(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We're now joined by our guest Jonathan Rende. He is the SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program today. >> That's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Natalie. Well, Summit 2021, an exciting time for PagerDuty. What are you looking forward to most? >> Well, finally, I'm looking forward to at some point, hopefully, not having to wear my mask in public anymore. I know that's the right thing to do still, and I am doing that, but it seems like things are starting to get back to normal. And because of that, what we're finding is a lot of our customers and clients business practices, especially in certain industries like the hospitality and entertainment, they're coming back as well, and to pre-COVID levels and their same level of usage and everything obviously, that got a little bit dampened during the pandemic. So I'm just looking forward to businesses normal and probably the biggest is talking to my colleagues in three dimensions in person versus two dimensions on a zoom. >> Right. Right. And yeah, I mean, it seems like, unfortunately, not this time we get to see each other in person. But looks like customer service is a big focus at the Summit. Why is it so important right now for companies to provide a seamless customer and digital experience? >> Well, we've learned a lot in the last 12 to 15 months. And one of those is that our historical audiences, developers, ITOps folks who have been on the front lines. And for the, a big part they've been distributed already. Customer service teams have always been on the front lines whenever there's a customer experience problem. And they're no longer working in the office across cubes being able to communicate they're remote now as well. And so with a couple of really interesting things have happened. One with the rise of digital services, the use, the demand on them, heck my own parents are now ordering groceries online, which they never did before. And with the increase with many of our clients and customers, the customer success organizations have to deliver a whole new level of customer experience for that digital experience versus just the brick and mortar in on-premise type of experience. And it's created a whole new set of needs around collaboration, communication. And we've seen that customer service teams are a critical component working with development and IT part of kind of like a three-legged stool that has to work together really well for great customer experience now in the digital age. >> Well, you mentioned this big push for digital and especially in light of the pandemic and what other ways did the pandemic impact customer service? >> So first, like maybe building on what I was just saying, just the collaboration aspect. Most customer service teams have historically that I get an opportunity to work with, they have to work for better, for worse in reactive mode. Cases get opened up, something isn't working, a customer is unhappy, there's a customer satisfaction issue, and so they're pulled in. And those individuals, they're lacking all the contexts that they need, and oftentimes, they're in a world where they have to pull in other individuals. And I think gone are the days where they can pass that customer case off to just another individual and then another individual and another individual, that's incredibly frustrating from a customer business experience. And so this notion of eliminating hand-offs and empowering that individual to be able to reach out to the people that they need and handle that case kind of from beginning to end and communicate directly bidirectionally with engineering teams when they're fixing an issue with electronic shopping cart, digital shopping cart, that's critical. They need to have that flow of information because they're a member of the team so that they can proactively communicate with their clients and give them updates of what's happening. >> Well, last year you announced a customer service solution. What are you announcing this week? >> So a couple of big things, we've recently just made available kind of like a complete in context experience or PagerDuty for customer service app for Zendesk and upcoming with Salesforce. It's really all about an agent, not having to switch out of their help desk, their contact center environment. They can get all the information they need in their world without having to move to other applications. They can instantly know if there's a really important issue in the back office with the systems, with the digital services that they need to be aware of. So we have a whole new set of PagerDuty for customer service products that we've made available. And then also a couple of different options for our customers and how they can consume that. We have a professional version and a business version. And really the difference between the two is if you want your customer service agents to really have full case ownership, to be able to be empowered to do everything, pull in the folks that they want to, they can do that in the business version of our package. >> How and why should DevOps and customer service work together in your opinion? >> So historically, I've always felt that in many times engineering teams will identify because of monitoring and many other technologies that they're using that they'll understand, that there is something that could be customer impacting and they'll work that diligently. Unfortunately, it's been more of a, kind of a stakeholder relationship only with customer service. Yes, they need to know about it. But what we've really worked towards is making sure that customer service is not just the stakeholder, they're an active participant because issues can be identified from customers on the front end or proactively by items issues that are identified in the back office. So being able to be right in the center of the customer world is super, super critical. >> And when you look at the next year and even the next five years, what are you most excited about? >> I think it's really empowering helping our customers, our community, customer service agents on the frontline do more, have more power at their fingertips. I know over and over again, I think, greater value is delivered to customers through those individuals that are contacted not always in the best of times. And there's some amazing statistics out there sets that it takes 10 good experiences to make up for a bad experience if you're a customer. So there's a big impact to this or if there's a particular pricing or product issue that a customer service issue is way more important, way more impactful, will lead somebody to use an alternative service versus the product itself or the pricing of it. It's the service element that's most important. Given all of that, when somebody does in their time of need have a customer service issue, when they do have a positive experience, three quarters of the time, they're super open to sharing that with others. And so if I look at some of that, again, what I'm excited about looking forward is how can we empower those agents to be able from cradle to grave. Take a case that comes in proactively communicate with their customers to provide a great experience to address some of those statistics. And we're really focused on automating that process. It's another truism is that, well, every business wants their customers to exponentially grow. You can't grow your customer service organization exponentially. You can't hire an infinite number of bodies. And so technology plays a really important role in that. And having PagerDuty for customer service as an integrated part of your Salesforce or your Zendesk or your fresh desk implementation will help those teams scale a little quality of life for those agents is important. And we believe that we can really help in that area. Minimize stress disruptions and help them provide better service to their customers. >> Yeah. Well, we touched on a lot of areas in terms of customer service, but another key feature of your role at PagerDuty is in product. So if you could outline some of the key products at PagerDuty and perhaps some insight on what you have in the pipeline. >> Yeah. So outside of just customer service, one of the huge parts of our community are those in ITOps and DevOps. And one of the areas of responsibility I have working with the team that I'm super proud of is what we're doing with what was recently announced last September, our Rundeck acquisitions. So we're announcing something called Runbook actions as a part of the PagerDuty platform. Think of it as a very simple, safe level of automation that every DevOps team can use to better address issues and kind of eliminate a lot of the toil and manual activities when they get pulled into a major event. And so we're releasing this new add on product, very excited about it. It's the first introduction of our Rundeck technology, new as a part of the integrated within the PagerDuty platform. So the reception we've gotten so far in early days has been tremendous and people are really excited, again, to eliminate toil, eliminate a lot of manual activities, allow them to fix items faster when seconds really matter. >> Terrific. Well, really, really appreciate your insights, Jonathan Rende, SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thanks very much for your insights. >> Thank you, Natalie. >> Terrific. And that's all for this session of the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thank you for watching.

(upbeat digital music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for the cube Natalie Erlich. We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO of Wiley. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Great to be here, Natalie. Thanks for having me. >> Terrific, well tell us about Wiley. What do you do? >> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company. Wiley drives the world forward with research in education through publishing and services. We help researchers, professionals, students, universities, and corporations to achieve their goals. Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company, but really now more than ever, we're a tech enabled research and education company, and we have three major areas of impact, research, education, and professional learning. >> Well, obviously the pandemic, the big topic of the last year and hopefully new topics as we move forward, but how has education community evolved during this pandemic? And what's the next step for hybrid learning? >> Yeah, it's been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic, during a time when these things have never really been more important. Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes and this is nowhere more evident than in the education space. For a long time we'd been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that's been a long, long process and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen the pandemic has really accelerated that. And we've seen huge increases in usage on our online education platforms, which we've been pushing towards for years. So in many ways it's really enabled us to move forward in a way that that nothing else could have. >> Yeah, I mean, that's really incredible, you mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, especially in education. What do you see as the next phase now that this has really developed over the last year? >> So as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level and at a business level, we just talked a little bit about that. Education is moving more and more to on online and hybrid models. Research, we're moving more and more to open access models where everybody has access to research. Again with the pandemic this has been critical to make sure that we're getting out good medical research and that it's available as widely as possible. But we're also transforming internally. I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now. And when I started, so this is actually prior to COVID, our CEO Brian Napack, said that we're not in a single market that's not going through major disruption, and he's right. And it's so exciting to be part of this company. And on the internally, we have to make sure we're going through a transformation so that we can deliver the products and services that the world's demanding at the speed at which they're demanding them. And so we're also going through transformations from Agile to cloud to DevOps, and it makes it a really exciting place to be as a technologist and also someone who is passionate about education and research. >> Yeah, well terrific. Why did you choose PagerDuty? >> I think there are a few key elements that PagerDuty really enables for us. So as I mentioned, we're going through this DevOps transformation and some of the core competencies, the core principles of DevOps are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty. I think a couple of key ones that I love about it are the ability to empower the users rather than having a centralized service desk that is looking up things and paging out and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people. We can put that power, that control in the hands of what we at Wiley call the functional delivery teams. These teams that are fully responsible for their staff, fully responsible for their research and education solutions that they're delivering. And we using PagerDuty can put that responsibility and empower those teams to take full ownership of their on call schedules, their team management, without having to go through several hops to get there. And I think this also drives another key element, which is that accountability. Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams to take responsibility for their applications and services. We don't work in an environment where we say, "Oh, that's a operations team's responsibility," we're working in a DevOps model. And we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility if we don't provide them the tools to be in control of their own fate. And I really think that PagerDuty is a key element of that tool chain, which enables them to manage their full stack and thereby drives that accountability and ownership. >> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us some of the challenges you were trying to solve by implementing PagerDuty. >> There were several, I think it speaks to some of the underlying principles of DevOps and Agile that we were trying to enable. More than anything it's really about driving better, meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive through faster escalation directly to the right person. And breaking out of this tiered service model where it has to go through a tier one, a tier two, tier three, before the technical issue gets to the right person. Now with PagerDuty, the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it and they're there, they're able to solve it. And we have made huge strides in reducing our meantime to resolution. I have never seen improvements like I've seen in the past year and a half in Wiley using PagerDuty as a part of our overall tool chain. >> Yeah, I mean, if you have a concrete example that something really stood out, we'd love to hear that. >> So I'm not going to go bring up the charts and data to show you, but I'll tell ya the concrete data is there. We track how long it takes us obviously to resolve problems when they occur, and I was blown away by what this team has achieved. And I don't want to take away credit from all the work they've done either. Tools alone doesn't solve any problem, we have amazing technology team, an amazing team willing to take that responsibility. But if you look at the numbers over the past year and a half, in terms of the reduction in time to resolve across every team, it's truly impressive. >> And what are you looking forward to at the summit? >> Well, I'm always excited to hear about what's going on at PagerDuty. I think there are a couple key items or key sessions that I'm excited to see. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the future of work, the views from the C-suite. I think PagerDuty always has a really unique and fresh perspective, and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely as we look to what's coming next in hybrid world. I'm also excited about the what's next in DevOps presentation. Some great folks speaking there. And I think DevOps is maturing and we can... (laughing) for a longest time we were asking, What is DevOps? Can we define it? Can we define it in a consistent way? And I think we're at a point now where we can, and we know the components. So it's a really good time to ask what's next in DevOps. And finally, I'm just excited to hear what's next for PagerDuty. It's been a great tool for us and I'm excited to see where the company is going next. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, let's shift gears a bit. Staying on point with digital transformation. How is that in line with some of the broader organizational goals that Wiley has, such as bridging the higher education gap? >> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned, all our businesses are changing dramatically and we're not going to be able to meet the rapidly changing technology demands, unless we have technologies and teams that can rapidly change with those demands and rapidly expand with those demands. So whether that's auto scaling, whether that's more resilient systems, we need to be there. And I'll also mention the key element that security plays here, because the other change we're seeing is a huge increase in the threat landscape and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing. And so this focus on security is another important part of the transformation and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps is something that's key for Wiley. It's critical because security for Wiley is security for our customers. And one of the things that we offer is the promise of reliable and secure services. >> And what are some of the innovative ways that Wiley is now delivering content solutions? >> So we're always trying to push the envelope of education in many different ways. I think that there's huge possibilities with AI, machine learning, adaptive learning to really push that envelope to really... I mean, one of the things that I love about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved with education and research. Like my job gets to be helping people learn better, helping people learn quicker. If we can, through technology, make learning easier, let's make it quicker to learn and also look at reducing the cost and availability of that education, we can make an impact around the world, and that's an exciting thing to be part of. >> So in terms of digital transformation, obviously that's a priority for you, security, tell us more about specifically the main points that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021. >> There's a few key key elements that we're focusing on as we go into... It's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year, We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year. But that kicks off or just kicked off last month. So we've spent the last four months doing a lot of planning for this year. For me, I think some of the keys are going to be driving agility through simplicity. And one of the places that comes into play is through our tool chain. Making sure we don't have every tool, but we've got the right tools to connect our users, and that, that tool chain is very much interconnected so that we can hit on another key concept for me, which is the enablement of our business. We enable our developers, we enable content editors, we enabled all of Wiley to do the best job they can through technology. We want technology to be seamless for our users. And these three concepts, seamless, enablement and simplicity, agility through simplicity, really work hand in hand to enable our users, our community, to develop, to build at the speed that business demands. >> And obviously, security a really key feature of your role. We don't often think about security going hand in hand with education, but for some of our viewers that are not directly involved in education, why is that so critical? >> Well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today can grasp the criticality of security. Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats, new ransomware attacks. And Wiley is now more than ever a technology enabled and driven business. When we talk about education, we're talking about technology. When we talk about research, we talk about technology and the underpinning systems and the threats that are out there, impact education and research technology just as they do any other research in education or any other line of business. We have amazing security team at Wiley. I am really blown away by the work this team does every day, and I'm excited about where it's going to. It's so critical for us because we need to provide... If we talk about enabling education for more people in a more effective way around the world, part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure and safe and confident. So we are investing heavily in security and going beyond just spending more money, but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach, focusing on application security, focusing on making security, not just a team, but part of what everybody in Wiley does because technology can't just be a set of tools and it can't be one team that sits in a dark corner of the environment and tells people what they can't do. Security has to be core to everything we do. And so when we're talking about people building new products and services, we have to make sure that they're part of the security solution. When we talk about our finance users, they need to be part of our security solution. Only by making sure that security is integral to everything we do, are we truly going to be able to make sure we have a secure set of products and services for our users. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and thoughts on PagerDuty Summit as well as digital transformation at Wiley. Really appreciate it, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO at Wiley. Thank you for joining the program. >> Great, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. >> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty Summit coverage by "theCube." I'm your host Natalie Elrich. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit, I'm your host from theCUBE Natalie Erlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty, thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific. Well, you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how's it going? >> It's going 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, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience, over 20 years in the Valley leading product, marketing, and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained a bit, but just really curious why you made that? >> Sure, 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 in so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time and waste from their processes. Well, this is your first PagerDuty Summit, I would 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, probably the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck; and so as part of that we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty and Rundeck in the form of Runbook actions. So this is a, you could 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 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, which is all just takes time and effort, and so when you're trying to remediate an 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 Craft, which is a new way to model your services and to 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 an issue is understanding is it me, or is it one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show the 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 incident 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 much richer insights, to again, reduce that mean time to resolution. So this whole team, our Event Intelligence team, that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that mean time to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow, and your mean time 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 if 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 Summit. >> Perfect. 