge. You really need to have a robust data intelligence platform which allows agencies to find understand and trust or data data intelligence platform like culebra is the system of record for their data no matter where it may reside. Um no strategy is complete without a strong data, governments platform and security and privacy baked in from the very start, data has to be accessible to the average data. Citizen people need to be able to better collaborate to make data driven decisions. Organizations need to be united by data. This is how a technology and platform like cal Ibra really allows agencies to leverage the data as a strategic asset. >>Terrific. Well, why is it more important than ever to do this than ever before? >>Well, you know, there's just the innovation of technology like Ai and Ml truly to be truly leveraged. Um you know, they need to be able to have trust the data that they're using it. If it if the model is trained with only a small set of data, um it's not going to really produce the trusted results they want. ML models deliver faster results at scale, but the results can be only precise when data feeding them is of high quality. And let's say Gardner just came out with a study that said data quality is the number one obstacle for adoption of A. I. Um when good data and good models find a unified scalable platform with superior collaboration capabilities, you're A I. M. L. Opportunities to truly be leveraged and you can truly leverage data as a strategic asset. >>Terrific. Well marco what does the future look like for the army and data >>so and let me play off. Do you think that Allen said so in terms of the future um obviously data's uh as you mentioned the data volumes are growing enormously so. Part of the future has to do with dealing with those data volumes just from a straight >>technological >>perspective. But as the data volumes grow and as we have to react to things that we need to react to the military, we're not just trying to understand the quantity of data but what it is and not just the quality but the nature of it. So understanding authoritative nous. Being able to identify what data we need to solve certain problems or answer certain questions. I mean a major theme in terms of what we're doing with data governance and having a data governance platform and a data catalog is having immediate knowledge of what data is, where what quality and confidence we have in the data. Sometimes it's more important to have data that's approximately correct than truly correct as quickly as possible, you know. So not all data needs to be of perfect quality at all times you need to understand what's authoritative, what the quality is, how current the information is. So as the data volumes grow and grow and grow. Keeping up with that. Not just from the standpoint of can we scale we know how to scale pretty well in terms of containing data volume but keeping up what it is, the knowledge of the data itself, understand authoritative nous quality, providence etcetera, uh that's a whole enterprise to keep keeping up with and that's what we're doing right now with this, with this project. >>Yeah. And I'd like to also follow up with that, how has leveraging palabras data intelligence platform enabled the army to accelerate its overall mission. >>So there's uh there's sort of interplay between, you know, just having a technology does something doesn't mean you're going to use it to do that something, but often having a place to do work of governance, work of knowledge management can be the precipitating functions or the stimulus to do so. So it's not and if you build it they will come. But if you don't have a place to play ball, you're not going to play ball to kind of run with that metaphor. So having technology that can do these things is a precursor to being able to. But then of course we, as an organization have to do it. So the interplay between making a selection of technology and doing the implementation from a technical perspective that plays off of an urgency, we've made the decision to use a technology, so then that helped accelerate getting roles, responsibilities of our ceo of our missionary data. Officers of data Stewart's the folks that have to be doing the work. Um, when you educate system owners in cataloging and giving a central environment, the information is needed. If you say here's a place to put it, then it's very tangible, especially in the military where work is done in a very uh, concrete task based way. If you have a place to do things, then it's easier to tell people to do things. So the technology is great and works for us. But the choice to to move with the technology has then been a productive interplay with with the doing of the things that need to be done to take advantage of the technology, if that makes >>sense? Well, >>yeah, that's really great to hear. I mean, speaking of taking advantage of the technology, a lien can collaborate, help your other public sector customers take advantage of A. I and machine learning. >>Well, people need to be able to collaborate and take advantage of their most strategic asset data to make those data driven decisions. It gives them the agility to be able to act 2020 was a great lesson around the importance of having your data house in order. Let's face it, the pandemic, we watched organizations that, you know, had a strong data governance framework who had looked at and understood where their data were and they were very able to very quickly assess the situation in react and others were not in such a good situation. So, you know, being able to have that data governance framework, being able to have that data quality, being able to have the right information and being able to trust it allows people to be effective and quickly to react to situations >>fascinating. Um do you have any insight on that marco, would you like to weigh in? >>Well, definitely concur. Um I think our strategy, like I said has been to um use the