>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. it's The Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Hello everyone welcome to this Cube here in D.C. Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier with my cohost. For the next two days John Walls we will be discussing the government Cloud. AWS Public Sector Summit this is our live coverage on the ground. Also as you know we have been covering the event for multiple, multiple years. It's our inaugural event here in Washington D.C. No better place where there's a lot of change, a lot of action. Data lakes here are turning into data swamps. We're here to drain the data swamps. (laughing) And get that data to you. I'm John Furrier with John Walls. Again, John we're kicking off our first inaugural event. Not the first event for AWS Public Sector Summit. I think this is their seventh or eighth year doing it. Started as a small little conference. But now the full on Public Sector Summit has become I'm calling the reinvent of government. 'Cause with Health and Human Services, government agencies, education, now there's a complete change-over from the Obama administration. Really started that off by initiating more open government, more access to data. You're starting to see AWS with wins over the past few years with the CIA. The ability to stand up with government Cloud now is now reality. Amazon has done extremely well on their billions and billions of dollars they're doing. 50% growth on those kinds of numbers. Amazon is just taking down market after market. Enterprise now, in the government for a while. Just really a case of history, Amazon. >> John you were on top of this. We were talking about this earlier. You wrote about this three, four years ago. Now we're seeing this tectonic shift occur. Government's starting to say okay, we can be open to a transformative experience now that we understand it's secure, and it's valuable. It helps us provide better services, and improve our services. But again there's still some convincing to be done, right? There's not a 100% discipleship if you will amongst the government crowd. Opportunities like this kind of bring that innovation, bring that entrepreneurialism to the government mindset. It's a good opportunity. But how do you get there? How do you make that shift from the cooporate side? Everybody gets private sector. Public sector may be a little slower, a little more of a foot dragger. >> Amazon's roots, I wrote that story as you mentioned three years ago on Forbes. Kind of broke the story on Andy Jassy and AWS Amazon Web Services. He talked about the journey of Amazon Web Services, how it started as a six-page business plan. He talked about their approach. Amazon's approach from day one has always been about building blocks. One of the things that Andy Jassy and the entire team has always been about, is about listening to the customer. Jeff Bezos's ethos within Amazon has always been lower prices and shipping things faster. You apply that to technology. Lower prices of technology and faster response times, and you mentioned security. Amazon's moved from that developer centered culture to the enterprise. But really three years ago is where you start to see them really start to get a landscape into the government and get the beachhead. They want to kill a key deal against IBM and the CIA. That went to court and the judge actually ruled in favor of Amazon saying Amazon has a better product. So that was to me a seminal moment. That was a flash point. That was an inflection point. Whatever you want to call it. Since that time, they've just been bringing the Amazon Web Services business model into the government. What that is is really providing an agility, the ability to turn on, compute, stand up Cloud in a way that makes government agencies agile. We all know from looking at the history of the government, they are far from being agile. They are slower than molasses to get things done. Usually little stove pipes and fiefdoms in politics. But now when you start to bring in what Obama did in his administration, he opened up the government. That means data can now be exposed. Data from agencies, for developers. So when you start thinking about developer integration into a government environment. You're starting to see potentially innovation happening. You're seeing evidence of that. We're going to talk with Intel about their AI strategy starting from machine learning. We're now bringing technology to the government and public sector for education, health and human services. A variety of agencies can benefit from having a dev ops mindset. >> Share with me your perspective. You've got this obviously this treasure trove of an asset in public data. >> Yeah. >> That can be used to improve any number of services. At the same time you've got major security concerns, because it's that valuable. How does that square up? How does that balance out with this crowd here this week? How much of a discussion is there going to be about making sure there's a secure environment, making sure it's a protected environment, that there's compliance and governance issues that really abound. >> There's really three things right now when you talk about federal agencies going to the Cloud. One is the centralization of infrastructure governance. With the advent of Cloud, the notion of standing something up, compute and resources, is easier more than ever. For governments, you can now put your credit card down, get a prototype going, and have it in production in months. Days, weeks, months. The second thing besides centralized infrastructure is really enforcing policy. It's policy compliance. That is key because now with all the regulations one department has data that's got to be protected. You see this in health care historically, but now government same thing. Compliance of those policies. This day they can only be touched by these people. Third, automating operations at scale. To me, those are the things that Amazon can bring to the table. If they can do those three things with their partners like Foog, for instance, a startup in the ecosystem, Evident.io, Intel and others, and then Amazon, you can essentially roll out developers, develop apps. So they consumption side of the equation, the users, can get new stuff quick. But the table stakes, a lot of that under the hood technology. Centralized governance, enforcing policy compliance around the data, and Cloud operations at scale. That's really the key. >> How does it differ then from the corporate world? You're talking about things that are just as important to a brand as they are to HSS or DHS or whomever. Everybody has common concerns. Everybody has protection at the top of their mind, but he's got compliance and enforcement and all those things, validation, identification, everything applies to public just like it does