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 that they're offering different from the others? >> Sure. So, we go head-to-head with a lot of competitors, and we, 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 had one customer I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent, and out of the box, we saw a 50% improvement in mean time to acknowledge, so this is how quickly we can pull in the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting, is we saw a 50% improvement in the mean time 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? >> Yeah, 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, you know, some of the exciting things you'll hear about at 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 water main, and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds, 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 want to 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 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, and 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 automate away to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated, and this goes back to the Rundeck 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 customers really take advantage of that platform they can really automate away to toil, and automate a lot of redundant work, and work that is just busy work 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 up 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, and it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty, because I saw the transformation industries are making to digital first. Right? And so there was a lot of teams, a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also, florists, you'd take 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, you know, table stakes, and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that oh, we need to do more on digital platform, and now it's like, you have to, you know, focus on your 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, you know, really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market, and look forward to a bright future, and 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. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. And now we're joined by the CEO and Chairperson for PagerDuty. We're joined by Jennifer Tejada. Thanks very much for joining the program. >> Hi, Natalie. It's great to have you, and "theCUBE", with us again. >> Fantastic, well, let's do an overview of what PagerDuty does and how it's helping its customers. >> Well, PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform. And what that means is that we use software to detect real-time issues and events from the complex ecosystem of technology that's really hard for humans to manage. We then intelligently orchestrate that work to the right teams, the right people with the right expertise, in the moments that matter the most to your business. And that's become especially important as the whole world has moved to a digital-first world. I mean, pretty much everything we do we can experience on demand today but that's only made possible through the complex technology and infrastructure that's managed and operated by responders all over the world. And PagerDuty's digital operation solution communicates issues in real time to ensure a perfect customer experience every time. >> Terrific, and if you could go through some of the key features like on-call management, incident response, event intelligence and analytics, it would be really great. >> Sure, so, our heritage started with automation of the on-call situation for engineers. So, back in the day, many organizations had software engineers building apps, platforms, infrastructure, but then they would throw that over the wall to an ops team who would manage it in production. That led to poor code quality, it led to lots of challenges when people would release software in the middle of the night on a Saturday, et cetera. And it meant that it took a very long time for companies to manually get a problem into the hands of the right person to solve it. We automated all of that using an API-based ecosystem that connects to over 460 of the most popular applications, observability stacks, monitoring systems, security applications, ticketing environments, cloud environments, et cetera. And so, all of that is now seamless. What that data enabled us to do was build an event management solution, which we call Event Intelligence, which now uses AI and machine learning to help responders understand the nature of all the different events coming at them. So, for instance, instead of seeing 100 events coming at you from 16 different monitoring environments in your infrastructure, PagerDuty will use AI to know that of those 175 are part of the same incident. They're events conspiring to becoming a business-impacting incident. And that allows our teams to get ahead of things, to become proactive versus reactive. We've also built analytics into our solution which helps our customers benchmark themselves and their operational efficiency versus their peer group. It helps them measure the health of their teams and understand which services are causing them the biggest challenges and the most expense whether that's labor expense or customer impact. And most recently, we've been really thrilled with our acquisition of Rundeck which helps us automate the remediation of events which now means that PagerDuty can automate incident management and incident response, both upstream, in terms of identifying events as they flow in, and also downstream, safe self-healing of infrastructure, application and platform environments to get things back to the way they need to work in order to serve end customers and serve employees across an enterprise. We're really excited as our vision has expanded to become the ubiquitous platform, the de facto platform, for real-time work. And what we've seen over the years is our customers coming up with very imaginative ways to use our software to solve real-time unstructured, unpredictable work across the company. That can be legal teams managing across different geographies and business units to close contracts at the end of the quarter, it could be financial services companies that are managing their physical security as well as their digital security through PagerDuty where time really, really matters if you have a data breach or a potential physical security incident. It could be customer service where customer service and support teams are working very closely with engineering teams to identify issues that are causing customers problems and to manage those issues collaboratively so that the customer experience is protected. So, just some examples of how PagerDuty is getting leveraged. And we're really excited to talk about some new innovations at Summit. >> Terrific, well, you really have your thumb on the pulse of corporate America, and as you know, last year, we talked about the pandemic and now we're looking at going back to the workforce, we're looking at the future of work. What does that look like for you? >> Well, the future of work is here and one thing is for sure, it has changed permanently. I think we all learned from the past year that remote work can provide a lot of flexibility and can level the playing field for people all around the world. It means you can access talent from different geographies. It means you can have a different level of work-life balance, but it also comes with its own set of complications. And one of the reasons we pulled Summit earlier from September into June was we really wanted to be a part of this kind of grand moment of reopening that we're seeing around the world. And that means that every organization that we're working with is redesigning their future. But that didn't start today, that started several months ago, as companies learned from their remote work experience, learned from their on-demand experience in dealing with their own customers. And it took some of those innovations and brought them forward into kind of the new design for the way teams will work, the way brands interact with their customers. And at Summit, you're going to hear us discuss why now is the moment, now is the moment to harness your digital acceleration because that's really the way that business is getting done. I mean, frankly, every business is now a software business and all business is now digital business. And PagerDuty has proven itself as the essential infrastructure on which all companies, all brands, can build their success. And as we widen our aperture we think about building the platform for not just today's challenges, but tomorrow's challenges. So, at Summit, you'll hear us talking a lot about resilience and how your entire organization and your brand will be judged on your ability to stand up a resilient business, a resilient brand experience for your customers. Today, uptime is money and resilience and reliability are the currency of tomorrow. We're entering into this era where autonomy is everything when it comes to work. I mean, employees, and generally humans, do not want to be stuck managing mundane tasks. And the hybrid work arrangements that we're anticipating mean that PagerDuty's platform will become even more essential for customers because hybrid work drives more complexity. It means your teams are distributed, they maybe distributed across regions, co-located, remote at home, in different time zones. And when something's going down that's really causing a problem in your business, you need to orchestrate work across the right people that can make a difference in that moment. Autonomy and flexibility, frankly, is what people expect from work. And they also expect to engage with apps and platforms that are easy to use, that are intuitive, that deliver really fast time to value. And that has long been at the core of PagerDuty's offering and value proposition. And none of these autonomous or automation investments replace human expertise. They allow our platform to channel that expertise and the expertise of your users to give them context and visibility to make the best possible decisions in the moment that matters. And I think that is so empowering as we think about this flexible new hybrid way of working. And then lastly- >> And I love the points. >> Oh yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, I love the points that you make about resilience and autonomy. I'd love it if you could just drive a little further how we can build more connection now that we're going into the office and also integrating this kind of hybrid system. >> Well, I think it's really interesting because in some ways I feel super connected to my employees 'cause I'm engaging with them one-to-one, my box and their box. I have had the opportunity to stay connected to customers and executives across the industry over course of the pandemic. And yet, I'm an extrovert, I miss the in-person opportunity that kinetic energy that comes with being together in a room. And I'm looking forward to being back in studio, doing interviews with you, Natalie. But at the same time, I appreciate the convenience that I've gained. Like, I'm not looking forward to commuting again. I mean, I plan to only get on the road during off hours in the future. And I realize that I don't have to travel six hours for a two-hour meeting on the other side of the U.S., or 15 hours to have a meeting in Europe, I can get a lot of business done online. Having said that, that connection is so important. The social contract that you create with your customers and your businesses is so important. And making sure that we can connect the complex technology that runs the world today is also really important. And that's where PagerDuty plays a role. PagerDuty really helps you know who you need, what you can leverage them for, and gets them in touch when you need them, like I said, on the work that is somewhat unpredictable but can be very high priority, the highest priority in the case of a security breach or a major customer-impacting incident. And so, using AI apps, or sorry, using AI and automation to make sure that we can intelligently route work to the right people is a big part of how our platform has come together and really become the central nervous system of the digital economy. >> Yeah, I mean, these are really great points and it's a bit of a silver lining actually with the pandemic, learning that we can really stay connected despite not being in the office and now have more hybrid systems of work. But let's switch now gears to talk about leadership in our communities and how we can truly activate change and a far more just and equitable world. >> Well, I am a huge believer in social responsibility and social impact, and I really appreciate how all of our employees have come together to leverage PagerDuty's platform for good. When we went public, we launched pagerduty.org which was led by Olivia Khalili. And I know you'll hear from her and some of our impact customers this week at Summit, but I think what's really important is how engaging it is for our employee base. Last year, 93% of PagerDuty employees have volunteered their time for social causes and philanthropy. And that's in a time when we were all enduring a hardship of our own, we were all facing an unprecedented pandemic. We've donated over a million dollars in financial grants to over 400 organizations through strategic giving and employee-match programs. And we've opened civic engagement. We've opened source civic engagement with our Day for Change for our employees and our toolkits which we've shared broadly throughout the industry. We signed on to the Board Challenge which I was thrilled to do because I'm a big believer that more diversity in the boardroom is going to lead more equity in corporate America. And thrilled to add Bonita Stewart and Dr. Alec Gallimore to our board last year. And I think representation is so important at the board level, not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because it's the right thing for business, but it's the right thing for career growth for your employees, showing them the path to what's possible for them with your company. And finally, we published PagerDuty's first ever "Inclusion Diversity and Equity Report", which is part of our effort to provide transparency around not just what we're doing, but how we're measuring it, how we're progressing, so that we can get better every year. And we've highlighted our work to support time-critical health, our work to support equity in the response to COVID including vaccine distribution. And I really enjoy some of the impact stories that we hear from our non-for-profit partners that are working with us at pagerduty.org. So, leadership is what you make of it and you can lead from every chair in an organization. And I'm so proud of the leadership, our employees, and many of our customers have demonstrated in this time of particular challenge around the globe. And we're not through it entirely yet, and so, I'm just really hopeful that we can all come out of this better together. >> Right, and speaking about leadership, why do you think that diversity is so critical for effective leadership? >> Well, first of all, I think it's our responsibility to reflect the communities that we serve. My users do not all look the same, they don't come from the same background, they're from over 150 countries around the world. They're solving a diverse set of problems. And in fact, the problems they're solving with our platform is growing every day as they imagine how to apply our technology, our digital operations platform, to different types of real-time work around their companies. But diversity is also important in problem solving, in looking at challenges through different lenses, in thinking about the different stakeholders that you serve in that process, and in creating an equitable community around you, creating opportunity for people around you. I mean, one of the things that we did that was a business decision a couple of years ago was to open an office in Atlanta. And part of that was to create a path, create opportunities for Georgians and people in the Metro Atlanta area to participate in the tech industry. This was before everybody was working from home, before those geographical barriers were broken down. And I'm thrilled to say, we have a thriving community now in Atlanta that's growing and we're hiring. But that's just one example. That was the smart thing to do for our business, but it was also a great thing to do, I think, for the community. And we've brought new minds and all kinds of new people into our business. And this month we're celebrating Pride Month at PagerDuty, which I'm thrilled to do. We have very active LGBTQ community who contribute hugely to our efforts and to our customers' success. And we think that everybody deserves an equal shot at opportunity at the lifestyle they want and the opportunity to build their own bright future. >> Great, and just lastly, what's the main focus for PagerDuty in the next year? >> The main focus for PagerDuty next year is really executing on our strategy to become the defacto platform for real-time work, ensuring that we can leverage the largest domain-agnostic ecosystem of connected apps and services, that we can leverage the largest dataset based on responder data, workflows, events and incidents to help our customers deliver the resiliency, the autonomy, and the connectedness that they're looking for to serve their customers and accelerate their digital prospects and frankly, to prosper in the future. So, it really is about becoming that de facto platform for action for all your real-time, unstructured and important work. >> Well, Jennifer Tejada, the CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, loved having you on this program. Really appreciate your insights on diversity and leadership, and, of course, the next phase for PagerDuty itself. I'm your host for "theCUBE" now covering the PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to introduce our next guests to highlight the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Telco Solution, and of course, I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We are now joined by Avishai Sharlin Division President at Amdocs Technology, and Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Let's have the opening question for both of you. You know, but let's first start with Avishai. What has been the highlight to date in the journey of both Amdocs and Vodafone? >> Well, it's a good question. I believe that the highlight was the teaming and getting things done together as partners. Unlike many previous experiences, this time, we understood that success equals us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners. So the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team. We always speak about the hurdles, we negotiate sometimes. But eventually, we're coming to the solution together, and making sure that everything is properly managed and properly done in the right timing, and according to plans. >> Terrific, well, Ralf, let's go to you. What do you see as the highlights of this collaboration. >> Now exactly what Avishai said, but let me add to that. What we are following is a real collaborative approach. Now, there's a lot of strengths in that approach. Because we are using for example, swarm intelligence, we are using elements, which you see in clouds attempts as well, for example, yeah, but you see it in agile attempts and agile working methods. And this is what we applied. And as Avishai said, we are doing that as real partners in the program. And we are pulling a lot of strengths out of that by detecting problems early, we have a high level of transparency, we put everything on the table, and differences that we do not fight about the problems. We work collaborative on the solution. And that's really kind of new to the industry we are working in. And that's kind of game changing for it. At the beginning, we said it will be game changing if it works. Now we see that it does. >> Terrific. Well, why do you think generally speaking, that the Telco industry has been so slow, to you know, embrace these kinds of innovations? Let's start with Avishai. >> Yeah. It's less about I think the actual technology, it's more about a handful of parameters that need to be aligned, once you are trying to address these big transformations. You need to upskill a lot of people, you need to educate your manpower, to new technologies and new ways and processes, how to embrace DevOps, how to work in a cloud environment, how to embrace an agile, safe methodology. So there are many small pockets of things that needs to be changed. Not a single element, actually is the same as like five years ago. So in a way, if the organization as a whole, is not being transformed, it's very tough to embrace all those new technologies and succeed in such a journey. So for us, and I think also to our partners in Vodafone, it was a mutual understanding that we need to not just work together, but also tackle the new technologies and methods and processes all together and change the entire organization and ecosystem in order to succeed. In many other cases in the industry, we see that some pockets are not being changed. And then even if the technology is right, you're missing the upscaling of people, if you upskill the people and you forgot the technology, and so on so forth. >> Perfect now, Ralf, I'd love for you to respond to that question as well. >> So the Telco industry is a quite complex industry, that you look to the product it seems to be quite easy. You pick up a phone and you do a phone call or you go to the internet and so on and so forth. But if you think of all the services, which you're using via your smartphone, for example, yeah, it's far away from just doing a phone call. So at the same time where the Telco industry is producing and selling products, it's producing and selling services. At the same time, while you're using it for leisure, you're also using it for emergency calls. So there's a high level of safety, which we need to bring, and we need to pair it with a lot of innovation elements, right, both together. Now, if you take all this and you think of the complexity, it's not easy to introduce new methods and new ways of working, etc, to such an industry, again you need to take two things into account, you need to make it very safe and stable and educated and controlled. And at the same time, you need to be very fast, because it's a fast moving industry. And both together explains how we adopt it and why sometimes we are a bit slower than others, because the trial and error, yeah, it's not that easy, because the error cannot be allowed in big scale. The more I'm happy that in the approach we're taking together with Amdocs and also AWS, we can apply these new methods while keeping the safety and stability. >> Terrific, well, thank you for outlining that safety methodology. Avishai, I'd like to move this back to you. How are you redefining this operation through DevOps and automation? >> Oh, that's an interesting question. I think that automation, needs to be baked into almost everything that we're doing in such a transformation. It's not from the basic technology stuff, but it goes into all the processes, the way you develop, the way you test. The way you deploy, the way later on, you're making sure that everything run in the right way. So automation is key fundamental element in the end to end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you're going into agile development, and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution. So first, as you rightfully said, it's automation. And DevOps is also key over here, because you need to make sure that what you develop is also something that you deploy in the right way. So you need to put in place all the right mechanism, such as (indistinct), and the cloud frameworks, and the relevant different technologies that are adhering into this end to end solution. >> Perfect, now, Ralf, what are your thoughts? How are you redefining the operation now through DevOps and automation? >> We are trying to solve the paradox. Again, the paradox is we want to have things very stable, that would dictate us to do very detailed plans and to adhere to it and so on this is what we did in the past, it fostered for example, taylorism, and similar things. Now, we want to go a step further, we want to apply agile methods, we want to dismantle the taylorism. And the techniques around DevOps, cloud operation, etc, agile methods help us to do that. Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don't want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before, we want to do a step forward and not at the same time step back. And therefore we are combining things. And automation, for example, is one way to do that. DevOps is another way to do that. We are joining the good thinking of operations and the good thinking of development together, and we are pulling additional strengths out of that, while not taking into account or taking on board the weaknesses of the former approach. So it's a stepwise transformation we are following. Automation helps us to focus on the real problems, and not on the things you can automate by technology. >> Terrific. Well, now Avishai, bringing this back to you, Ralf talks about agility and also DevOps, explain the journey today on such a large program. >> The the journey, in what sense? Can you give me some coloring? >> Yeah tell us about this collaboration and keeping that in mind, keeping in mind agility as well as DevOps. You know, the step by step process in developing such a large collaborative program. >> Thank you for clarification. So I think that the journey as a whole had several components, (indistinct) and myself also the beginning about the nature of being true partners here. But it is also about establishing something very new in the industry. Many of the things that we're working are, you know, the first time that we're doing agile manner of developing software and testing, it's so fast, it's the first time we're implementing the latest and greatest DevOps technologies. The first time, we're adhering into new standards and way and behavior from a modernized technology organization. So in a way, this journey is all about a mixture of innovation, new stuff, on one hand, aligned with a very, very tight in a good way, I would call it German engineering, in the sense of making sure the things are in place and making sure that the processes are well defined. And we're seeing at any given point, the different status we're in, what needs to be improved, what is going well, and what future lies ahead. >> Staying with that topic on the journey opening to both of you, and perhaps Ralf would like to jump in here, first, how have AWS technologies been featured as part of this journey. >> AWS has been chosen wisely by us because of its technology components brought to the table. Now, without now pointing to a particular service, which we are using, we talked about automation, we talked about DevOps, now everyone can itself about how AWS in general helps to foster that, the sheer fact that we can merge the different way of working with a different mindset of people working in our collaboration and technology components coming not only, but also from AWS, this is ensuring our success. If you would pull out one of these elements, yeah, out of the equation, that most probably it would not work. I have problems to rate which element is more important, they are all part of the puzzle and otherwise, you will not see the picture and create the picture. So in a nutshell, we are utilizing the AWS technologies in order to allow the speed of development, lots of first times which we have in our collaboration, and the AWS technologies are an essential part of that. >> Terrific and Avishai, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think that the collaboration with AWS goes in several, in a way different shapes and form. On the technology, pure technology level, we're utilizing native EKS, we're moving with the managed Kubernetes. We're using, you know the latest technology in databases, and many other very, very cool technologies coming from AWS. And on a different level, completely different level, I think that AWS understands the behavior of complex enterprise and are assisting us with programs, looking into well architected framework and how to work in a managed environment and what are the technologies that we need to utilize. And also in, from an Amdocs perspective, something that assisted us a lot in this journey, we have a unique technology which defines an end to end solution to development within a micro service cloud native environment, we'll call it M360. AWS assisted a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud native environments. >> Terrific, now to both of you, what do you see as the next step in your collaboration together? Let's bring this to Ralf. >> There is no distinct next step. And maybe this is the consequence of the way of working we have established. There are many small steps we will pursue and most probably, if you want to know, which are the next steps, you need to talk to our teams. This is another aspect of this new way of working, which we apply. The people working in that approach, they tell us how they construct, how they structure this approach. If I would summarize it, we are constantly tearing down the walls between the companies, between silos, between departments working in that collaboration, and we are getting more close together every day. And solving problems quicker, we are getting them quicker on the table, we are getting them quicker, and softer, faster, soft, and AWS, Amdocs are part of this. And this is really nice to see and be part of, that this is really happening. So the next step is, foster the collaboration. >> Avishai do you have any thoughts? >> Yeah, on a personal level, I think the next step would be to glide together in Europe. But on a more serious note, I think that this is becoming like a true partnership. And I think that I see a lot of empowerment coming from both sides, allowing the team to develop together, to think together and to start to create new stuff, that even if you plan ahead, you will never achieve without true collaboration. So this empowerment, the fact that the teams feel that they can do things on their own, and make one and one equals three, two, or you know, or seven, is the big change that I see in front of us. And I really feel it in the air. And I also feel it in in the way we act and we move forward. >> Yeah, so Ralf, how do you see that this program will enable continuous innovation? >> Oh, it does already. So if you're looking to big transformation programs of the past, (indistinct) beside the fact that lots of them actually did not achieve what they are, what they were asked to achieve. Usually big programs, do big plans, and then you have a very long period of preparation. And then usually you have a rather big bank or life and then everything shall be fun. That sometimes work but not most times, it's difficult. Now within our program, we are doing that in collaboration, but step by step by step. And it's more an evolution than a revolution, which we are doing. At least in the way we deploy things, again, we are back to DevOps, continuous integration, continuous deployment and so on all these elements, which you can see in these approaches. And this is where the wheel spinning slice. So it's evolving step by step. And it's bringing benefits step by steps. So the benefits are already in place into to a certain extent, and they're constantly growing. >> Terrific, Avishai, what are your thoughts? How do you see the innovation of being able to continue and even further? >> In a way we're in a world that everything is in continuum, so it's continuous delivery, and continuous development and also continuous innovation. As long as you know, the ecosystem of ours continues to innovate as a whole, we are part of it. And inevitably, we are part of the larger ecosystem on one hand, and also players within it on a smaller scale in this project and as organization. So I think innovation is baked into everything we're doing today. Sometime it's small incremental steps, sometimes it's big, innovative moves, but all in all, it's something that is currently part of our DNA. >> And how is this system helping you both you know, be more proactive? Either one of you who would like to go first? >> No, I started first. >> Avishai? Okay. So, we are data driven, we are way more data driven. And by knowing exactly what is happening, we can be faster, we can be more innovative, we can be more productive. So, in cases where we either discover a problem or we discovering opportunity, we are much faster in analyzing whether it's really one, how should we redirect on that? How can we solve it or utilize it? And that's really working well. >> Perfect. And, you know, Avishai, feel free to join in on that too. >> In the digitized economy, I think that productivity comes a lot from the business side. If there is something that completely changed lately is the fact that business people are driving many, many changes on one end, and technology is here to adhere on one end and flexible to to move forward. So many of the productive concepts are coming from non technology savvy people, and the ability of what we're doing together to adjust and support different business behaviors and business models, and also, you know, business initiatives is thought of as being productive and being able to adapt into the digitalized economy. >> Let me join in on that one, what Avishai said, Let's think of a business person who wants to change something, and you don't know whether it's a white way as a corporation. Now you bring in the technology bits and pieces from different angles, and all of a sudden, you can combine it with a data driven approach, then, you know much better how to react on this business demand and how to bring it to life by using technology. Yeah, that might be a very high level of example of what we're doing here. Again, collaboration, get it done together with is the theme of that, technology is a very important part of that, paired with the business. >> Yeah, we talked on some very broad terms like themes, collaboration, innovation, I just want to focus a bit now on automation. Why do you think it is so critical to the vision of this program, Avishai. >> First of all, because it ends with ation, and everything that has this, but what I think that we started with this, automation is fundamental to everything that needs to be nimble, everything that needs to be fast. You cannot do it manually. And if you want to react either to a business demand or to a data driven decision, analytic decision, if you want to adopt new technology, if you want to test a new business scenario or technology scenario, you need automation to be part, inevitable part of everything that you're doing. So automation is a key element in everything that we're doing. And it's critical part of also the way to look into the future and to make sure that everything is working the right way. >> Perfect Ralf, any quick thoughts on that? >> Actually, nothing, nothing to add. >> All right, terrific. Well, it's been so wonderful to have you on the program. I know people are coming in from all over the world to join us. Really fantastic opportunity to highlight this important innovation in the Telco sector. Glad to have you here. Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany, as well as Avishai Sharlin, the Division President at Amdocs Technology. we're highlighting the award that they won as part of the AWS, Global Public Sector Partner Awards. So great to have you on the show. And I'm your host Natalie Erlich, do stay tuned for more coverage. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to present our special guests for today's program and they are Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., chief of the Cherokee Nation. Welcome to the program, gentlemen >> Thank you. >> Terrific, well, delighted to have you here, we're going to discuss the key award of best partner transformation, most impactful nonprofit partner, of course now highlighting some of the technologies now being technology now being leveraged to help preserve the Cherokee language as well as its culture. Now, Chuck, I'd like to start with you and if you could describe some of the challenges that the Cherokee nation is now faced with in terms of preserving the language and its culture and how you see technology being able to really help preserve it. >> Well, thank you, Natalie. It was really good to be with you all today. The Cherokee language and culture is what makes us unique as a people. It's the link that links us back to time and immemorial through generations. And over those generations, there've been many threats to our language and culture. There's been disease after European contact, there's been dispossession, there's been our forced removal on the trail of tears. Other pressures in more modern times have continued to erode our language and culture, including, boarding schools, the public school system through most of the 20th century as Cherokee Nation has gotten back on its feet, that is to say when the govern the United States has allowed Cherokee Nation to do what we've always done well which is to govern ourselves, chart our own destiny, and preserve our life ways, we've been able to make preservation efforts but those generations of eroding our language and culture had coming to steep costs. We're the largest tribe in the country, 392,000 citizens and by the way we're mostly in Northeast, Oklahoma but we have Cherokees living all over the country even all over the world. And we only have 2000 fluent speakers left. So it's a great challenge to save a language that's truly endangered. And if we don't save it generations from now we may do a number of things exceedingly well as we do today, business, providing education and housing, creating a great healthcare system, but we will have lost that thing that makes us a unique people, that thing that links us back to our past. And so what we're doing today, working with great partners like Presidio is just indispensable to what's really our most important mission. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, thank you so much for those insights. I'd like to switch it over to Kyle and hear about the technologies now being utilized to preserve the Cherokee language and culture. >> Sure, happy to Natalie and thanks for having us this morning. So yeah, when we started to work with the Cherokee Nation, it was very clear to us that, there's obviously a higher power or a higher mission here. And so it's really been an honor to work with the chief and the nation and what we've been able to do is is take what the Cherokee Nation is trying to do in terms of language and cultural preservation and build solutions in really a very modern way. So between Inage’i, the 3D mobile open-world game and the virtual classroom platform, it's entirely a cloud native serverless solution in AWS, using a lot of the most modern tools and technologies in the marketplace. For example, in the mobile game, it's built around unity and the virtual classroom platform is built around the Amazon chime SDK, which allows us to really build something that is very clean and light and focused on what the nation is trying to achieve and really cut out a lot of the baggage and the other sort of plumbing and various other technologies that this would have, this type of solution would have taken just a few short years ago. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, Kyle, staying with you, what do you think were some of the factors behind the development of this solution? >> Yeah, so I think flexibility was key. Was maybe the biggest design goal in building these solutions because you learn a lot when you originally set out to build something and it starts to impact real users, and in this case, speakers of the Cherokee Nation, you learn a tremendous amount about the language and how it's used and how people communicate with each other. And so the main design goal of the solutions was to allow a sort of flexibility that lets us adapt. And every time we learn something and every time we find something that works or perhaps doesn't work quite as well as was imagined, we have the flexibility to change that and kind of stay nimble and on our toes. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, now switching over to you, why do you think that some of these, platforms like the virtual classroom are so effective with Cherokee speakers? >> Well, a couple of reasons, one pandemic related, during COVID the worst public health crisis the world seen in living memory, we have had to adapt quickly to continue on our mission to save this language. We couldn't afford a year off in terms of pairing speakers, by the way, most of our fluent speakers are over the age of 70, with young people who need to learn the language and be the new generation of speakers. So it's been really important that during those difficult times we could connect virtually and the technology we've been using has worked so effectively, but the other is really irrespective of what's going on in terms of having to isolate, and social distance and things of that nature during COVID, and that is just making sure we can make this language accessible, particularly to young people in a manner in which they are becoming accustomed to learning things throughout the rest of the world. And so using platforms that they're familiar with is very important but it also has to be something that an older generation of these fluent speakers, as I say most of them are over 70, can use. And that's what really has been so effective about this platform. It's so usable. Once you introduce it to people whether it's a young person who can adapt pretty quickly 'cause they're growing up immersed in it, or it's someone who has not been familiar with that technology, with just a little bit of showing them how to use it, suddenly this classroom becomes just like you're in person. And that makes all the difference in the world in terms of connecting these young people with their elders. As the other thing is Cherokees are by nature very much part of a big extended family. And so that personal connection that you can maintain through this platform is really important. I think it's going to be the key to how we save this language, because as I say we have Cherokees all over the country, even all over the world and we're going to harness our numbers, the large population we have and find those with the interest and aptitude to learn the language, we must use this technology and so far it's worked well. >> Yeah, terrific, and now switching over to Kyle, we'd love to hear from you how your team developed this technology. How they really thought out, what kinds of methods are really going to drive the interaction and the immersion and engagement among these disparate demographics of, elderly Cherokees and also the young generation. So, how did your team go about developing that? >> Yeah, it's a very good question because in a situation like this, there is no shortage of different ways that you could have built a solution like this. There are a lot of different ways that it could have been done. So the tax that we took was a rigorous focus on the user experience and on the experience of the speaker. And that allowed us to detach ourselves to a large degree from what were the exact technology choices that were implemented in terms of AWS services, other open source packages that run on AWS, it's being able to focus completely on what the nation was trying to achieve with their speakers, both through the game and the virtual classroom platform. It let us take a lot of other design decisions and technology choices sort of into the background and behind a level of abstraction. And so there's always quite a bit of rigorous testing and really making sure you understand how something's going to perform in the wild, but the reality of the situation was, the whole reason for doing it was the experience of the speakers, both in the game and in the classroom platform. So we stayed very focused on that and made technology decisions sort of second fiddle or lower priority. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, how do you think that these kinds of innovations could be applied to other areas of the Cherokee school system? >> Well, our greatest challenge is preserving language and culture, but we also have as part of our mission to educate this new generation of Cherokees coming up. For years and years, really generations, Cherokees who were able to get a good education many of them left our tribal lands for new opportunities. And so we lost a great deal because of the economic pressures here in Northeast, Oklahoma, particularly on our Cherokee lands. So the task now is to generate opportunity for a new generation coming up. Education is key to that and so if we want to create a pipeline of young Cherokees who want to get into the healthcare fields, want to get into aerospace, want to get into other professions, we've got to create an education system that is steadier and modern. We have a school that is K through 12th grade, K through the senior year, and so we have an opportunity really to do that. And I think for the first time in our history, in this era, I'm talking elect the last few decades, we are able to really craft education in a way that works for us and using technology and making choices about what that technology is, is important to us. It's a bygone era in which the federal government or the state is sort of imposing on us what choices we make. Now we can reach out with great partners all over the world like Presidio and say what solution can work for our classroom? When we can identify what the great demands are on the reservation in terms of jobs. And one of the great demands we have is healthcare. So how can we use technology to inspire little Cherokee boys and girls to grow up and be doctors and nurses here in just a few decades when we're building this great health system? Well, we're going to use technology to do it. So the possibilities are really unlimited and they need to be because we think our potential here in Cherokee Nation is unlimited. >> Yeah, I mean that's terrific to hear how technology is really encouraging younger generations to study, learn and really push themselves further. Kyle, I'd like to switch over to you and hear a little bit about the benefits of launching this kind of platform on AWS. >> Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to building this on AWS. And I think that it spans a couple of categories, even. I mean, from a technological perspective there was every tool and every service that we needed to build both of the solutions that we built right there in AWS. And when there was a, when there was a time where we needed to jump out and use a project outside of AWS, running on AWS such as the unity engine, AWS makes that very easy. So I would say that the choice was easy because there are technological realities and the breadth and the depth of the technological portfolio in AWS combined with the partnership that we get from them, It's really, you know, there's a lot of support when it comes to, Hey we're working with the Cherokee nation on something that's extremely important. We need your help. We need you to help us figure this out. It's never been hard to get that partnership. >> Terrific, and also following up on that, love to hear how AWS really helped with flexibility and also the cost effective effectiveness of this kind of platform. >> Yeah I would take those questions backwards or in reverse order because the cost-effectiveness of the solution is really, it's really something to make note of because when we build something in the way that we built these platforms they're serverless and event driven. Meaning that the Cherokee Nation is not paying for a solution constantly as we would in lives past running things in data centers and such. It really, the services in AWS allow us to say, Hey, let's spin up certain pieces of functionality when they're needed as they're being used. And the meter is running during that time, and the cost is occurred during the time it's being used and not all of the time. So that really has a dramatic impact on cost effectiveness. And then from a flexibility standpoint, as we learn new things, as we evolve the platform as we grow this out to more and more speakers and to more and more impact to the Cherokee Nation, we have all kinds of different technology choices that we can make and it's all contained within AWS. >> Yeah, and I'd like to open this now to both of you, starting with Chuck, how do you think this kind of technology could be applied to other cultures or languages that re seeking to preserve themselves? There's so many languages in the world that are now dying out because most of us are only speaking, just a few like English, Spanish, just a few others, what steps can be taken so that humanity can preserve these important languages? >> Well, you're right. There are so many endangered languages around the world and indigenous languages are unfortunately dying all over the world all the time, even as we speak, they're slipping away. The United nations is dedicated the next decade to the preservation of indigenous languages. That's gotten many leaders around the world thinking about how we can save languages here in this era. And I would encourage any tribal leader in particular in the United States, but I think it certainly applies around the world to seek out this technology. I mean, Cherokee Nation's in a position now where we can seek out the best in the world in terms of partnerships. And we've found that in Presidio. And of course they're using AWS which means they're using the best in the world and so the technology exists, and the willingness to work together exist. And I think generations ago that would have been not something we could have connected well on in terms of partnering with companies that were doing cutting edge things. So if you're looking to connect generations in terms of learning and sharing the language, which is just I cannot stress enough how indispensable that is to language preservation, this type of technology will do it. There are some, I think that may think, and I don't have a technology background, that if you're using this cutting edge technology, I mean this is the best in