technology to highlight the need to put governance into place and to focus on increasing data quality the data sources. And I would say this has also helped us uh I mean things that we weren't doing before that have to do with just educating the populace, you know all the way from the folks operators of systems to the most senior executives. Being conversant in the principles that we're talking about this whole discipline is a bit arcane and kind of back office and kind of I. T. But it's actually not. If you don't have the data to make, if you don't know where to get the data to make a decision then you're going to make a decision based on incorrect data and and you know that's pretty important in the military to not get wrong. So definitely concur and we're taking that approach as well. >>I'd like to take it one step further. If if you're speaking the same language then so if you have an understanding what the data governments framework is you can understand what the data is, where it is. Sometimes there's duplicate data and there's duplicate data for a reason, but understanding where it came from and what the linage is associated with, it really gives you the power of being able to shop for data and get the right information at the right time and give it the right perspective. And I think that's the power of what has laid the foundation for the work that the army and MArco has done to really set the stage for what they can do in the future. >>Terrific and marco, if you could comment a little bit about data storage ship and how it can positively dry future outcomes. >>Yeah, So um data stewardship for us um has a lot to do with the functional, so the people that were signing as a senior data Stewart's are the senior functional in the respective organizations, logistics, financial management, training, readiness, etcetera. So the idea of the folks who know really everything about those functional domains, um looking at things from the perspective of the data that's needed to support those functions, logistics, human resources, etcetera. Um and being, you know, call it the the most authoritative subject matter experts. So the governance that we're doing is coming much more from a functional perspective than a technical perspective, so that when a when a system is being built, if we're talking about data migration, if we're talking about somebody driving analytics, the knowledge that were associated with the data comes from the functional. So our data stewardship is less about the technical side and more about making sure that the understanding from functional perspective of what the data is for, what the provenance is, not from a technical perspective, but what it means in terms of sources of information, sources of personnel, sources of munitions et cetera um is available to the folks using it. So they basically know what it is. So the emphasis is on that functional infusion of knowledge into the metadata so that then people who are trying to use that day to have a way of understanding what it really is and what the meaning is. And that's what really what data stewardship means from were actually very good at stewarding data. From a technical perspective. We know how to run systems very well. We know how to scale, We're good at that, but making sure that people know what it is and why and when to use it. Um that's where it's maybe we have some catching up to do, which is what this efforts about. >>Terrific. Well, fantastic insights from you both. I really appreciate you taking the time uh to tell all our viewers about this. That was Eileen Black and Marco Timoner and that, of course, was our section for the AWS Global Public Partner Sector Awards. Thanks for watching. I'm your host, Natalie Early. Thank you. >>Yeah. Mm.

(bright music) >> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube conversation. >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host from the cube Natalie Ehrlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer of PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific, while you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how is it going? >> Well and great. So I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies. In fact, over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward. I'm excited to be a part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience over 20 years in the value leading product, marketing and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained it but just really curious why you made that. >> So, yeah, I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience. I ran the homepage, product page, checkout a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up. So, but after 15 years and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO and the more we talked the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure. And yet I think we're just getting started and we can help out companies and so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time in a waste from their processes. >> Well, this is your first PagerDuty summit. Do tell us, what do you think is the vision for this year's program? >> Yeah, so we'll be launching a lot of new products that I'm excited to talk about and I'll be sharing some of the vision about what I've been thinking about and what I've been working on for my time that I've been here so far. And that starts with our vision, which is really how do we enable more flexibility across our platform. I mentioned our customers are using us for a lot of unique ways beyond DevOps. Things like IOT device management. You know, I heard one yesterday of, you know really doing building management. So the building was having a water leak and instantly it was hooked up to PagerDuty already beforehand. And so within 30 seconds they had alerted and within a minute and a half, they had the water shut off of the building. So way beyond the DevOps use case to even organ transplant delivery, if