public, as opposed to private. What's the difference? >> Here's my thought on this. I haven't written about this yet, but here's my thought. This is kind of where I see it. You saw the consumerization of enterprises as a big wave over the past five years, and that's going to be a run for the next 10, 20 years. We're seeing enterprise businesses providing a consumer experience for employees. Meaning my iPhone has apps on it, I want an app-like experience. I don't really want to have that specialized device because I work for a company, or a certain email account. I just want to be able to do my thing on premise in the company and then in the wild as a consumer. I should be able to watch some sports, video gaming, whatever I want to do I should be able to do that on a device and then come to work and have that work fine. That's been going on for about five years. That's got another big horizon of another 10 years plus, minimum. Consumerization of enterprise of business. That's one. What's going on in the government is really being enterprised. The government is being enterprised. Meaning it's always been the snail pace evolution. The old terminals, government employees having phones that look like relics. >> John: Right. >> There's a perception that in reality that the government just is slow, because they're so stuck on these compliance issues, security, all these risk factors really slow down the adoption of government. Consumerization is going to the business, and now the businesses is going to the government. So you start to see government really start to act like agile companies. >> A problem though, or at least I would imagine a challenge in the public space if I'm a government agency, I've got a different board of directors, right? I have congressional oversight. They have budgetary control. I am year to year. I don't have quarterly board meetings. Sometimes we get stuck in the whole appropriation process, that in itself is a whole... >> The government's always had a cover your ass mentality because a lot of appointees come in. But a lot of the people, whether they work in the state department down into the different agencies are public service. They've been in their jobs. >> 25, 30 years. >> Normally good workers, right? So even though you might have change at the top, at the quote elected official level of the different department and agencies, in general people are trying to do a good thing. So that's why it slows down. It's a moving train relative to I don't want to get fired mentality. Everyone's always been concerned with government around leaking data, compliance, oh my god something went wrong. They're very conservative. That's why I'm saying they've been slower than business. Consumers go super fast, businesses now are going faster because of the consumer trend, and now that trend is coming into the government, where again scale, agility, governance, all have to be big. Those building blocks have to be big. Then the goodness for the developers is really where the action is. Because at the end of the day, there is a developer community out there take could take data from different agencies, say Health and Human Services, and take that broad data and create a mash up to say hey I'm going to provide some services to the community on where the best place to get medicine, or how to optimize medicare so that the spending can be more efficient. Who should be doing this or that? There's lot of cases where with the data being exposed government innovation really thrives. That's going to come from the developer community. That creativity cannot be realized without exposing the data, without creating a massive amounts of compute. And goodness, like what Amazon have on their stack. >> Is there any kind of, I don't want to say clash of culture, but again as you said, in terms of government, we think about a more methodical approach, right? And that might come with experience. The worker has maybe been in that position a little bit longer as opposed to the private sector where you're getting maybe recent college graduates who are coming in with different ideas, different approaches, different mindsets. So how about that mash up, just in terms of being open to new approaches, and being open to new ideas, and having the confidence to embrace them as opposed to a startup mentality that obviously is very, very different. >> It's the same kind of trends we see in the dev ops movement. Culturally it always starts with the organization. But at the end of the day, if people have confidence that they're not going to get fired, or that the risk of whatever their issues are, whether it's data, or a certain kind of enforcement around policies, if that's solved, then you're now in an environment where everything's been encapsulated, so then more freedom to do things. I think that's step number one. Just getting it out there, letting people know that it's reliable and secure and has scale and the elasticity. Because the beautiful thing of the business model of the Cloud is it's very elastic. You buy as you go. It's not a big buy up front. This is where the government actually can save money. From a tax payer perspective, the U.S. government can be highly efficient with Cloud. So there's an economic impact, not just the technology and privacy and governance issues. >> You hit on this in your opening comments about Obama and 2.0. Now we have the Trump administration in office. That's provided certainly a change in how business is being done in Washington in a number of ways. I live here. (laughing) Believe me we see it on a regular basis. But because of that shift in administration in general, how do companies like Intel and AWS and Riverbed we're going to see here a little bit later on, some other folks, how did they adapt in that environment when the rules of engagement appear to be maybe a bit cloudier right now? >> Well I think the thing that folks like Intel which huge AI focus, they've always been an enabler. You look at, I look at these companies like Intel, like Amazon itself, Foog, Riverbed, Truva, these are the kinds of companies out there that are creating enabling technologies. Meaning you want to enable growth and opportunity and not foreclose the future. That's really the job of most of those. Intel in particular has always been that bellwether innovator. They create technology. We've had Moore's law, that's changed the landscape over the years. They have an AI focus over 5G, network transformation, smart cities, autonomous vehicles. Intel has now a fabric of technology that's taken to the next level. Obviously Intel and AWS work together. And things like smart cities. This is a huge issue. Talk about being consumerized. I mentioned consumerization of IT and business, and business now impacting government. When you start getting the consumerization of