the world that you're going to speak only to this young generation coming up, and maybe it's inaccessible to an older generation. It's just not the case. This is so user-friendly that we we've been able to connect elders with young people. And if anyone in the world interested in preserving languages could see this in action, could see a young person sitting next to an elder talking about the technology or connecting virtually, it would change their whole perspective on what technology means for language reservations because I promise you all over the world the great challenges you have this group of older generations of people who know the language. They have it in their hearts, they have it in their minds and they're slipping away just from the passage of time. Connecting them with the generation coming up is just what we need to do. This technology allows us to do it. >> Yeah, Chuck following up on that when I hear about elderly people being able to connect with the younger generations in this way and share their history and their culture I'm sure that also, It must have a positive mental effect for them. Right, so elderly are often isolated. Do you have any insight on that? Any quality of insight what you've heard from people using this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think the last year has proven how valuable it is. I mean, we lost over 50 fluent Cherokee speakers and I mentioned earlier in the program, that we only have 2000 left. 50 to COVID and more to just the passage of time and old age. But we have many that are active and engaged in language preservation and they have said to me how valuable it's been to be able to be at home and yet still feel like they're part of this great mission that we have at the Cherokee Nation. Understand that this mission that we have is on par with what any nation in history has set as a goal to shoot for whether it's the United States wanting to land a man on the moon, we're trying to save the language. This is that level of importance. And so for an elder to feel like they're connected and still contributing during this past year difficult times, that makes all the difference in the world. And even as I say, as the pandemic recedes and we hope it continues to recede, there is still a need for elders to stay connected. And in many cases they cannot due to poor health, due to the lack of transportation, this knocks down those barriers and so there's a great deal of joy that has been gained from using this technology. And honestly, just talking to elders about young people getting the opportunity to play this video game even some elders that were voice actors in this game, that Presidio helped us develop. I mean, I can't tell you how important that is for somebody to use their language, to make a living. And that's part of how you preserve a language. Presidio has showed us a way that we can do just that. So we're not only training new speakers, we're giving this opportunity many cases to elders to do something that is very productive with the wonderful gift they have, which is the Cherokee language. >> Terrific, well that is really inspiring because potentially this technology could be utilized by generations to come. The current young people that are using this will one day be the elderly. So, Kyle, how do you see this technology potentially on this platform being evolved? What's the next step to keep it really up to date for future generations as it's evolving. >> Yeah, there's a lot of plans on where to take this I can tell you, honestly. From the perspective of the mobile game, you're building on a platform of an open world game means that the imagination is the limit quite honestly. So there are a lot of new characters and new levels and new adventures that are plans to further immerse the speakers in the platform. And I think that will, that will help with reach and it will help with the amount of connection that's built to the chief's point about bridging the older generations into the younger generations over that common bond of the language and the culture that keeps those connections alive. And so we want to expand the mobile game Engage, the navigate to be as accessible and as wide reaching and immersive as it possibly can, and there are a lot of plans in the works for that. And then with the virtual classroom platform, we started with a various focused constituency within the nation of the language immersion school. And there are many other educational services and even healthcare to the chief's earlier point again where I think there's a lot of potential for that one as well. >> All right, well, terrific gentlemen. Thank you so much for your insights, really fantastic hearing how this platform is really a difference in the lives of people in the Cherokee Nation. Of course, that were our guests, Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation. And that's all for today's session at the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. Thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session at the 2021, AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, for the award for the best, Think Big for Small Business Partner. I'm your host Natalie Erlich, and we are now joined by our very special guest, Lisa Brunet, a managing Partner and President of the DLZP Group. Welcome to today's session. Now, I'd love to talk with you about how you got to partner with AWS. >> Sure, I think Natalie, thank you so much for your time today. So we started a journey with AWS back in 2012, we ran into an AWS rep at another conference, and he was talking about how he would love to do some innovative technology, because one of my reps were actually wearing gold glass, and he's like, I need something creative, I need something different. Because right now AWS, Amazon is just known for selling online books, while the cloud is only known for storing photos. So we spent a little bit of time working with them, and we came up with this idea of doing creating the test drive, where people could actually go and try a different product, like we actually did PeopleSoft on AWS. So we were able to prove that large ERP applications could run on the cloud. And that was actually faster and more resilient than having it on premise, and from there, it's been a whirlwind journey with AWS. >> Now terrific, well, how does TBSP open doors for companies and help them understand all of the tools available to them through AWS, as well as APN. >> With the Think Big for Small Business program, what it does, it gives us the opportunity to play with the big guys. So a lot of small businesses have the capabilities, they're very agile, and they have the connections, they have the capabilities. But because of our size, we have limitations on getting the number of certifications, getting the network competencies. So with this program, it evens the playing field for everybody. So now I'm able to like... I've been turned away projects because of my size, because they're like, well you're not certified by AWS at this level. But now I'm at the same level, as some of my some of the larger primes, and I'm able to compete with them head to head now. >> So has this kind of like democratizing effect. >> Yes, it does. >> Terrific. Well, to expand a bit more on how, the Think Big program has helped us overcome other kind of obstacles. >> For us, a big obstacle was always with the competencies and the certifications. So before, we would never eligible to get a competency, even though we were the ones that proved that PeopleSoft could run on the clouds. So we had the competency for Oracle Applications, we had the competency from Microsoft, but we could never, we're never eligible to actually get the competency because we were not advanced partner. And then also with the training, we were always being hindered, because we couldn't get all the discounts available at a certain level for the trading, so we had to pay full retail price. Now we get a discount, so I can send everybody for training to make sure that everybody is up to date on their certifications. >> And how do you assess your experience as an AWS partner? >> I love it, I love being an AWS partner, and that's I think what really makes the difference is the employees at AWS, they stand by us for everything. We know, of course we do give a lot of benefits to them, but anytime I have a need, I have everybody's number, I can reach out to anybody on their team and say, I need assistance with this, I'm looking to try to accomplish this, and they'll do anything they can to help us. >> And do you have any advice for other companies who might be interested in moving in that direction as well. >> For any small business, I think that Think Big for Small Business program is a great idea, just as long as you're willing to put the hard work in, and you can prove to AWS that you're willing to work hard, they'll reciprocate and work with you to create this great, to make you a great partner. >> And I'd love to hear more about your company, DLZP Group, tell us about your core market. >> So we actually were split between three different main markets. We try to be equal between public sector, private sector and federal. We are just starting our federal journey. We recently became AA certified, so we're looking to expand in the federal journey, but for us, we try to make sure that we are, we don't have too strong, we don't have more than like 33% of our income coming from any one sector, just because if there's a crisis like with the federal, when they shut down for six months, I don't want to have to layoff my employees, I value my employees too much have to say, I'm sorry, I have to lay you off. So we made sure we're resilient, and we're able to handle any customer at any given time. >> Well, let's talk about resilience, I mean, how do you ensure that you're resilient? Obviously, you've had some really tough time, in the last year or so with a pandemic, I mean, what's your advice for companies that are looking to become even more resilient in the years ahead? >> For us, I think a big thing is we've always worked hard to make sure that we offer a quality product for our customers. So that really helped us on the downtime's. When everybody was struggling, keep the doors open, our customers stood by us, because we've had a proven track record to make sure that we offer them the best solution, were there for them when they need us. So they came to rely on us and they would use this with during the past year during the pandemic. >> And if you could outline just in further detail your business model for our viewers. >> So we actually are 100% remote, and I have staff around the world. We purposely, strategically, like have everybody around the world, because some of our customers are global. We have to offer 24/7 support for them, especially nowadays. But another part was because of disaster recovery. I'm based in Houston, Texas. So we're known for getting hurricanes, that means sometimes I can be without power for three weeks. But I don't want that to affect my customers, I don't want them to feel that they can't come to us, but knowing that if a hurricane comes through, I might know my employees are going to be able to work. So we made sure that we have a great disaster recovery plan, we have where no matter what happens, manmade or natural disaster, we're able to support our customers, without any with any without a pause. And then we also make sure that all of our employees, they have a quality work life balance, and I think that also helps because that shows the clients, that we value our employees, and it makes them want to work with us more, because our employees are happy, they're happy to work with us, because they know that well (crackling drowns out speaker) >> And describe to us in greater detail, the core technology and its key benefits. >> Well, a lot we do is around AWS. So, when we first started with them, as I mentioned, we started with them with the test drive and ERP applications, but then we expanded our services, we started working with serverless, when we first heard about serverless, we were like this is a game changer. We can do almost anything on serverless and save so much money. So we years ago, we went and built our website, so it's 100% serverless. So it costs us a couple pennies a month to run, versus if you think about a traditional website, that's a couple hundred dollars a month to run, and then we started playing with machine learning. So we're now developing internal projects, where we're using machine learning for a number of applications, and we're going to keep expanding, where we're going to have a full suite of applications to give to our customers that will be run at 100% serverless using machine learning. >> Yeah, really terrific. What are your goals for the next year? What is your vision for 2021? >> My goal is to do a little bit more than federal, we're actually expanding to Canada as well. So we have officially launched there, we have employees in Canada that are working in different areas in different provinces and with the federal government to try to help AWS grow there. >> Terrific, and I thought it was just so fascinating, how you're mitigating disaster, and you know, really pushing your business forward, you know, thinking geographically, and that's something that we kind of had to all figured out with a pandemic. So in a way your business has been like a bit of step ahead of the others, and what other ways are you trying to kind of be a step ahead of the curve from the competition. >> So we're looking to stay ahead of the curve by making sure we have the right resources in place, so we do a lot, making sure that when we bring somebody on, we make sure that they're aware that this is a team based company, you're not going to be working individually on one project. We were very big on spec, so we're always making sure that, no matter what level you come in, even if you're just an intern here for the summer, you're running a project, you're getting that real world experience, you're going to even have times where I'm reporting to you, when you have to make sure I'm a accountable for the work. And that helps also build respect amongst the peers, because they know what it takes to run a project, and they're going to make sure that they do a good job, because nobody wants to see their peers if you fail. >> Yeah, well excellent insights, I agree with you. Lisa Brunet, a managing partner and president of the DLZP Group. That's all for this session, I'm your host Natalie Erlich, thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich and today we'll highlight the best cybersecurity solution. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike and Jennifer Dvorak information security architect for the State of Arizona. Thank you so much for being with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yep, thank you. >> Perfect. Well you know obviously a really wild year with COVID and it certainly pushed a lot of boundaries. Cyber security resiliency also a hot topic as ransomware really spiked up. How have you addressed this concern and really accelerated this push with COVID-19 in the backdrop? I'd love it if either one of you would just like to jump in here. >> Well, CrowdStrike was one of our initiatives for 2020 and it was significantly increased, accelerated due to COVID. So we had to roll out in a matter of weeks when we had a matter of months previously and it really provided us the visibility that we needed for folks taking their computers home. We had no way of triaging any of our incidents when the computers were at home. So rolling out CrowdStrike as quickly as possible it gave us remote access, it gave us visibility and that was huge for our organization. >> Tina, if you could weigh in on this as well, that would be terrific. >> Sure absolutely. And you know, Jen with the State of Arizona is one of our premier customers but across the board with the 2021 global threat report that we issue each year, what we saw there was a fourfold increase in the number of intrusions. So to your point about the threat activity and it's not getting better. So what CrowdStrike is on a mission to do is stop regions and protect organizations against these bad actors so that they're, that we minimize disruptions. It's really been tremendous to see and build a ecosystem from a platform approach that started with visibility on the end point that Jen was just alluding to. >> And Jennifer, I'd love to get your insight how the public sector and the private sector can work better in tandem with each other in order to protect customers and also communities against ransomware attacks and other kinds of cybersecurity threats that we've seen coming from Russia for instance. >> Certainly so our state CISO Tim Roemer, he has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors. So that's one of his strategic initiatives and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We don't want to just spend money and then the vendor runaway, we want somebody that's going to be with us every step of the way. We've had some incidents this past year and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don't typically work with a lot. And that was really helpful because we were able to act quickly and address the issues that arose. So just having somebody that's looking out for your best interests and being a true partner is what we're really looking for. And that's the only way that we can circumvent these ransomware attacks. >> And Tina I'd love it if you'd weigh in as well. How do you see your role in this effort to protect the public evolving now in 2021? >> So I love that question and especially with the role of my role brand new in COVID interestingly enough, to create this bi-directional executive alignment with our customers and our internal teams and overall at CrowdStrike our goal, as I said is to stop breaches and it's really to bring, to minimize the frustration that comes sometimes with rolling out security tools. I've been at this a long time and tools like CrowdStrike are really game changers for security teams that are really about protecting organizations. And essentially what we do is we brought a single platform where when it, when the, when our software is deployed to an organization across their laptops, desktops, server and cloud infrastructure, we were born in the cloud kind of before it was cool and now we serve more than 11,000 customers. And that threat activity goes to a single AWS instance where we look across all of the threat activity. And then when we see activity in one area, we can protect all of our customers. That's the power of the cloud. >> Perfect and I'd love Jennifer's insights here too. What steps are you taking now to keep the public protected and the state cyber ready? >> And I like Tina's point about being born in the cloud. So State of Arizona is a cloud first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we're able to be more nimble. We're able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud first, even though it's, it wasn't embraced initially, I think that it's something that we've been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud first initiative that we have. >> And Tina what's top of mind? What are some of the key initiatives that your team and teams are going to be focused on in the years ahead? What's the next phase for cybersecurity? >> Great question and we've talked quite a bit about the end point but where we're headed and really where we've invested heavily the last couple of years and we'll continue moving forward is now that we have, we've brought this game-changing visibility to our security teams on the end point of each one of the systems in their environment where we've expanded the platform to now include cloud services like I mentioned. Now include indicators of misconfigurations which are so detrimental to teams working in a hybrid cloud environment. And then we've also moved into the identity protection space. And essentially what we're doing there is the same thing we've been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we're also in a zero trust principles way looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity. >> Terrific, well, in light of COVID-19, we saw a big spike in ransomware and I'd love to hear specifically from Tina why do we need trusted partners rather than software vendors in this fight? >> You know, it's so important to get out in front of all of the adversaries and most recently that we've seen huge growth in the e-crime actors that are taking advantage of the tools that are unfortunately in the market today, sometimes even free that allow them to hold organizations hostage. And the reason that's so important to partner with organizations and companies like CrowdStrike, is that we've been thinking ahead and we are designed in a way to stop an individual, a breach or adversary attack from occurring but we've been watching how their adversary works and now we can see their activity very early on before they have a chance to gain a foothold in an organization's server or laptop or even a phone or a tablet. And really what we're doing is we're providing protection so that it doesn't even need to move to an analyst to do further review. We just stop it right at the gate before it causes harm. And the reason that this is so important probably is obvious, but we're about making sure that the organizations like the State of Arizona can continue on their business and without these kinds of disruptions. So we haven't designed against one particular adversary but we really designed an approach that works across them all because we've been watching so closely how they move through environments for years. And we use the power of artificial intelligence delivered from the cloud to protect against all things including ransomware. >> Right it's really an evolving process. You constantly have to be vigilant for the next threat. Now I'd love to hear how you see things change with your tech partners and providers at the moment. >> So from a CrowdStrike perspective, we aim to be absolutely the best in class for the products and services that we provide whether that's your products that you can purchase like our endpoint solutions or whether that's services like our 24/7 threat hunting teams or Falcon Complete Teams that basically serve as an extension of an organization's team. But it's absolutely critical that we move this direction and not try to be the best at everything and instead partner. So we have extensive partnerships with Zscaler and Proofpoint and so many others, Okta. I mean the list goes on and on with now hundreds. And we also have a CrowdStrike store. So once you're a customer we've reduced the friction to taking on and trying out new modules, either from us or new options that maybe you haven't considered before from our trusted partners, much like the AWS marketplace we've got the CrowdStrike store and it's a growing set of partnerships where we build those integrations. So, my prior life I was the CISO for Arizona State University most recently. And we spend an awful lot of time integrating these solutions in a CrowdStrike. We're about building those integrations so that the teams within the organizations that can get on to doing innovative things within their space, rather than having to spend all their time tying these technologies together. >> Yeah now shifting to Jennifer late last year we learned that suspected Russian hackers broke into the US government agencies including a county in Arizona. So what measures has the State of Arizona put in place now to ensure that something like that won't happen again or that at least the state is very vigilant and ready to protect citizens and the government against these threats? >> We're definitely partnering with products like or vendors like CrowdStrike. That's what we, we're looking to extend those partnerships. And not only that we're developing our information sharing program across state, local and territorial governments. So we're looking to partner with the cities, the counties. Cybersecurity is a team sport. Cybersecurity is, it takes everyone. It takes the whole state working together. And that's one of the things that we've been trying to build. So working in conjunction with the state fusion center, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, we've been working to do more indicators of compromise sharing, any intelligence that we've been gathering from these counties that maybe did have an incident or a breach. We want to make sure that the information is disseminated to everyone so that we can be stronger and protect against it. Additionally, we we're always looking for grants that we can extend so that we're able to extend our products that we use to some of the smaller cities and towns and counties so that they can leverage some of the same technologies like CrowdStrike in their environments at a fraction of the cost or paid for by a grant. >> Terrific, well, Tina how does your experience as a CrowdStrike customer now come into play in your current role? >> Well, how's it come into play? Well, I think that it makes it really easy for me to be a liaison internally and help internal teams understand what it's like to sit as a CISO or as a CIO or deputy CIO. And to understand the kinds of challenges that these teams are (indistinct) these leaders of these teams are facing as they're moving forward with their innovation agenda while making sure to make sure that they're gaining those operational efficiencies that are so important today and wowing their customers all the while, right? So I think really what I bring to it is that level of experience to make sure that the voices of our customers are heard internally and that we continue to build products and services that make sense for the needs of our customers additional capabilities. Like we just released Falcon X Recon is an example of one of our newer capabilities where we're basically looking at their deep and dark web activity and bringing that together in the single platform, single event console that we've leveraged for years now. And in highlighting that activity many, in many cases, pre breach. So before you'd ever see it hit your, in your organization's operational environment, we would detect it through that service. So, I think it's those, all those things combined. >> Terrific well, CrowdStrike won a number of key accolades this year, and I was curious, Tina what you attribute to this huge success. >> Well, I have to tell you that I've been in the security space for far too long. And what I can say is that until CrowdStrike came along, there wasn't a solution, a security solution that we could get software running on an end point that wasn't just frustrating across the board. There were conflicts with other software running or the software would work great for one platform but it wouldn't work for the other. So we really have this new approach. And I think that that's what's made us, in fact I'm sure it's certainly what made me a wildly happy customer is that staff, faculty, employees, if we hadn't told them the software was being rolled out, they wouldn't have even noticed. You know it doesn't impact the machines and it's really provided this amazing experience and bringing all that with 150 different adversary groups that we track and we take that on for the customers and just bring visibility for the immediate things they need to take action on. I think those are all of the things that got us to this point in building out this platform is going to be really amazing to see in the years to come as we expand across other areas within the security space, either developing our own or really driving partnerships to make it easier for our customers. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, I pulled up the stat here for us to examine because I think it's really important for our viewers to understand just how important cybersecurity is and how it's going to be even more important for customers and for the private citizens and public citizens. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year reaching 10.5 trillion by 2025. That's just in about four years. And not only that, cyber crime will become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and China. So, I mean, it's really terrific that you're stepping up. You know just if you could both, perhaps Jennifer can go first and then Tina, what are the key lessons that you have for even the federal government to take a more proactive stance against these threats? >> Well, I think it's clear that this is a very lucrative venture, business venture. It's treated like a business venture by these criminal actors and they have a formula and it works. So I don't see that it's going to be changing anytime soon. And it's also not something that is highly sophisticated, highly technical. It's very easy. It's very much phishing, you know, users clicking on emails and vulnerabilities and environments. It's really a very easy formula that they continue to repeat. So I think until the federal government has more ways to recoup some of these ransomware payments, or we're able to stop some of these ransomware as a service products from being used, I think it's going to continue. So we're defenders so we need to make sure that we're ready for anything that comes and using products that keep us safe is really the best way and training our users. >> Terrific and Tina? >> Thank you. So we are so passionate about making sure that our customers can sleep better at night. When it comes down to tips it really comes back to the basics in many regards but the basics are sometimes really hard to do. So they sound simple, but they aren't so easy to do. And it's basics like making sure your systems are patched. Every organization has just a growing number of devices and pieces of software and infrastructure and all of those things need to be patched nearly immediately to stay out in front of today's adversaries. And Jen's right, Some are sophisticated, some are not but the reality is if we leave those windows open, we will have adversaries, oh, you know walk into our house if you will. So the basics like that also making sure that you have great backups, right? So if you do run into an instance of a ransomware where your systems are locked that you have the ability to recover quickly, being proactive and making sure that you have the partnership arrangement ahead of time is a third really important thing to do. Many organizations now have IRR retainers that they, incident response retainers that you can use proactively in years where you don't find yourself on your heels in a reactive situation but then it's there when you need it. Sometimes it's hard to find great services when there are the flood of ransomware attacks like we've seen in recent months. And then lastly, and I should have started with this 'cause it's the most important part, train your people. It's so important to make sure that security is just a culture, a part of the culture, just like you lock your car and you lock your house. Making sure that you're thinking about those things that will help keep you safe and your organization safe. >> Really excellent points. Thank you both so much for your insights. That was Tina Thorstenson executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, as well as Jennifer Dvorak, information security architect for the State of Arizona. Again, really appreciate your insights. This was a fantastic conversation with you. And that's all for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards or in this session of that. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and see you very soon. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE presents the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in cloud startups with AI security and life science tracks, 15 hottest growing startups are presented. And we had a great opening keynote with luminaries in the industry. And now our closing keynote is to get a deeper dive on cracking the code in the enterprise, how startups are changing the game and helping companies change. And they're also changing the game of open source. We have a great guest, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development, Madrona Venture Group. Katie, thank you for coming on the CUBE for this special closing keynote. >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> So one of the topics we talked about with Soma from Madrona on the opening keynote, as well as Ali from Databricks is how startups are seeing success faster. So that's the theme of the Cloud speed, agility, but the game has changed in the enterprise. And I want to really discuss with you how growth changes and growth strategy specifically. They talk, go to market. We hear things like good sales to enterprise sales, organic, freemium, there's all kinds of different approaches, but at the end of the day, the most successful companies, the ones that might not be known that just come out of nowhere. So the economics are changing and the buyers are thinking differently. So let's explore that topic. So take us through your view 'cause you have a lot of experience. But first talk about your role at Madrona, what you do. >> Absolutely all great points. So my role at Madrona, I think I have personally one of the more enviable jobs and that my job is to... I get the privilege of working with all of these fantastic entrepreneurs in our portfolio and doing whatever we can as a firm to harness resources, knowledge, expertise, connections, to accelerate their growth. So my role in setting up business development is taking a look at all of those tools in the tool chest and partnering with the portfolio to make it so. And in our portfolio, we have a wide range of companies, some rely on enterprise sales, some have other go to markets. Some are direct to consumer, a wide range. >> Talk about the growth strategies that you see evolving because what's clear with the pandemic. And as we come out of it is that there are growth plays happening that don't look a little bit differently, more obvious now because of the Cloud scale, we're seeing companies like Databricks, like Snowflake, like other companies that have been built on the cloud or standalone. What are some of the new growth techniques, or I don't want to say growth hacking, that is a pejorative term, but like just a way for companies to quickly describe their value to an enterprise buyer who's moving away from the old RFP days of vendor selection. The game has changed. So take us through how you see secret key and unlocking that new equation of how to present value to an enterprise and how you see enterprises evaluating startups. >> Yes, absolutely. Well, and that's got a question, that's got a few components nestled in what I think are some bigger trends going on. AWS of course brought us the Cloud first. I think now the Cloud is more and more a utility. And so it's incumbent upon thinking about how an enterprise 'cause using the Cloud is going to go up the value stack and partner with its cloud provider and other service providers. I think also with that agility of operations, you have thinning, if you will, the systems of record and a lot of new entrance into this space that are saying things like, how can we harness AIML and other emerging trends to provide more value directly around work streams that were historically locked into those systems of record? And then I think you also have some price plans that are far more flexible around usage based as opposed to just flat subscription or even these big clunky annual or multi-year RFP type stuff. So all of those trends are really designed in ways that favor the emerging startup. And I think if done well, and in partnership with those underlying cloud providers, there can be some amazing benefits that the enterprise realizes an opportunity for those startups to grow. And I think that's what you're seeing. I think there's also this emergence of a buyer that's different than the CIO or the site the CISO. You have things with low code, no code. You've got other buyers in the organization, other line of business executives that are coming to the table, making software purchase decisions. And then you also have empowered developers that are these citizen builders and developer buyers and personas that really matter. So lots of inroads in places for a startup to reach in the enterprise to make a connection and to bring value. That's a great insight. I want to ask that just if you don't mind follow up on that, you mentioned personas. And what we're seeing is the shift happens. There's new roles that are emerging and new things that are being reconfigured or refactored if you will, whether it's human resources or AI, and you mentioned ML playing a role in automation. These are big parts of the new value proposition. How should companies posture to the customer? Because I don't want to say pivot 'cause that means it's not working but mostly extending our iterating around their positioning because as new things have not yet been realized, it might not be operationalized in a company or maybe new things need to be operationalized, it's a new solution for that. Positioning the value is super important and a lot of companies often struggle with that, but also if they get it right, that's the key. What's your feeling on startups in their positioning? So people will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's marketing." But maybe that's important. What's your thoughts on the great positioning question? >> I've been in this industry a long time. And I think there are some things that are just tried and true, and it is not unique to tech, which is, look, you have to tell a story and you have to reach the customer and you have to speak to the customer's need. And what that means is, AWS is a great example. They're famous for the whole concept of working back from the customer and thinking about what that customer's need is. I think any startup that is looking to partner or work alongside of AWS really has to embody that very, very customer centric way of thinking about things, even though, as we just talked about those personas are changing who that customer really is in the enterprise. And then speaking to that value proposition and meeting that customer and creating a dialogue with them that really helps to understand not only what their pain points are, but how you were offering solves those pain points. And sometimes the customer doesn't realize that that is their pain point and that's part of the education and part of the way in which you engage that dialogue. That doesn't change a lot, just generation to generation. I think the modality of how we have that dialogue, the methods in which we choose to convey that change, but that basic discussion is what makes us human. >> What's your... Great, great, great insight. I want to ask you on the value proposition question again, the question I often get, and it's hard to answer is am I competing on value or am I competing on commodity? And depending on where you're in the stack, there could be different things like, for example, land is getting faster, smaller, cheaper, as an example on Amazon. That's driving down to low cost high value, but it shifts up the stack. You start to see in companies this changing the criteria for how to evaluate. So an enterprise might be struggling. And I often hear enterprises say, "I don't know how to pick who I need. I buy tools, I don't buy many platforms." So they're constantly trying to look for that answer key, if you will, what's your thoughts on the changing requirements of an enterprise? And how to do vendor selection. >> Yeah, so obviously I don't think there's a single magic bullet. I always liked just philosophically to think about, I think it's always easier and frankly more exciting as a buyer to want to buy stuff that's going to help me make more revenue and build and grow as opposed to do things that save me money. And just in a binary way, I like to think which side of the fence are you sitting on as a product offering? And the best ways that you can articulate that, what opportunities are you unlocking for your customer? The problems that you're solving, what kind of growth and what impact is that going to lead to, even if you're one or two removed from that? And again, that's not a new concept. And I think that the companies that have that squarely in mind when they think about their go-to market strategy, when they think about the dialogue they're having, when they think about the problems that they're solving, find a much faster path. And I think that also speaks to why we're seeing so many explosion in the line of business, SAS apps that are out there. Again, that thinning of the systems of record, really thinking about what are the scenarios and work streams that we can have happened that are going to help with that revenue growth and unlocking those opportunities. >> What's the common startup challenge that you see when they're trying to do business development? Usually they build the product first, product led value, you hear that a lot. And then they go, "Okay, we're ready to sell, hire a sales guy." That seems to be shifting away because of the go to markets are changing. What are some of the challenges that startups have? What are some that you're seeing? >> Well, and I think the point that you're making about the changes are really almost a result of the trends that we're talking about. The sales organization itself is becoming... These work streams are becoming instrumented. Data is being collected, insights are being derived off of those things. So you see companies like Clary or Highspot or two examples or tutorial that are in our portfolio that are looking at that action and making the art of sales and marketing far more sophisticated overall, which then leads to the different growth hacking and the different insights that are driven. I think the common mistakes that I see across the board, especially with earlier stage startups, look you got to find product market fit. I think that's always... You start with a thesis or a belief and a passion that you're building something that you think the market needs. And it's a lot of dialogue you have to have to make sure that you do find that. I think once you find that another common problem that I see is leading with an explanation of technology. And again, not focusing on the buyer or the... Sorry, the buyer about solving a problem and focusing on that problem as opposed to focusing on how cool your technology is. Those are basic and really, really simple. And then I think setting a set of expectations, especially as it comes to business development and partnering with companies like AWS. The researching that you need to adequately meet the demand that can be turned on. And then I'm sure you heard about from Databricks, from an organization like AWS, you have to be pragmatic. >> Yeah, Databricks gone from zero a software sales a few years ago to over a billion. Now it looks like a Snowflake which came out of nowhere and they had a great product, but built on Amazon, they became the data cloud on top of Amazon. And now they're growing just whole new business models and new business development techniques. Katie, thank you for sharing your insight here. The CUBE's closing keynote. Thanks for coming on. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Okay, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development at Madrona Venture Group. Premier VC in the Seattle area and beyond they're doing a lot of cloud action. And of course they know AWS very well and investing in the ecosystem. So great, great stuff there. Next up is Peter Wagner partner at Wing.VX. Love this URL first of all 'cause of the VC domain extension. But Peter is a long time venture capitalist. I've been following his career. He goes back to the old networking days, back when the internet was being connected during the OSI days, when the TCP IP open systems interconnect was really happening and created so much. Well, Peter, great to see you on the CUBE here and congratulations with success at Wing VC. >> Yeah, thanks, John. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me. >> Reason why I wanted to have you come on. First of all, you had a great track record in investing over many decades. You've seen many waves of innovation, startups. You've seen all the stories. You've seen the movie a few times, as I say. But now more than ever, enterprise wise it's probably the hottest I've ever seen. And you've got a confluence of many things on the stack. You were also an early seed investor in Snowflake, well-regarded as a huge success. So you've got your eye on some of these awesome deals. Got a great partner over there has got a network experience as well. What is the big aha moment here for the industry? Because it's not your classic enterprise startups anymore. They have multiple things going on and some of the winners are not even known. They come out of nowhere and they connect to enterprise and get the lucrative positions and can create a moat and value. Like out of nowhere, it's not the old way of like going to the airport and doing an RFP and going through the stringent requirements, and then you're in, you get to win the lucrative contract and you're in. Not anymore, that seems to have changed. What's your take on this 'cause people are trying to crack the code here and sometimes you don't have to be well-known. >> Yeah, well, thank goodness the game has changed 'cause that old thing was (indistinct) So I for one don't miss it. There was some modernization movement in the enterprise and the modern enterprise is built on data powered by AI infrastructure. That's an agile workplace. All three of those things are really transformational. There's big investments being made by enterprises, a lot of receptivity and openness to technology to enable all those agendas, and that translates to good prospects for startups. So I think as far as my career goes, I've never seen a more positive or fertile ground for startups in terms of penetrating enterprise, it doesn't mean it's easy to do, but you have a receptive audience on the other side and that hasn't necessarily always been the case. >> Yeah, I got to ask you, I know that you're a big sailor and your family and Franks Lubens also has a boat and sailing metaphor is always good to have 'cause you got to have a race that's being run and they have tactics. And this game that we're in now, you see the successes, there's investment thesises, and then there's also actually bets. And I want to get your thoughts on this because a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to evaluate startups and starts also can make the wrong bet. They could sail to the wrong continent and be in the wrong spot. So how do you pick the winners and how should enterprises understand how to pick winners too? >> Yeah, well, one of the real important things right now that enterprise is facing startups are learning how to do and so learning how to leverage product led growth dynamics in selling to the enterprise. And so product led growth has certainly always been important consumer facing companies. And then there's a few enterprise facing companies, early ones that cracked the code, as you said. And some of these examples are so old, if you think about, like the ones that people will want to talk about them and talk about Classy and want to talk about Twilio and these were of course are iconic companies that showed the way for others. But even before that, folks like Solar Winds, they'd go to market model, clearly product red, bottom stuff. Back then we didn't even have those words to talk about it. And then some of the examples are so enormous if think about them like the one right in front of your face, like AWS. (laughing) Pretty good PLG, (indistinct) but it targeted builders, it targeted developers and flipped over the way you think about enterprise infrastructure, as a result some how every company, even if they're harnessing relatively conventional sales and marketing motion, and you think about product led growth as a way to kick that motion off. And so it's not really an either word even more We might think OPLJ, that means there's no sales keep one company not true, but here's a way to set the table so that you can very efficiently use your sales and marketing resources, only have the most attractive targets and ones that are really (indistinct) >> I love the product led growth. I got to ask you because in the networking days, I remember the term inevitability was used being nested in a solution that they're just going to Cisco off router and a firewall is one you can unplug and replace with another vendor. Cisco you'd have to go through no switching costs were huge. So when you get it to the Cloud, how do you see the competitiveness? Because we were riffing on this with Ali, from Databricks where the lock-in might be value. The more value provider is the lock-in. Is their nestedness? Is their intimate ability as a competitive advantage for some of these starts? How do you look at that? Because startups, they're using open source. They want to have a land position in an enterprise, but how do they create that sustainable competitive advantage going forward? Because again, this is what you do. You bet on ones that you can see that could establish a model whatever we want to call it, but a competitive advantage and ongoing nested position. >> Sometimes it has to do with data, John, and so you mentioned Snowflake a couple of times here, a big part of Snowflake's strategy is what they now call the data cloud. And one of the reasons you go there is not to just be able to process data, to actually get access to it, exchange with the partners. And then that of course is a great reason for the customers to come to the Snowflake platform. And so the more data it gets more customers, it gets more data, the whole thing start spinning in the right direction. That's a really big example, but all of these startups that are using ML in a fundamental way, applying it in a novel way, the data modes are really important. So getting to the right data sources and training on it, and then putting it to work so that you can see that in this process better and doing this earlier on that scale. That's a big part of success. Another company that I work with is a good example that I call (indistinct) which works in sales technology space, really crushing it in terms of building better sales organizations both at performance level, in terms of the intelligence level, and just overall revenue attainment using ML, and using novel data sources, like the previously lost data or phone calls or Zoom calls as you already know. So I think the data advantages are really big. And smart startups are thinking through it early. >> It's interest-- >> And they're planning by the way, not to ramble on too much, but they're betting that PLG strategy. So their land option is designed not just to be an interesting way to gain usage, but it's also a way to gain access to data that then enables the expand in a component. >> That is a huge call-out point there, I was going to ask another question, but I think that is the key I see. It's a new go to market in a way. product led with that kind of approach gets you a beachhead and you get a little position, you get some data that is a cloud model, it means variable, whatever you want to call it variable value proposition, value proof, or whatever, getting that data and reiterating it. So it brings up the whole philosophical question of okay, product led growth, I love that with product led growth of data, I get that. Remember the old platform versus a tool? That's the way buyers used to think. How has that changed? 