you can believe that our platform is being used on. So it's pretty exciting to think about all our product already does, but we want to continue to accelerate that. And so building much more flexibility into our product to really capture more of that value and more of the work that's happening across the organization, connect to everyone. >> That's really incredible. We'd love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week. >> Yeah, sure. So we have a few things that we're announcing. One is we announced last year by the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck. And so as part of that, we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty in Rundeck in the form of Runbook action. So this is a, you can think of it as kind of quick kind of micro automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's say running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface. So you don't have to SSH into a box, for example what does all just takes time and effort. And so when you're trying to remediate that issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well and those automation actions, to again before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing service graft which is a new way to model your services and show your services and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate issues is understanding, is that me, or is that one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show that our responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see, is it you or is it maybe some dependency maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and internet outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people. And so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing a much richer insights to again reduce that meantime to resolution. So this whole team, our intelligence team that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that meantime to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow and your meantime to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers which is all about telling you have an incident, is this rare or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing which will again help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for something. >> Terrific. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product offering different from the others. >> Sure. So we go head to head with a lot of our competitors and we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But you know, when we go head to head with these companies we generally win and we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We have one customer, I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent and out of the box, we saw 50% improvement in meantime to acknowledge. So this is how quickly we can pull the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting as we saw a 50% improvement in the meantime to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah. So when you were helping develop this program this week what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> So one of the big areas is really talking about our vision and what is our go forward plan, because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think some of the exciting things you'll hear about at the summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows and enabling flexibility. So if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing. So their whole building is IP enabled. And so they had a contractor drill through a watermain and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds they had the PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance and within a minute and a half the water was shut off and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management. We see even organ transplant delivery using our product. And so we will continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering. So now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams and the engineering teams and the service owners to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations. So that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work. So we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automated way to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated. And this goes back to the one deck acquisition that I mentioned and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customer has really taken advantage of that platform they can really automate a way to toil and automate a lot of redundant work and work that is just busy work and that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed a business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So I saw that, I mean, it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty because I saw the transformation industries are making a digital first, right. And so there was a lot of teams a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also flourished you'd take, you know companies like Instacart and DoorDash and Zoom, you know had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty even with the pandemic and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year. And that's, I think it's pretty exciting. And it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming table stakes and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that we need to do more on digital platform. And now it's like, you have to, you know focus on a digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it. I think we're really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market and look forward to a bright future in our platform. Really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific, well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCube. Thank you for watching. (bright music)