government, you're talking about Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, autonomous vehicles. Who the hell sets the policies for those? There's going to be a governance involved on the societal impact at the smart cities level. Meaning that's a government issue. So who determines the policy and risk for the citizen of the community? The cities and towns are going to monitor which side of the street the cars drive on. Are they going to monitor cyber bullying and cyber security? Are they going to monitor the kind of healthcare that's being provided to the front door of people's homes? Are they going to monitor the AI? There are open questions. This is why I call the gov Cloud the tip of the iceberg. Because these things are going to open up a slew of societal challenges as well as technology. >> This is why I'm looking forward to looking and talking to the array of guests that we have. Because you've just opened up this Pandora's box of questions. Government is as you said has a C.Y.A. mentality. Always has, and should. Frankly, to a certain degree. There has to be some process here. It can't just go willy-nilly. As technology races to innovate, how does government maintain that pace? >> Government just has to be agile. >> John: But that's almost oxymoronic in some way. >> The change in the landscape certainly with the Trump administration from Obama has been like night and day. You got a president with no scandals at all in Obama, who's done a lot of great things. Trump who's got the mojo saying hey I'm going to drain the swamp, all that bravado. He's in a trainwreck situation here going on in D.C. It's kind of shaken things up. I think it could be a catalyst opportunity. One of the things that's interesting is that you look at education and health care, for instance. Forget government for a minute. Really impactful human civilization issues. Health and human services can be completely transformed by technology. Education to me seems like a slow motion video game that's lagging. The kids are getting so much more education online, than they are in the linear analog classroom. Some people are trying to get iPads and do some things differently integrating curriculums. There's a whole disruption. I watch my kids learning, and it's like boring school that's going so slow and linear. They're online putting together, building his own motor skateboard. He's doing YouTube. He's essentially in a robotics club at home from YouTube videos. So you're seeing the eLearning impacting education. What does that mean for education? That means they got to be more competitive. At the end of the day the competitiveness of the groups within public sector have to step up their game. And the only way they're going to do that is build better apps. And apply what they've got to the people they're targeting and deliver it better, faster, cheaper than before. That is why Amazon is poised in my opinion to do extremely well. >> Amazon being a global brand, some of these, many of these companies with international footprints are they bringing back experiences from developing countries who maybe don't have that education infrastructure in place and are leapfrogging to the technology, being able to bring back these kinds of lessons to the united States? >> You know John you and I both love golf. And we talk golf all the time. I'll use the golf analogy here for the golfers out there. Non-golfers I'm sorry. It's like playing with old clubs. Someone comes up and starts winning everything 'cause they've got big fat driver, get the new technology. It kind of depends. It depends what your legacy is. A lot of countries, your question about international, have no infrastructure and all of a sudden when they stand up these 3G, 4G, 5G LTE towers they have full connectivity. They've got better connectivity wirelessly than the third nation, than us. It all comes down to the legacy and the baggage, and that is why I see the transformation really being on the Cloud because the U.S. public sector in North America they've got so much legacy baggage. It's slowing them down. It's anchoring them down. >> John: Right. >> They got to unleash that, and it's going to take a progressive mentality. It's going to take someone saying let's get the civil liberties of our citizens nailed down. Let's deliver better services. More expensive every day, faster, and better. That's the Amazon way in my opinion. That's why they've been doing well in the startup world. That's why they're now doing well in the enterprise. That's the secret to their success. Before we jump into our first guest of the day, they're coming up in just a few moments here. What's your, if you have two or three curiosity points or questions that you'd like to explore over the next day and a half with our guests, what would those be? >> To me, I've been involved in public sector in my career, in previous jobs. So I kind of get a sense of the moving parts. I don't think anyone would argue in public sector we want technology. I think to me it's how to get it done. Question of how to get it operationalized. To me what I'm looking for is how decisions get made, how organizational structures are changing to make decisions that are more dev ops oriented. And how the transformation of the process of deploying and requiring the technology. 'Cause that's really the key. The disruption of the business model of Cloud, renting versus buying. Then two, how those decisions get made. My questions will be all about not only the vision and the road map of what the technology impact is, but how does the reality play out? I think that's the key there. I also want to take a minute John, if you don't mind, to thank our sponsors. >> John: Absolutely. >> Without our sponsors, The Cube would not be able to be allowed to go to these events because they're expensive to run. I want to thank our sponsors. We get to do our good work thanks to the sponsorship support. Our business model's sponsorship generated. We appreciate that. I want to give a shout out to AWS as a main sponsor, with Intel. I want to thank Intel. Intel's doing some great stuff with AI. Again, across multiple sectors of the business. 5G, network transformation, Cloud, et cetera. Riverbed, I want to thank Riverbed, give a shout out. Foog. Who's really taking agencies to the Cloud one of the things I talked about. And Truva. I want to thank those guys for putting the business model in the Cloud together with Amazon here in The Cube. Thanks to the sponsors. Go check them out. Tell them we sent you. Get a 10% discount on all their products and services. (laughing) Only kidding. >> Time out on that. That was just kind of a joke. (laughing) >> Alright John. >> John: Here we go. We're off and running. >> Alright we'll be back with more live coverage of AWS Public Sector after this short break. (electronic music)