'Cause now almost, this conversation throws out the whole platform thing, but isn't like a platform. >> It looks like it's all. (laughs) you can if it is a platform, though to do that you can reveal that later, but you're looking for adoption, so if it's down stock product, you're looking for adoption by like developers or DevOps people or SOEs, and they're trying to solve a problem, and they want rapid gratification. So they don't want to have an architectural boomimg, placed in front of them. And if it's up stock product and application, then it's a user or the business or whatever that is, is adopting the application. And again, they're trying to solve a very specific problem. You need instant and immediate obvious time and value. And now you have a ticket to the dance and build on that and maybe a platform strategy can gradually take shape. But you know who's not in this conversation is the CIO, it's like, "I'm always the last to know." >> That's the CISO though. And they got him there on the firing lines. CISOs are buying tools like it's nobody's business. They need everything. They'll buy anything or you go meet with sand, they'll buy it. >> And you make it sound so easy. (laughing) We do a lot of security investment if only (indistinct) (laughing) >> I'm a little bit over the top, but CISOs are under a lot of pressure. I would talk to the CISO at Capital One and he was saying that he's on Amazon, now he's going to another cloud, not as a hedge, but he doesn't want to focus development teams. So he's making human resource decisions as well. Again, back to what IT used to be back in the old days where you made a vendor decision, you built around it. So again, clouds play that way. I see that happening. But the question is that I think you nailed this whole idea of cross hairs on the target persona, because you got to know who you are and then go to the market. So if you know you're a problem solving and the lower in the stack, do it and get a beachhead. That's a strategy, you can do that. You can't try to be the platform and then solve a problem at the same time. So you got to be careful. Is that what you were getting at? >> Well, I think you just understand what you're trying to achieve in that line of notion. And how those dynamics work and you just can't drag it out. And they could make it too difficult. Another company I work with is a very strategic cloud data platform. It's a (indistinct) on systems. We're not trying to foist that vision though (laughs) or not adopters today. We're solving some thorny problems with them in the short term, rapid time to value operational needs in scale. And then yeah, once they found success with (indistinct) there's would be an opportunity to be increasing the platform, and an obstacle for those customers. But we're not talking about that. >> Well, Peter, I appreciate you taking the time and coming out of a board meeting, I know that you're super busy and I really appreciate you making time for us. I know you've got an impressive partner in (indistinct) who's a former Sequoia, but Redback Networks part of that company over the years, you guys are doing extremely well, even a unique investment thesis. I'd like you to put the plug in for the firm. I think you guys have a good approach. I like what you guys are doing. You're humble, you don't brag a lot, but you make a lot of great investments. So could you take them in to explain what your investment thesis is and then how that relates to how an enterprise is making their investment thesis? >> Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, the concept that I described earlier that the modern enterprise movement as a workplace built on data powered by AI. That's what we're trying to work with founders to enable. And also we're investing in companies that build the products and services that enable that modern enterprise to exist. And we do it from very early stages, but with a longterm outlook. So we'll be leading series and series, rounds of investment but staying deeply involved, both operationally financially throughout the whole life cycle of the company. And then we've done that a bunch of times, our goal is always the big independent public company and they don't always make it but enough for them to have it all be worthwhile. An interesting special case of this, and by the way, I think it intersects with some of startup showcase here is in the life sciences. And I know you were highlighting a lot of healthcare websites and deals, and that's a vertical where to disrupt tremendous impact of data both new data availability and new ways to put it to use. I know several of my partners are very focused on that. They call it bio-X data. It's a transformation all on its own. >> That's awesome. And I think that the reason why we're focusing on these verticals is if you have a cloud horizontal scale view and vertically specialized with machine learning, every vertical is impacted by data. It's so interesting that I think, first start, I was probably best time to be a cloud startup right now. I really am bullish on it. So I appreciate you taking the time Peter to come in again from your board meeting, popping out. Thanks for-- (indistinct) Go back in and approve those stock options for all the employees. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> All right, thank you John, it's a pleasure. >> Okay, Peter Wagner, Premier VC, very humble Wing.VC is a great firm. Really respect them. They do a lot of great investing investments, Snowflake, and we have Dave Vellante back who knows a lot about Snowflake's been covering like a blanket and Sarbjeet Johal. Cloud Influencer friend of the CUBE. Cloud commentator and cloud experience built clouds, runs clouds now invests. So V. Dave, thanks for coming back on. You heard Peter Wagner at Wing VC. These guys have their roots in networking, which networking back in the day was, V. Dave. You remember the internet Cisco days, remember Cisco, Wellfleet routers. I think Peter invested in Arrow Point, remember Arrow Point, that was about in the 495 belt where you were. >> Lynch's company. >> That was Chris Lynch's company. I think, was he a sales guy there? (indistinct) >> That was his first big hit I think. >> All right, well guys, let's wrap this up. We've got a great program here. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. >> No worries. Glad to be here todays. >> Hey, Sarbjeet. >> First of all, really appreciate the Twitter activity lately on the commentary, the observability piece on Jeremy Burton's launch, Dave was phenomenal, but Peter was talking about this dynamic and I think ties this cracking the code thing together, which is there's a product led strategy that feels like a platform, but it's also a tool. In other words, it's not mutually exclusive, the old methods thrown out the window. Land in an account, know what problem you're solving. If you're below the stack, nail it, get data and go from there. If you're a process improvement up the stack, you have to much more of a platform longer-term sale, more business oriented, different motions, different mechanics. What do you think about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, I was thinking about this when I was listening to some of the startups pitching, if you will, or talking about what they bring to the table in this cloud scale or cloud era, if you will. And there are tools, there are applications and then they're big monolithic platforms, if you will. And then they're part of the ecosystem. So I think the companies need to know where they play. A startup cannot be platform from the get-go I believe. Now many aspire to be, but they have to start with tooling. I believe in, especially in B2B side of things, and then go into the applications, one way is to go into the application area, if you will, like a very precise use cases for certain verticals and stuff like that. And other parties that are going into the platform, which is like horizontal play, if you will, in technology. So I think they have to understand their age, like how old they are, how new they are, how small they are, because when their size matter when you are procuring as a big business, procuring your technology vendors size matters and the economic viability matters and their proximity to other windows matter as well. So I think we'll jump into that in other discussions later, but I think that's key, as you said. >> I would agree with that. I would phrase it in my mind, somewhat differently from Sarbjeet which is you have product led growth, and that's your early phase and you get product market fit, you get product led growth, and then you expand and there are many, many examples of this, and that's when you... As part of your team expansion strategy, you're going to get into the platform discussion. There's so many examples of that. You take a look at Ali Ghodsi today with what's happening at Databricks, Snowflake is another good example. They've started with product led growth. And then now they're like, "Okay, we've got to expand the team." Okta is another example that just acquired zero. That's about building out the platform, versus more of a point product. And there's just many, many examples of that, but you cannot to your point, very hard to start with a platform. Arm did it, but that was like a one in a million chance. >> It's just harder, especially if it's new and it's not operationalized yet. So one of the things Dave that we've observed the Cloud is some of the best known successes where nobody's not known at all, database we've been covering from the beginning 'cause we were close to that movement when they came out of Berkeley. But they still were misunderstood and they just started generating revenue in only last year. So again, only a few years ago, zero software revenue, now they're approaching a billion dollars. So it's not easy to make these vendor selections anymore. And if you're new and you don't have someone to operate it or your there's no department and the departments changing, that's another problem. These are all like enterprisey problems. What's your thoughts on that, Dave? >> Well, I think there's a big discussion right now when you've been talking all day about how should enterprise think about startups and think about most of these startups they're software companies and software is very capital efficient business. At the same time, these companies are raising hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion dollars before they go to IPO. Why is that? A lot of it's going to promotion. I look at it as... And there's a big discussion going on but well, maybe sales can be more efficient and more direct and so forth. I really think it comes down to the golden rule. Two things really mattered in the early days in the startup it's sales and engineering. And writers should probably say engineering and sales and start with engineering. And then you got to figure out your go to market. Everything else is peripheral to those two and you don't get those two things right, you struggle. And I think that's what some of these successful startups are proving. >> Sarbjeet, what's your take on that point? >> Could you repeat the point again? Sorry, I lost-- >> As cloud scale comes in this whole idea of competing, the roles are changing. So look at IOT, look at the Edge, for instance, you got all kinds of new use cases that no one actually knows is a problem to solve. It's just pure opportunity. So there's no one's operational I could have a product, but it don't know we can buy it yet. It's a problem. >> Yeah, I think the solutions have to be point solutions and the startups need to focus on the practitioners, number one, not the big buyers, not the IT, if you will, but the line of business, even within that sphere, like just focus on the practitioners who are going to use that technology. I talked to, I think it wasn't Fiddler, no, it was CoreLogics. I think that story was great today earlier in how they kind of struggle in the beginning, they were trying to do a big bang approach as a startup, but then they almost stumbled. And then they found their mojo, if you will. They went to Don the market, actually, that's a very classic theory of disruption, like what we study from Harvard School of Business that you go down the market, go to the non-consumers, because if you're trying to compete head to head with big guys. Because most of the big guys have lot of feature and functionality, especially at the platform level. And if you're trying to innovate in that space, you have to go to the practitioners and solve their core problems and then learn and expand kind of thing. So I think you have to focus on practitioners a lot more than the traditional oracle buyers. >> Sarbjeet, we had a great thread last night in Twitter, on observability that you started. And there's a couple of examples there. Chaos searches and relatively small company right now, they just raised them though. And they're part of this star showcase. And they could've said, "Hey, we're going to go after Splunk." But they chose not to. They said, "Okay, let's kind of disrupt the elk stack and simplify that." Another example is a company observed, you've mentioned Jeremy Burton's company, John. They're focused really on SAS companies. They're not going after initially these complicated enterprise deals because they got to get it right or else they'll get churn, and churn is that silent killer of software companies. >> The interesting other company that was on the showcase was Tetra Science. I don't know if you noticed that one in the life science track, and again, Peter Wagner pointed out the life science. That's an under recognized in the press vertical that's exploding. Certainly during the pandemic you saw it, Tetra science is an R&D cloud, Dave, R&D data cloud. So pharmaceuticals, they need to do their research. So the pandemic has brought to life, this now notion of tapping into data resources, not just data lakes, but like real deal. >> Yeah, you and Natalie and I were talking about that this morning and that's one of the opportunities for R&D and you have all these different data sources and yeah, it's not just about the data lake. It's about the ecosystem that you're building around them. And I see, it's really interesting to juxtapose what Databricks is doing and what Snowflake is doing. They've got different strategies, but they play a part there. You can see how ecosystems can build that system. It's not one company is going to solve all these problems. It's going to really have to be connections across these various companies. And that's what the Cloud enables and ecosystems have all this data flowing that can really drive new insights. >> And I want to call your attention to a tweet Sarbjeet you wrote about Splunk's earnings and they're data companies as well. They got Teresa Carlson there now AWS as the president, working with Doug, that should change the game a little bit more. But there was a thread of the neath there. Andy Thry says to replies to Dave you or Sarbjeet, you, if you're on AWS, they're a fine solution. The world doesn't just revolve around AWS, smiley face. Well, a lot of it does actually. So (laughing) nice point, Andy. But he brings up this thing and Ali brought it up too, Hybrid now is a new operating system for what now Edge does. So we got Mobile World Congress happening this month in person. This whole Telco 5G brings up a whole nother piece of the Cloud puzzle. Jeff Barr pointed out in his keynote, Dave. Guys, I want to get your reaction. The Edge now is... I'm calling it the super Edge because it's not just Edge as we know it before. You're going to have these pops, these points of presence that are going to have wavelength as your spectrum or whatever they have. I think that's the solution for Azure. So you're going to have all this new cloud power for low latency applications. Self-driving delivery VR, AR, gaming, Telemetry data from Teslas, you name it, it's happening. This is huge, what's your thoughts? Sarbjeet, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I think Edge is like bound to happen. And for many reasons, the volume of data is increasing. Our use cases are also expanding if you will, with the democratization of computer analysis. Specialization of computer, actually Dave wrote extensively about how Intel and other chip players are gearing up for that future if you will. Most of the inference in the AI world will happen in the field close to the workloads if you will, that can be mobility, the self-driving car that can be AR, VR. It can be healthcare. It can be gaming, you name it. Those are the few use cases, which are in the forefront and what alarm or use cases will come into the play I believe. I've said this many times, Edge, I think it will be dominated by the hyperscalers, mainly because they're building their Metro data centers now. And with a very low latency in the Metro areas where the population is, we're serving the people still, not the machines yet, or the empty areas where there is no population. So wherever the population is, all these big players are putting their data centers there. And I think they will dominate the Edge. And I know some Edge lovers. (indistinct) >> Edge huggers. >> Edge huggers, yeah. They don't like the hyperscalers story, but I think that's the way were' going. Why would we go backwards? >> I think you're right, first of all, I agree with the hyperscale dying you look at the top three clouds right now. They're all in the Edge, Hardcore it's a huge competitive battleground, Dave. And I think the missing piece, that's going to be uncovered at Mobile Congress. Maybe they'll miss it this year, but it's the developer traction, whoever wins the developer market or wins the loyalty, winning over the market or having adoption. The applications will drive the Edge. >> And I would add the fourth cloud is Alibaba. Alibaba is actually bigger than Google and they're crushing it as well. But I would say this, first of all, it's popular to say, "Oh not everything's going to move into the Cloud, John, Dave, Sarbjeet." But the fact is that AWS they're trend setter. They are crushing it in terms of features. And you'd look at what they're doing in the plumbing with Annapurna. Everybody's following suit. So you can't just ignore that, number one. Second thing is what is the Edge? Well, the edge is... Where's the logical place to process the data? That's what the Edge is. And I think to your point, both Sarbjeet and John, the Edge is going to be won by developers. It's going to be one by programmability and it's going to be low cost and really super efficient. And most of the data is going to stay at the Edge. And so who is in the best position to actually create that? Is it going to be somebody who was taking an x86 box and throw it over the fence and give it a fancy name with the Edge in it and saying, "Here's our Edge box." No, that's not what's going to win the Edge. And so I think first of all it's huge, it's wide open. And I think where's the innovation coming from? I agree with you it's the hyperscalers. >> I think the developers as John said, developers are the kingmakers. They build the solutions. And in that context, I always talk about the skills gravity, a lot of people are educated in certain technologies and they will keep using those technologies. Their proximity to that technology is huge and they don't want to learn something new. So as humans we just tend to go what we know how to use it. So from that front, I usually talk with consumption economics of cloud and Edge. It has to focus on the practitioners. And in this case, practitioners are developers because you're just cooking up those solutions right now. We're not serving that in huge quantity right now, but-- >> Well, let's unpack that Sarbjeet, let's unpack that 'cause I think you're right on the money on that. The consumption of the tech and also the consumption of the application, the end use and end user. And I think the reason why hyperscalers will continue to dominate besides the fact that they have all the resource and they're going to bring that to the Edge, is that the developers are going to be driving the applications at the Edge. So if you're low latency Edge, that's going to open up new applications, not just the obvious ones I did mention, gaming, VR, AR, metaverse and other things that are obvious. There's going to be non-obvious things that are going to be huge that are going to come out from the developers. But the Cloud native aspect of the hyperscalers, to me is where the scales are tipping, let me explain. IT was built to build a supply resource to the businesses who were writing business applications. Mostly driven by IBM in the mainframe in the old days, Dave, and then IT became IT. Telcos have been OT closed, "This is our thing, that's it." Now they have to open up. And the Cloud native technologies is the fastest way to value. And I think that paths, Sarbjeet is going to be defined by this new developer and this new super Edge concept. So I think it's going to be wide open. I don't know what to say. I can't guess, but it's going to be creative. >> Let me ask you a question. You said years ago, data's new development kit, does low code and no code to Sarbjeet's point, change the equation? In other words, putting data in the hands of those OT professionals, those practitioners who have the context. Does low-code and no-code enable, more of those protocols? I know it's a bromide, but the citizen developer, and what impact does that have? And who's in the best position? >> Well, I think that anything that reduces friction to getting stuff out there that can be automated, will increase the value. And then the question is, that's not even a debate. That's just fact that's going to be like rent, massive rise. Then the issue comes down to who has the best asset? The software asset that's eating the world or the tower and the physical infrastructure. So if the physical infrastructure aka the Telcos, can't generate value fast enough, in my opinion, the private equity will come in and take it over, and then refactor that business model to take advantage of the over the top software model. That to me is the big stare down competition between the Telco world and this new cloud native, whichever one yields in valley is going to blink first, if you say. And I think the Cloud native wins this one hands down because the assets are valuable, but only if they enable the new model. If the old model tries to hang on to the old hog, the old model as the Edge hugger, as Sarbjeet says, they'll just going to slowly milk that cow dry. So it's like, it's over. So to me, they have to move. And I think this Mobile World Congress day, we will see, we will be looking for that. >> Yeah, I think that in the Mobile World Congress context, I think Telcos should partner with the hyperscalers very closely like everybody else has. And they have to cave in. (laughs) I usually say that to them, like the people came in IBM tried to fight and they cave in. Other second tier vendors tried to fight the big cloud vendors like top three or four. And then they cave in. okay, we will serve our stuff through your cloud. And that's where all the buyers are congregating. They're going to buy stuff along with the skills gravity, the feature proximity. I've got another term I'll turn a coin. It matters a lot when you're doing one thing and you want to do another