(introductory upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm Natalie Ehrlich your host for theCube. Today we're going to speak with an AI enhancing data startup that recently raised $75 million in C-series funding. Now we're joined by the chief marketing officer of Exosporium Ajay Khanna. [Natalie] Thank you so much for being with us today. >> Thank you so much, Natalie. Thanks for inviting me in. >> So tell us what is Exosporium. >> Sure. So Exosporium, we provide external data platform and this platform helps you discover thousands of relevant data signals external data signals that you can then use in your analytics or in your machine learning models and all. So what we are offering here is this a unique end to end platform where you can have access to thousands and thousands of data signals. And then you can take those signals and match it with your internal data. You can enrich your internal data, do the transformations and then build pipelines that business analysts can use and take it to their, their tool of their choice. Or what data scientists can do is take that enriched data and improve their ML algorithms. So that is the end-to-end platform that we provide. >> That's really fascinating. So you're constantly improving on the data and providing better analytics. Can you tell us how specifically are you helping your customers? >> Ajay: Absolutely. So as we kind of jump into the customer use cases let's first discuss this challenge with the external data, right? So when we refer to external data with the increase in AI and ML adoption there has been increase in interest in external data like getting the company data from external sources whether it is formal graphics, technographic data, you want socio-economic data, you may want like foot traffic data. You may want to include like data about website visits and, and the tons of data out there website interaction that are not within your organization but you want to get that data to get better understanding of your customers. But the challenge is that getting external data is really hard. So, and what I mean by that is that it is hard to access. First of all you don't even know how many data sources out there. It could be thousands of data sources. If you just go to data.gov there are like 250,000 data sources out there. So that is the first problem to tackle is where do I get the data from? And how do I get? And even before that what is the data that is going to impact my business? So having that issue of like data access is, is big problem. Second thing is that once you know which data you want to get it is very hard to use within your systems, or it is hard to kind of like you're going to just directly use the data into your analytics or into machine learning. You have to clean it up. You have to evaluate the quality of the data. You have to do the proper alignment and matching and integration and so on and so forth. And by various estimates like data scientists and analysts spend 80% of their time doing just that job. And the third is around the, compliance issues. We want to make sure that data is compliant with the GDPR or CCPA kind of regulations. So what we are helping our customers do is have an easy access to all these relevant data sources and where the system can recommend that, okay this is the relevant data which is going to make an impact to your business. This is the relevant data, which is going to make your ML and analytics better, and then match that data with your internal data sources automatically so that you can focus on the business value that you want to generate and take that data... Once you understand the impact of the data take it to your actual business use cases of the models that you have created. So our customers are in like various kind of industries, right? They are in CPG, they are in retail. Our customers are coming from various FinTech organizations like payments and lending and insurance. And they are using us for like various use cases. Like whether it is lead gen or whether it is a lead enrichment fraud and risk kind of use cases understanding the loan risk loan application risks and the by having access to these additional data sources that helps them make better decisions about their customers, about their business. >> Natalie: Fascinating. Well tell us, how do you see this market evolving? >> Market is, is, is really dynamic. And we have seen this whole market changing the whole data market, kind of like changing in, last year and a half with the pandemic coming in, right? So the models that we were working on for credit risk for evaluating loan applications were not working anymore. The data that we had was not really usable to make those decisions. So many of our customers, they had to depend on external data to make those credit decisions, right? I mean, if I have to approve an application for a small or a medium business restaurant and the restaurant is closed for last to five months how do I do that? So they were looking for additional data sources like foot traffic data about the Yelp reviews or about the ratings around how they're signed up for various delivery services and use those alternative sources to make those decisions. I think with these kind of like, as the situation come in, companies will become much more agile to react to these kinds of either data losses or changes in the data that they need. And some of the things that we also see right now is where Google is stopping the third party cookies with Chrome, right? Or Apple saying that with iOS 14, there are new transparency requirements that you have to, you have to abide by. So if those signals are gone, then how do companies better understand their customers? How do the companies will redesign their information, that they are delivering to their customers or the products that they are presenting to their customers. So having that agility will be determining the competitive advantage for these companies. And once these data signal losses happen, you cannot start evaluating the alternate data at that point in time because it takes like