thing when you're doing all this transactional stuff and regular stuff, and now you want to do data science, where do you go? You go next to it, wherever you have been. Your skills are in that same bucket. And then also you don't have to write a new contract with a new vendor, you just go there. So in order to serve, this is a lesson for startups as well. You need to prepare yourself for being in the Cloud marketplaces. You cannot go alone independently to fight. >> Cloud marketplace is going to replace procurement, for sure, we know that. And this brings up the point, Dave, we talked about years ago, remember on the CUBE. We said, there's going to be Tier two clouds. I used that word in quotes cause nothing... What does it even mean Tier two. And we were talking about like Amazon, versus Microsoft and Google. We set at the time and Alibaba but they're in China, put that aside for a second, but the big three. They're going to win it all. And they're all going to be successful to a relative terms, but whoever can enable that second tier. And it ended up happening, Snowflake is that example. As is Databricks as is others. So Google and Microsoft as fast as they can replicate the success of AWS by enabling someone to build their business on their cloud in a way that allows the customer to refactor their business will win. They will win most of the lion's share my opinion. So I think that applies to the Edge as well. So whoever can come in and say... Whichever cloud says, "I'm going to enable the next Snowflake, the next enterprise solution." I think takes it. >> Well, I think that it comes back... Every conversation coming back to the data. And if you think about the prevailing way in which we treated data with the exceptions of the two data driven companies in their quotes is as we've shoved all the data into some single repository and tried to come up with a single version of the truth and it's adjudicated by a centralized team, with hyper specialized roles. And then guess what? The line of business, there's no context for the business in that data architecture or data Corpus, if you will. And then the time it takes to go from idea for a data product or data service commoditization is way too long. And that's changing. And the winners are going to be the ones who are able to exploit this notion of leaving data where it is, the point about data gravity or courting a new term. I liked that, I think you said skills gravity. And then enabling the business lines to have access to their own data teams. That's exactly what Ali Ghodsi, he was saying this morning. And really having the ability to create their own data products without having to go bow down to an ivory tower. That is an emerging model. All right, well guys, I really appreciate the wrap up here, Dave and Sarbjeet. I'd love to get your final thoughts. I'll just start by saying that one of the highlights for me was the luminary guests size of 15 great companies, the luminary guests we had from our community on our keynotes today, but Ali Ghodsi said, "Don't listen to what everyone's saying in the press." That was his position. He says, "You got to figure out where the puck's going." He didn't say that, but I'm saying, I'm paraphrasing what he said. And I love how he brought up Sky Cloud. I call it Sky net. That's an interesting philosophy. And then he also brought up that machine learning auto ML has got to be table stakes. So I think to me, that's the highlight walk away. And the second one is this idea that the enterprises have to have a new way to procure and not just the consumption, but some vendor selection. I think it's going to be very interesting as value can be proved with data. So maybe the procurement process becomes, here's a beachhead, here's a little bit of data. Let me see what it can do. >> I would say... Again, I said it was this morning, that the big four have given... Last year they spent a hundred billion dollars more on CapEx. To me, that's a gift. In so many companies, especially focusing on trying to hang onto the legacy business. They're saying, "Well not everything's going to move to the Cloud." Whatever, the narrative should change to, "Hey, thank you for that gift. We're now going to build value on top of the Cloud." Ali Ghodsi laid that out, how Databricks is doing it. And it's clearly what Snowflake's new with the data cloud. It basically a layer that abstracts all that underlying complexity and add value on top. Eventually going out to the Edge. That's a value added model that's enabled by the hyperscalers. And that to me, if I have to evaluate where I'm going to place my bets as a CIO or IT practitioner, I'm going to look at who are the ones that are actually embracing that investment that's been made and adding value on top in a way that can drive my data-driven, my digital business or whatever buzzword you want to throw on. >> Yeah, I think we were talking about the startups in today's sessions. I think for startups, my advice is to be as close as you can be to hyperscalers and anybody who awards them, they will cave in at the end of the day, because that's where the whole span of gravity is. That's what the innovation gravity is, everybody's gravitating towards that. And I would say quite a few times in the last couple of years that the rate of innovation happening in a non-cloud companies, when I talk about non-cloud means are not public companies. I think it's like diminishing, if you will, as compared to in cloud, there's a lot of innovation. The Cloud companies are not paying by power people anymore. They have all sophisticated platforms and leverage those, and also leverage the marketplaces and leverage their buyers. And the key will be how you highlight yourself in that cloud market place if you will. It's like in a grocery store where your product is placed and you have to market around it, and you have to have a good story telling team in place as well after you do the product market fit. I think that's a key. I think just being close to the Cloud providers, that's the way to go for startups. >> Real, real quick. Each of you talk about what it takes to crack the code for the enterprise in the modern era now. Dave, we'll start with you. What's it take? (indistinct) >> You got to have it be solving a problem that is 10X better at one 10th a cost of anybody else, if you're a small company, that rule number one. Number two is you obviously got to get product market fit. You got to then figure out. And I think, and again, you're in your early phases, you have to be almost processed builders, figure out... Your KPIs should all be built around retention. How do I define customer success? How do I keep customers and how do I make them loyal so that I know that my cost of acquisition is going to be at least one-third or lower than my lifetime value of that customer? So you've got to nail that. And then once you nail that, you've got to codify that process in the next phase, which really probably gets into your platform discussion. And that's really where you can start to standardize and scale and figure out your go to market and the relationship between marketing spend and sales productivity. And then when you get that, then you got to move on to figure out your Mot. Your Mot might just be a brand. It might be some secret sauce, but more often than not though, it's going to be the relationship that you build. And I think you've got to think about those phases and in today's world, you got to move really fast. Sarbjeet, real quick. What's the secret to crack the code? >> I think the secret to crack the code is partnership and alliances. As a small company selling to the bigger enterprises, the vendors size will be one of the big objections. Even if they don't say it, it's on the back of their mind, "What if these guys disappear tomorrow what would we do if we pick this technology?" And another thing is like, if you're building on the left side, which is the developer side, not on the right side, which is the operations or production side, if you will, you have to understand the sales cycles are longer on the right side and left side is easier to get to, but that's why we see a lot more startups. And on the left side of your DevOps space, if you will, because it's easier to sell to practitioners and market to them and then show the value correctly. And also understand that on the left side, the developers are very know how hungry, on the right side people are very cost-conscious. So understanding the traits of these different personas, if you will buyers, it will, I think set you apart. And as Dave said, you have to solve a problem, focus on practitioners first, because you're small. You have to solve political problems very well. And then you can expand. >> Well, guys, I really appreciate the time. Dave, we're going to do more of these, Sarbjeet we're going to do more of these. We're going to add more community to it. We're going to add our community rooms next time. We're going to do these quarterly and try to do them as more frequently, we learned a lot and we still got a lot more to learn. There's a lot more contribution out in the community that we're going to tap into. Certainly the CUBE Club as we call it, Dave. We're going to build this actively around Cloud. This is another 20 years. The Edge brings us more life with Cloud, it's really exciting. And again, enterprise is no longer an enterprise, it's just the world now. So great companies here, the next Databricks, the next IPO. The next big thing is in this list, Dave. >> Hey, John, we'll see you in Barcelona. Looking forward to that. Sarbjeet, I know in a second half, we're going to run into each other. So (indistinct) thank you John. >> Trouble has started. Great talking to you guys today and have fun in Barcelona and keep us informed. >> Thanks for coming. I want to thank Natalie Erlich who's in Rome right now. She's probably well past her bedtime, but she kicked it off and emceeing and hosting with Dave and I for this AW startup showcase. This is batch two episode two day. What do we call this? It's like a release so that the next 15 startups are coming. So we'll figure it out. (laughs) Thanks for watching everyone. Thanks. (bright music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to today's session of the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in AI, Security, & Life Sciences. Today we're featuring Protegrity for the life sciences track. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich, and now we're joined by our guest, Rick Farnell, the CEO of Protegrity. Thank you so much for being with us. >> Great to be here. Thanks so much Natalie, great to be on theCUBE. >> Yeah, great, and so we're going to talk today about the ransomware game, and how it has changed with kinetic data protection. So, the title of today's video segment makes a bold claim, how are kinetic data and ransomware connected? >> So first off kinetic data, data is in use, it's moving, it's not static, it's no longer sitting still, and your data protection has to adhere to those same standards. And I think if you kind of look at what's happening in the ransomware kind of attacks, there's a couple of different things going on, which is number one, bad actors are getting access to data in the clear, and they're holding that data ransom, and threatening to release that data. So kind of from a Protegrity standpoint, with our protection capabilities, that data would be rendered useless to them in that scenario. So there's lots of ways in which kind of backup data protection, really wonderful opportunities to do both data protection and kind of that backup mixed together really is a wonderful solution to the threat of ransomware. And it's a serious issue and it's not just targeting the most highly regulated industries and customers, we're seeing kind of attacks on pipeline and ferry companies, and really there is no end to where some of these bad actors are really focusing on and the damages can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and last for years after from a brand reputation. So I think if you look at how data is used today, there's that kind of opposing forces where the business wants to use data at the speed of light to produce more machine learning, and more artificial intelligence, and predict where customers are going to be, and have wonderful services at their fingertips. But at the same time, they really want to protect their data, and sometimes those architectures can be at odds, and at Protegrity, we're really focusing on solving that problem. So free up your data to be used in artificial intelligence and machine learning, while making sure that it is absolutely bulletproof from some of these ransomware attacks. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring a really fascinating point that's really central to your business. Could you tell us more about how you're actually making that data worthless? I mean, that sounds really revolutionary. >> So, it sounds novel, right? To kind of make your data worthless in the wrong hands. And I think from a Protegrity perspective, our kind of policy and protection capability follows the individual piece of data no matter where it lives in the architecture. And we do a ton of work as the world does with Amazon Web Services, so kind of helping customers really blend their hybrid cloud strategies with their on-premise and their use of AWS, is something that we thrive at. So protecting that data, not just at rest or while it's in motion, but it's a continuous protection policy that we can basically preserve the privacy of the data but still keep it unique for use in downstream analytics and machine learning. >> Right, well, traditional security is rather stifling, so how can we fix this, and what are you doing to amend that? >> Well, I think if you look at cybersecurity, and we certainly play a big role in the cybersecurity world but like any industry, there are many layers. And traditional cybersecurity investment has been at the perimeter level, at the network level keeping bad actors out, and once people do get through some of those fences, if your data is not protected at a fine grain level, they have access to it. And I think from our standpoint, yes, we're last line of defense but at the same time, we partner with folks in the cybersecurity industry and with AWS and with others in the backup and recovery to give customers that level of protection, but still allow their kinetic data to be utilized in downstream analytics. >> Right, well, I'd love to hear more about the types of industries that you're helping, and specifically healthcare obviously, a really big subject for the year and probably now for years to come, how is this industry using kinetic protection at the moment? >> So certainly, as you mentioned, some of the most highly regulated industries are our sweet spot. So financial services, insurance, online retail, and healthcare, or any industry that has sensitive data and sensitive customer data, so think first name last name, credit card information, national ID number, social security number blood type, cancer type. That's all sensitive information that you as an organization want to protect. So in the healthcare space, specifically, some of the largest healthcare organizations in the world rely on Protegrity to provide that level of protection, but at the same time, give them the business flexibility to utilize that data. So one of our customers, one of the leaders in online prescriptions, and that is an AWS customer, to allow a wonderful service to be delivered to all of their customers while maintaining protection. If you think about sharing data on your watch with your insurance provider, we have lots of customers that bridge that gap and have that personal data coming in to the insurance companies. All the way to, if in a use case in the future, looking at the pandemic, if you have to prove that you've been vaccinated, we're talking about some sensitive information, so you want to be able to show that information but still have the confidence that it's not going to be used for nefarious purposes. >> Right, and what is next for Protegrity? >> Well, I think continuing on our journey, we've been around for 17 years now, and I think the last couple, there's been an absolute renaissance in fine-grained data protection or that connected data protection, and organizations are recognizing that continuing to protect your perimeter, continuing to protect your firewalls, that's not going to go away anytime soon. Your access points, your points of vulnerability to keep bad actors out, but at the same time, recognizing that the data itself needs to be protected but with that balance of utilizing it downstream for analytic purposes, for machine learning, for artificial intelligence. Keeping the data of hundreds of millions if not billions of people saved, that's what we do. If you were to add up the customers of all of our customers, the largest banks, the largest insurance companies, largest healthcare companies in the world, globally, we're protecting the private data of billions of human beings. And it doesn't just stop there, I think you asked a great question about kind of the industry and yes, insurance, healthcare, retail, where there's a lot of sensitive data that certainly can be a focus point. But in the IOT space, kind of if you think about GPS location or geolocation, if you think about a device, and what it does, and the intelligence that it has, and the decisions that it makes on the fly, protecting data and keeping that safe is not just a personal thing, we're stepping into intellectual property and some of the most valuable assets that companies have, which is their decision-making on how they use data and how they deliver an experience, and I think that's why there's been such a renaissance, if you will, in kind of that fine grain data protection that we provide. >> Yeah, well, what is Protegrity's role now in future proofing businesses against cyber attacks? I mean, you mentioned really the ramifications of that and the impact it can have on businesses, but also on governments. I mean, obviously this is really critical. >> So there's kind of a three-step approach, and this is something that we have certainly kind of felt for a long, long time, and we work on with our customers. One is having that fine-grain data protection. So tokenizing your data so that if someone were to get your data, it's worthless, unless they have the ability to unlock every single individual piece of data. So that's number one, and then that's kind of what Protegrity provides. Number two, having a wonderful backup capability to roll kind of an active-active, AWS being one of the major clouds in the world where we deploy our software regularly and work with our customers, having multi-regions, multi-capabilities for an active-active scenario where if there's something that goes down or happens you can bring that down and bring in a new environment up. And then third is kind of malware detection in the rest of the cyber world to make sure that you rinse kind of your architecture from some of those agents. And I think when you kind of look at it, ransomware, they take data, they encrypt your data, so they force you to give them Bitcoin, or whatnot, or they'll release some of your data. And if that data is rendered useless, that's one huge step in kind of your discussions with these nefarious actors and be like you could release it, but there's nothing there, you're not going to see anything. And then second, if you have a wonderful backup capability where you wind down that environment that has been infiltrated, prove that this new environment is safe, have your production data have rolling and then wind that back up, you're back in business. You don't have to notify your customers, you don't have to deal with the ransomware players. So it's really a three-step process but ultimately it starts with protecting your data and tokenizing your data, and that's something that Protegrity does really, really well. >> So you're basically able to eliminate the financial impact of a breach? >> Honestly, we dramatically reduce the risk of customers being at risk for ransomware attacks 100%. Now, tokenizing data and moving that direction is something that it's not trivial, we are literally replacing production data with a token and then making sure that all downstream applications have the ability to utilize that, and make sure that the analytic systems and machine learning systems, and artificial intelligence applications that are built downstream on that data have the ability to execute, but that is something that from our patent portfolio and what we provide to our customers, again, some of the largest organizations in retail, in financial services, in banking, and in healthcare, we've been doing that for a long time. We're not just saying that we can do this and we're in version one of our product, we've been doing this for years, supporting the largest organizations with a 24 by seven capability. >> Right, and tell us a bit about the competitive landscape, where do you see your offering compared to your competitors? >> So, kind of historically back, let's call it an era ago maybe even before cloud even became a thing, and hybrid cloud, there were a handful of players that could acquire into much larger organizations, those organizations have been dusting off those acquired assets, and we're seeing them come back in. There's some new entrants into our space that have some protection mechanisms, whether it be encryption, or whether it be anonymization, but unless you're doing fine grain tokenization, you're not going to be able to allow that data to participate in the artificial intelligence world. So, we see kind of a range of competition there. And then I'd say probably the biggest competitor, Natalie, is customers not doing tokenization. They're saying, "No, we're okay, we'll continue protecting our firewall, we'll continue protecting our access points, we'll invest a little bit more in maybe some governance, but that fine grain data protection, maybe it's not for us." And that is the big shift that's happening. You look at kind of the beginning of this year with the solar winds attack, and the vulnerability that caused the very large and important organizations found themselves the last few weeks with all the ransomware attacks that are happening on meat processing plants and facilities, shutting down meat production, pipeline, stopping oil and gas and kind of that. So we're seeing a complete shift in the types of organizations and the industries that need to protect their data. It's not just the healthcare organizations, or the banks, or the credit card companies, it is every single industry, every single size company. >> Right, and I got to ask you this questioning, what is your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Well, ultimately we kind of have a charge here at Protegrity where we feel like we protect the world's most sensitive data. And when we come into work every day, that's what every single employee thinks at Protegrity. We are standing behind billions of individuals who are customers of our customers, and that's a cultural thing for us, and we take that very serious. We have maniacal customer support supporting our biggest customers with a fall of the sun 24 by seven global capability. So that's number one. So, I think our part in this is really helping to educate the world that there is a solution for this ransomware and for some of these things that don't have to happen. Now, naturally with any solution, there's going to be some investment, there's going to be some architecture changes, but with partnerships like AWS, and our partnership with pretty much every data provider, data storage provider, data solution provider in the world, we want to provide fine-grain data protection, any data in any system on any platform. And that's our mission. >> Well, Rick Farnell, this has been really fascinating conversation with you, thank you so much. The CEO of Protegrity, really great to have you on this program for the AWS Startup Showcase, talking about how ransomware game has changed with the kinetic data protection. Really appreciate it. Again, I'm your host Natalie Erlich, thank you again very much for watching. (light music)

>> Welcome to today's session of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, The Next Big Thing in AI, Security and Life Sciences. Today featuring Lacework for the security track. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thank you for joining us. And we will discuss today how LendingTree automates AWS security for DevOps teams and stays compliant with Lacework. Now we're joined by Adam Leftik the VP of Product at Lacework as well as a Arun Sankaran, CISO of LendingTree. Thank you both very much for joining us today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, wonderful. Adam, let's start with you. Lacework positions itself as, "cloud security at the speed of cloud innovation." What does that mean to you and how are you helping your customers? >> Great question, Natalie. I think one of the things that's really important to understand about Lacework really comes back to essentially what's happening at cloud speed, which is customers are aggressively moving more and more of their applications to the cloud, but they're doing so with the same number of resources to secure that environment. And as the cloud continues to grow, both in terms of complexity, as well as overall ability to unlock new styles of applications that were never before even possible without this new technology landscape. Fundamentally, Lacework is designed to enable those builders to go faster without worrying about all the different intricacies and threats that they face out there on the internet. And so the core mission of Lacework is really about enabling builders to build those applications and leverage those cloud resources and new cloud technologies to move quicker and quicker. >> Natalie: Fascinating. >> Yeah, thanks. If you go back to the sort of foundation of the company there we took a very different approach to how we think about security. Often, you know, security approaches in the past have been a rules driven model where you try and think of all the different vectors that attacks can come at. And fundamentally, you end up writing a series of these rules that are impossible to maintain, they atrophy over time, and that you can't possibly think ahead of all these nefarious actors. So one of the things that Lacework did from the very beginning was take a very different approach which is leveraging security as a data problem. And the way we do this is through what we refer to as our polygraph. And the polygraph essentially looks at all the exhaust telemetry that we're able to ingest both from your cloud accounts as well as the underlying infrastructure. And we take that and we build a baseline and a behavioral model for how the application should behave when it's normal. And this baseline represents the state of normalcy. And so then we leverage modern data science techniques to essentially build a model that can identify potential threats without requiring our users to build rules and ultimately play catch up to all the different threats that they face. And this is a really, really powerful capability because it allows our customers both to identify misconfigurations and remediate them, monitor all the activity to reduce the overall overhead on their security organization, and of course help them build faster and identify threats as they come into the system. And we differentiate in lots of different ways as well. So one of the things we're looking to do as part of the overall cloud transformation is really meet the DevOps teams and the security teams where they are. And so all of the information that Lacework captures, synthesizes, and produce through our automation ultimately feed into the different channels that our users are really leveraging that skill today. Whether that's through their ChatOps windows or ultimately into their CICD pipeline so that we give broad coverage both at build time as well as run time and give them full visibility and insights and the ability to remediate those quickly. You know, one of the other things that we're really proud of and this is core to our product philosophy is building more and more partnerships with our customers and LendingTree is really at the forefront of that partnership and we're super excited to be partnering with them. And that's certainly something that we've done to differentiate our product offering and I'd love to hear from Arun, how have you been working with Lacework and how has that been going so far? >> Yeah, thank you, Adam. You know, frankly I think that's a huge differentiator for us. There's a lot of players that can solve technology problems but what we've really appreciated is that as a smaller shop and a smaller organization, the level of connectedness that we feel with the development teams at Lacework. We raise a opportunity. You know, this can make things more efficient for us or this can reduce our time to triage, or this visualization or this UI could be modified to support certain security operations center use cases, maybe that's not what it's designed for. And we've enjoyed just a lot of success in kind of shaping the product in order to meet all the different use cases. And as Adam mentioned, you know, as a CISO, my primary responsibility is security, but frankly there's a lot of DevOps and tech use cases within the polygraph visualization tool, and understanding our environment and troubleshooting has frankly it saved us quite a bit of time and we're looking forward to the partnership to continue to grow out the tool. As we, as a company, scale in today's world, it's very important that we're able to scale our capability 2-3X without a corresponding 2-3X in staff and resources. I think this is the kind of tool that's going to help us get there. >> Well, speaking to you Arun, Lacework has recently grown tremendously and gotten a lot of industry attention but you saw something before everyone else. Can you tell us what really caught your attention? What stood out to you and why you decided to become an early adopter? >> Yeah, great question. Honestly, I wish it was a super tricky kind of answer but the real honest answer is it was a very easy decision because we had a need. We knew that we needed robust monitoring capability and detection of threats within containerized environments. And, you know, there are other players in the space but we have a very diverse environment. We're a combination of multiple container technologies and multiple cloud platforms. And we needed something that had the greatest diversity of coverage across our environments. And this was really the only solution that would work for us. I'd love to be able to say that it was like an aggressive bake-off and there's all these different options. But really, from a capability, and scope, and coverage, it was a fairly easy decision for us. >> And how has your threat detection and investigation process changed since you brought on Lacework? >> Yeah, it certainly has. Our environment within 24 hour period, it might generate 300, 400 million events and that's process level data from hosts and network data access. It's just a very noisy amount of alerts. With the Lacework's platform, those 300, 400 million get reduced to about a hundred alerts a day that we see and of those, five are critical and those tend to all be very actionable. So from an alert fatigue perspective, we really rely on this to give us actionable data, actionable alerts that teams can really focus on and reduces that noise. So I would say that's probably the number one way that our detection process has changed and frankly, a lot of it is what Adam mentioned as far as the underlying self-learning, self-tuning engine. There's not a whole lot of active rules that we had to create or configuration that we had to do. It's kind of a learning system and I think it's really, probably, I would estimate maybe 50-60% reduction in triage and response time for alerts as well. >> And Adam, now going to you, while 2020 was a really rough year for a lot of people, a lot of businesses, Lacework realized 300% revenue growth. So now that the economy is bouncing back and seemingly so in full force, what are your expectations for Lacework in the next year? >> Great question. I think one of the things we're seeing broadly across the industry is an acceleration, a realization that companies that are going through digital transformations have accelerated their pace and so we anticipate even faster growth. Additionally, you know, the companies that may have not been on that trajectory are now realizing that they need to move to the cloud. There's not a lot of folks right now thinking that they're going to be racking and stacking in physical data centers going forward. So we fully expect a continuation of massive growth. And increasingly as customers are moving into the cloud, they're looking for tools to help them build a secure footprint but also enable them to go faster. So, we have a point of view that we're going to continue to see this massive growth and if not, how to accelerate from here. >> Well, you're also the man behind the product. So could you go behind some of the key features that it offers? >> Sure. So, if you think about our overall product portfolio, we really have both breadth and depth. So, first and foremost, most customers who are moving to the cloud or have a large cloud footprint, the first concern they have is, do I have a series of misconfigurations? We really help our customers both identify best practices with those configurations in the cloud, and then also help them move quickly towards potential compliance standards that they need to adhere to. Everyone's operating in a regulated environment these days. And then of course, once you've got that footprint to a place where it's healthy, you really, really want to be able to monitor and track the changes to the configurations over time to ensure you're continuing to maintain that footprint. And so we provide a polygraph based model that essentially identifies potential behavioral risks that we're observing through our data clustering algorithms to help you identify potential holes that you may have created over time and help you remediate those things. And then of course, you know, every customer faces a significant challenge when it comes to just keeping up with the overall landscape changes in terms of overall vulnerability footprint in their environments. And so we have a great capability with what we call vulnerability discovery, which enables our customers to understand where they're vulnerable and not simply tell them how many vulnerabilities they have, but help them isolate, leveraging all the run time and bill time contexts we have so that they can really prioritize what's important to them and what represents the highest risk. And then of course, lastly, you know, where the company really got started is in helping customers protect their cloud workloads. And we do this by identifying threats that we're able to leverage our machine learning and data clustering algorithms so that once we have those baseline behaviors identified and modeled, we can leverage all of our threat intelligence to identify anomalies in that system and help customers really identify those risks as they're coming into the system and deal with those in a really timely manner. So those are kind of the overall key capabilities that they really help teams scale and drive their overall cloud security programs. >> And Arun, really quickly from your perspective, what is a key feature that is really beneficial to LendingTree? >> It's kind of what Adam mentioned with the kind of the self-tuning capability, the reduction of alerts and data based on behavioral-based detection versus rule-based. A lot of people have, you have fancy words, they call AI and machine learning, this and that, but I've rarely seen it work effectively. I think this is a situation where it does work really effectively and does free up time and resources on our side that we can apply to other problems we're trying to solve so I think that's the number one. >> Okay, terrific. Well, I'm really curious Adam. Got to ask you this question. I mean, we saw a really big software IPO last year. What do you think is in store for Lacework? >> Yeah, well, you know, the IPO is just a point in time as opposed to it's part of the journey. Lacework's continuing to invest and really focus on fundamentally changing the security landscape. One of the reasons why I joined Lacework and continue to be really excited about the opportunity comes back to the fundamental challenge that all security tools have. We do not want to create a platform that drives wet blanket behavior, but really fundamentally enables teams like Arun's to move faster and enable the builders to build the applications that fundamentally drive great business outcomes for our customers. And so that's what gets me out of bed. And I think everyone at Lacework is really focused on helping drive great outcomes for our customers. >> Fascinating to hear how Lacework is securing cloud around the world. Lovely to have you on the show. Adam Leftik, the VP of Lacework, as well Arun Sankaran, the CISO of LendingTree. I'm your host for the AWS Startup Network here on theCUBE. Thank you very much for watching.

(up-tempo music) >> Welcome to today's session of the cube's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. The next big thing in AI security and life sciences. Today, we'll be speaking with Aizon, as part of our life sciences track and I'm pleased to welcome the co-founder as well as the chief science officer of Aizon: Toni Monzano, will be discussing how artificial intelligence is driving key processes in pharma manufacturing. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being with us today. >> Thank you Natalie to you and to your introduction. >> Yeah. Well, as you know industry 4.0 is revolutionizing manufacturing across many industries. Let's talk about how it's impacting biotech and pharma and as well as Aizon's contributions to this revolution. >> Well, actually pharmacogenetics is totally introducing a new concept of how to manage processes. So, nowadays the industry is considering that everything is particularly static, nothing changes and this is because they don't have the ability to manage the complexity and the variability around the biotech and the driving factor in processes. Nowadays, with pharma - technologies cloud, our computing, IOT, AI, we can get all those data. We can understand the data and we can interact in real time, with processes. This is how things are going on nowadays. >> Fascinating. Well, as you know COVID-19 really threw a wrench in a lot of activity in the world, our economies, and also people's way of life. How did it impact manufacturing in terms of scale up and scale out? And what are your observations from this year? >> You know, the main problem when you want to do a scale-up process is not only the equipment, it is also the knowledge that you have around your process. When you're doing a vaccine on a smaller scale in your lab, the only parameters you're controlling in your lab, they have to be escalated when you work from five liters to 2,500 liters. How to manage this different of a scale? Well, AI is helping nowadays in order to detect and to identify the most relevant factors involved in the process. The critical relationship between the variables and the final control of all the full process following a continued process verification. This is how we can help nowadays in using AI and cloud technologies in order to accelerate and to scale up vaccines like the COVID-19. >> And how do you anticipate pharma manufacturing to change in a post COVID world? >> This is a very good question. Nowadays, we have some assumptions that we are trying to overpass yet with human efforts. Nowadays, with the new situation, with the pandemic that we are living in, the next evolution that we are doing humans will take care about the good practices of the new knowledge that we have to generate. So AI will manage the repetitive tasks, all the human condition activity that we are doing, So that will be done by AI, and humans will never again do repetitive tasks in this way. They will manage complex problems and supervise AI output. >> So you're driving more efficiencies in the manufacturing process with AI. You recently presented at the United nations industrial development organization about the challenges brought by COVID-19 and how AI is helping with the equitable distribution of vaccines and therapies. What are some of the ways that companies like Aizon can now help with that kind of response? >> Very good point. Could you imagine you're a big company, a top pharma company, that you have an intellectual property of COVID-19 vaccine based on emergency and principle, and you are going to, or you would like to, expand this vaccination in order not to get vaccination, also to manufacture the vaccine. What if you try to manufacture these vaccines in South Africa or in Asia in India? So the secret is to transport, not only the raw material not only the equipment, also the knowledge. How to appreciate how to control the full process from the initial phase 'till their packaging and the vials filling. So, this is how we are contributing. AI is packaging all this knowledge in just AI models. This is the secret. >> Interesting. Well, what are the benefits for pharma manufacturers when considering the implementation of AI and cloud technologies. And how can they progress in their digital transformation by utilizing them? >> One of the benefits is that you are able to manage the variability the real complexity in the world. So, you can not create processes, in order to manufacture drugs, just considering that the raw material that you're using is never changing. You cannot consider that all the equipment works in the same way. You cannot consider that your recipe will work in the same way in Brazil than in Singapore. So the complexity and the variability is must be understood as part of the process. This is one of the benefits. The second benefit is that when you use cloud technologies, you have not a big care about computing's licenses, software updates, antivirals, scale up of cloud ware computing. Everything is done in the cloud. So well, this is two main benefits. There are more, but this is maybe the two main ones. >> Yeah. Well, that's really interesting how you highlight how this is really. There's a big shift how you handle this in different parts of the world. So, what role does compliance and regulation play here? And of course we see differences the way that's handled around the world as well. >> Well, I think that is the first time the human race in the pharma - let me say experience - that we have a very strong commitment from the 30 bodies, you know, to push forward using this kind of technologies actually, for example, the FDA, they are using cloud, to manage their own system. So why not use them in pharma? >> Yeah. Well, how does AWS and Aizon help manufacturers address these kinds of considerations? >> Well, we have a very great partner. AWS, for us, is simplifying a lot our life. So, we are a very, let me say different startup company, Aizon, because we have a lot of PhDs in the company. So we are not in the classical geeky company with guys all day parameter developing. So we have a lot of science inside the company. So this is our value. So everything that is provided by Amazon, why we have to aim to recreate again so we can rely on Sage Maker. we can rely on Cogito, we can rely on Landon we can rely on Esri to have encryption data with automatic backup. So, AWS is simplifying a lot of our life. And we can dedicate all our knowledge and all our efforts to the things that we know: pharma compliance. >> And how do you anticipate that pharma manufacturing will change further in the 2021 year? Well, we are participating not only with business cases. We also participate with the community because we are leading an international project in order to anticipate this kind of new breakthroughs. So, we are working with, let me say, initiatives in the - association we are collaborating in two different projects in order to apply AI in computer certification in order to create more robust process for the MRA vaccine. We are collaborating with the - university creating the standards for AI application in GXP. We collaborating with different initiatives with the pharma community in order to create the foundation to move forward during this year. >> And how do you see the competitive landscape? What do you think Aizon provides compared to its competitors? >> Well, good question. Probably, you can find a lot of AI services, platforms, programs softwares that can run in the industrial environment. But I think that it will be very difficult to find a GXP - a full GXP-compliant platform working on cloud with AI when AI is already qualified. I think that no one is doing that nowadays. And one of the demonstration for that is that we are also writing some scientific papers describing how to do that. So you will see that Aizon is the only company that is doing that nowadays. >> Yeah. And how do you anticipate that pharma manufacturing will change or excuse me how do you see that it is providing a defining contribution to the future of cloud-scale? >> Well, there is no limits in cloud. So as far as you accept that everything is varied and complex, you will need power computing. So the only way to manage this complexity is running a lot of power computation. So cloud is the only system, let me say, that allows that. Well, the thing is that, you know pharma will also have to be compliant with the cloud providers. And for that, we created a new layer around the platform that we say qualification as a service. We are creating this layer in order to qualify continuously any kind of cloud platform that wants to work on environment. This is how we are doing that. >> And in what areas are you looking to improve? How are you constantly trying to develop the product and bring it to the next level? >> Always we have, you know, in mind the patient. So Aizon is a patient-centric company. Everything that we do is to improve processes in order to improve at the end, to deliver the right medicine at the right time to the right patient. So this is how we are focusing all our efforts in order to bring this opportunity to everyone around the world. For this reason, for example, we want to work with this project where we are delivering value to create vaccines for COVID-19, for example, everywhere. Just packaging the knowledge using AI. This is how we envision and how we are acting. >> Yeah. Well, you mentioned the importance of science and compliance. What do you think are the key themes that are the foundation of your company? >> The first thing is that we enjoy the task that we are doing. This is the first thing. The other thing is that we are learning every day with our customers and for real topics. So we are serving to the patients. And everything that we do is enjoying science enjoying how to achieve new breakthroughs in order to improve life in the factory. We know that at the end will be delivered to the final patient. So enjoying making science and creating breakthroughs; being innovative. >> Right, and do you think that in the sense that we were lucky, in light of COVID, that we've already had these kinds of technologies moving in this direction for some time that we were somehow able to mitigate the tragedy and the disaster of this situation because of these technologies? >> Sure. So we are lucky because of this technology because we are breaking the distance, the physical distance, and we are putting together people that was so difficult to do that in all the different aspects. So, nowadays we are able to be closer to the patients to the people, to the customer, thanks to these technologies. Yes. >> So now that also we're moving out of, I mean, hopefully out of this kind of COVID reality, what's next for Aizon? Do you see more collaboration? You know, what's next for the company? >> The next for the company is to deliver AI models that are able to be encapsulated in the drug manufacturing for vaccines, for example. And that will be delivered with the full process not only materials, equipment, personnel, recipes also the AI models will go together as part of the recipe. >> Right, well, we'd love to hear more about your partnership with AWS. How did you get involved with them? And why them, and not another partner? >> Well, let me explain to you a secret. Seven years ago, we started with another top cloud provider, but we saw very soon, that this other cloud provider were not well aligned with the GXP requirements. For this reason, we met with AWS. We went together to some seminars, conferences with top pharma communities and pharma organizations. We went there to make speeches and talks. We felt that we fit very well together because AWS has a GXP white paper describing very well how to rely on AWS components. One by one. So this is for us, this is a very good credential, when we go to our customers. Do you know that when customers are acquiring and are establishing the Aizon platform in their systems, they are outbidding us. They are outbidding Aizon. Well we have to also outbid AWS because this is the normal chain in pharma supplier. Well, that means that we need this documentation. We need all this transparency between AWS and our partners. This is the main reason. >> Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation to hear how AI and cloud are revolutionizing pharma manufacturing at such a critical time for society all over the world. Really appreciate your insights, Toni Monzano: the chief science officer and co-founder of Aizon. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich, for the Cube's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. Thanks very much for watching. (soft upbeat music)