six, seven months to going to find the data sources and negotiate for those data sources bring them on board and then integrate them to kind of start using them. Then it is already too late. So what we are seeing is that companies will be much more agile and looking for a lot of external data sources to bring them in seamlessly and be able to make their business decision by incorporating those data sources as well. So, so that's how we are seeing that the use of external data is going to, going to increase with the time. >> Fascinating. And also that you mentioned the pandemic and the company added new data signals to help organizations understand risk. >> Ajay: Absolutely. Can you explain how that actually works to our audience? >> Ajay: Sure. So let's take a couple of scenarios, right? So for example, there is a lending organization and then they are looking for approving a loan application for a small medium business. And they had like three years back revenues or three years previous employee data or their tax returns and everything. But that is irrelevant right now because the business is not running. So how can they use alternate data signals to make that loan decisions or credit decisions? So they will be relying on some of like foot traffic data. They may rely on ratings and reviews. They may rely on, on other delivery services subscription that they have subscribed to and helping their customers, and then use those additional signals to make those credit decisions. This is like one situation. Another situation that we came across was in, CPG where food and beverages, sellers, whether those are like convenience stores or whether those are like small restaurants they're going in and out of business. And now when they're coming back in or the new restaurants or convenience stores are emerging, how do this food and beverage provider find those new customers? What are the additional signals they can use to go to that customer right away and say that, okay we are there with you. We are here to kind of like support your business. What are the additional things that you need to kind of like bring everything back to business? What are the additional shelf spaces available to place your product out there? Because now you don't have data, there's a data lag now. So you need to kind of like provide that additional data to your field operations so that they can find the right businesses. They can find they can prioritize them and they can see that, okay these are the businesses which are going to kind of like come back and we need to proactively go and market to them. So that once we are out of this COVID which hopefully we are now and how to support the small businesses that come come right back on track. >> Very, very interesting. And recently your company Exosporium closed $75 million in seed series funding and not even a year before another $31 million. So what do you attribute to that success? >> I think it is, it is the whole idea of a increase in adoption of AI and ML that we are seeing in the last few years. And as this adoption increases there is an increase in appetite for external data. So companies do realize that just having ML algorithms is not enough. That is not a competitive advantage. Everybody has the same algorithms. The advantage is the data that you have, advantages the domain expertise that you have, and then having the wide variety of data that is really important. So what we are seeing is that there is an increase in trust and getting access to these external data sources as a competitive advantage and then having that access easily and being able to easily use that external data into your analytics, into your ML models. That's where the, the real kind of advantages where you can actually bring your big ideas to life and execute on those ideas, but are coming from your business analysts and from your data scientists. So I think that increased interest is what we are seeing here. >> Well, that's a fascinating point on how data is really the central point of analytics. Really appreciate your fantastic insights on this program for this conversation on theCUBE. I'm Natalie Ehrlich your host. And that was Ajay Khanna the chief marketing officer of Exosporium. Thanks so much for joining us today. 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>> Wait. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube. We're live on a special presentation of BMC Day atop of sixty State Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Beautiful view of Boston Harbor. Evelyn Ehrlich is here. She's the vice president and research director for service delivery at Force that we're going to talk about job control, language and cobalt. No, I'm just kidding. We're talking about service delivery. Who'd Evelyn? Yes. So you have a really deep background in it, And I know what J C l stands for, So I had to make that joke. So anyway, uh, welcome to the cubes. Great to see you gave a fantastic presentation today. Who doesn't need better service delivery? It's an imperative for the digital transformation. So, again, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Forrester, what your area is, and I want to get into your presentation today. >> Sure. So service delivery. Basically, when the application development team is ready to hand us something, whatever that issa Web service and application a service, we actually make sure that that gets to the work force or to the customer. So anything from Police Management Service Management, the front end relative to the service desk. Tell them anything around management after a performance of the applications operations. Anything like that is all about service delivery. >> And they were two. Two pieces of your talk really struck out to me on Dino. No George for a long time. So two things to majorities that you don't like to use one is users, right end users use it, and then the other really was. So talk about it. Why those terms don't make sense in this digital economy. And what does make sense? >> Yeah, so your users, it almost seems like to me, it is something where people are putting folks into a box that they are that they can like addicts. You know, user. Like I said, in a camp in the drug industry, we have users because they're addicts way have to somehow keep them at bay. We have to somehow keep them low and our engagement with them. It's no, it's not going to be enjoyable. It's not going to be fun, and it's not going to be actually effective. Unfortunately, these users today those are our workforce. There's our employees There's our partners and customers. They have other places to go. They don't need us and technology. So if we don't shift that thinking into that, their customers, so that we can actually enable them, we're might be able to lose our jobs. Because there's outsourcers service providers to workplace services, for example, as many companies out there who provide the service desk who provide of VD I who provide the services cheaper, faster and better. But what we have been lost or what if that's gonna happen? We are losing the understanding of the business for losing the connection to the business, and is that that could be a strategic conversation right? There should be a strategic conversations, not justa cost conversation. And when we think about user, it's all about cost. If you think about customer, its value and relevancy, >> okay, And of course, that leads to not its business. There's no such thing as a project. >> No, there isn't because anything we do if we think of information technology is anything almost like in the back room. It's something which is hidden in a data center somewhere in a storage or a server or in a device and it doesn't really add any value. >> Boiler, the boy, the room >> Exactly and way have done that. We have massaged it, what with whatever way measured the heck out of it. We measure meantime to repair. Well, who cares? It's time to business impact. This what we need to think about. So if we start thinking about customers to empty, TR becomes time to business impact. We're now thinking outside in and the same is true with I t. If we just use it for technology sake to Dr Information, we're not connected if the business, because it is about business technology, is dear to win, retain and sustain our customers. If we don't do that, we become borders. We become the, you know, the companies who all have not focused on the winning technology to make them successful. >> You had a really nice graph, simple sort of digital failing digital masters, and I were in between talked a little about things like I Till and Deb ops, and they feel sometimes like counter counter to each other. Once one's fast one feels home. As you talk to customer, you talk to customers. What can they expect? How long might these transformations take? Or what of the one of those key stepping stones you talked about? It being a journey? >> How do you >> will think about all this change? >> But that that's a good question. It's a very difficult question to have an answer to, and I think it has to. It has to be a little bit more compartmentalized. We have to start thinking a little bit more in smaller boxes, off influences or or areas where we can make some progress. So let's take, for example, Dev Ops and Vital and connect the process release, which is an I told process into this notion. If we combine Deaf ops and Tyto release, we're starting to see that the police management process. It's now a process which is done very agile very much. There is a lot more things behind that process and a lot more collaboration between a D and D and I, you know, to make the process of faster process. So we're now married, I told release management with the journey of Death, Bob's as we're starting to see release cycles off one day. Lookit, lookit Amazon. What they do I mean again, Amazon is a very extreme. Not everybody needs a police processes Amazon has, because it's just not that not every pieces is in the Amazon business. Maybe in ten years, who knows? Maybe in five, but those kinds of things that marriage happens through, more off for design thinking. And I think that's the practical way. Let's not adopt a Iittle blandly and say, All right, we're going to just redo our entire twenty six processes. Let's look at where is the problem? What, where? Where's the pain? What is the ninety day journey to solve that pain? Where's the six months? Nine months, twelve months, twenty four months? And if twenty four months is too far out, which I believe it's staying a twelve month road map and start adjusting it that way and measure it, measure where you are. Measure where you want to go and prove that you have done to Delta. Because if I don't measure that, I won't get funding for support, right? I think that's key. >> Devlin. You talked about the, you know, pray or a predator, right? That's good of a common theme that you hear conferences like this isn't a zero sum game, is is the taxi drivers. You know, the taxi companies screwed is, you know, the hotels in big trouble. I mean, Ken, cos you know who are sort of caught flat footed transform and begin to grow again. Talk about that zero sum game nous. >> Yeah, I think I think there is. There is hope. So I hope it's what dies last week saying right. But there is hope, hope if customers of organizations he's enterprise to see that there's a challenger out there. And if they don't necessarily stand up to fight that challenges start innovating in either copying or leveraging or ten. Gently do something else. Let me give you an example. When about two years we had a two years ago with an event in London and stuff I got Square was completely blocked off by the taxi drivers because uber was there were striking against uber or they were going on. It wasn't really a real strike was in London. It's a little bit of a challenge with unions, but anyway, instead, off going on a strike, why did they not embrace whatever they needed to and example is in the cab At that time, you could not use American Express or discover credit card uber. I never have tipple any money out of my pocket because that's a convenience. It's easy. It's enjoyable. >> Love it, >> We love it. It's simple. So why don't these other companies this cos the taxi cannot? Why don't the equip that technology in such a way? They can at least start adopting some of those innovations to make it a even part right. Some of the other things, maybe they will never get there, because there whatever limitations are there. And so that's what that's what I think needs to happen. These innovators will challenge all these other companies and those who want to stay alive. I mean, they want to because they have for street is forcing them to stay alive. They are the ones who will hopefully create a differentiation because of that >> essay, really invention required. It's applying technology and process that's well established. >> Thinking outside in thinking of you and him and me as >> customers, it becomes, you know, who just does the incumbent get innovation before the the challenger gets distribution? Exactly. You know, Huber, lots of cars. I don't have to buy them, but somebody like Tesla isn't necessarily disrupting forward because they don't have the men. They can't distribute it faster than you know. It depends where you are in the distribution versus innovation. So it's in the brief time. We have love to talk about the landscape. So and that's particularly the transformation of beings. BMC Public Company to private They were under a lot of fire, you know, kind of flattish revenues. Wall Street pound. You got companies like service now picking away at the established SM players. We're talking off camera, saying that's begun to change. Give us the narrative on that that sequence and where we are today. Yeah, we're going. >> Yeah, so if you go back, maybe me way back seven years ago or so you know, it started service now they had a fairly easy game because BMC with a very old platform, it wasn't really it wasn't. There was no fight. Um, and I think they were the enterprises. We're ready for something new, and it is always some new vendor out there is a new shiny object, and I have teenagers, so they always spent the next latest iPhone or whatever. I would >> sort of wave >> so So. And and it kept going in the other vendors into space hp, cia, IBM really had no challenge had no, no, didn't give service now a challenge either because the SAS cloud, the adoption of the cloud in this space was absolutely important. And service now was the first one to be on the cloud. BMC was not really doing much with remedy force at the time. Itis them on demand was in an A S P model. Not really an itis, um, and so service not just took names and numbers and that just grew and grew and steamrolled. Really? All of them and customers just were like, Oh, my God, this is easy. I loved it. Looks it loves it looks beautiful. It's exciting >> over for the >> same thing that innovation, right, That challenge, they served the customers. Then suddenly what happened is service now grew faster than native. You experienced some growing pains Customer saying my account rep. I haven't seen him for a while. They changed the pricing model a little bit too started to blow up their solution. And now board nebula, which is the ninety operations management solution der extending into financials and they're bolstering themselves into more of an enterprise solution, which is where BMC already has been. But they lost the connection to the customer. BMC did not love the customers at that time. Now, through some executive changes to really starting to realize that the install base they need to hug them, they're back in the game >> and watching >> service now. And they're going private. As you were asking the question earlier, try about giving them the funding to invest in R and D. >> It's so necessary if I want to give me your take on icy service now. Is someone on the collision course with sales Force? In a way, where does BMC go for to expand their their tam and to grow? >> Yeah, I said, I think so. So on the first comment Sales force and service. Now, absolutely now the CEO of service now does not think that sales force is his target off competition. I think it has to. He has to, because it is about business applications, everything. It's everything exactly So sales force and service now in I don't know. Is that the year you know, wherever Chris >> No, no, no, >> no. But they will there will collapse. Deborah Crash or you'LL see a fight. I think BMC should stay and really extend in this digital performance management in this operational management and really make it intelligent, intelligent decisions for operation for operations to become automated. To have a staff of eighty eight PM solution the application dependency mapping solution happening to be one of the best, really one of the best in the market. And customers love it. Tying that into two side intelligence, giving them the ability to understand before it happens not when it happens or after and then drive intelligence into different organizations to cmo the CEO, the CFO. Because that's what basis technology is all about. It's not about the journey anymore. They have that capability with products where service now does not have that >> great insight from a sharp analyst. Evan are like Evelyn Evelyn Ehrlich. Thanks very much for coming on the Cube. Forced to research wicked, we find more about the research that you do force the dotcom, obviously, but anything new for you, any upcoming events that we should know about where people should watch >> you go into Crystal Rica, Nicaragua >> mochi ice all right. We'LL leave you alone for a while, right, Evelyn? Great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. I keep right there, buddy. We're back with our next guest Is the Q ber live from BMC Day in Boston right back.