>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of a ws public sector Here in our nation's capital Washington D. C. I'm your host Rebecca. Night hosting alongside of John Farrier. Always a pleasure being with you. >> So good to see you again. >> And we're joined by first time Cube guest Brett MacMillan. He is the GM ground station. Eight of us. Thanks so much for coming on >> the road to be here. Thank you. >> So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about ground station? What? It is one of us. >> You're first of all really excited to be here at this conference yesterday we had our second annual Earth Science Day. Last year was really successful, and we're finding a huge amount of interest around a space and space primarily tto help save the earth. And so >> eight of >> us came out with the solution, and we made it generally available last month called Ground Station. And if you think back about 15 years ago, before the commercial cloud came out, uh, you had to do for a data center. You Hey, either had to buy the data center. You had to do a long term lease. And then >> we >> came out with the commercial cloud. And from that point forward, there was a tremendous number of innovations. That movie came out of that. I don't think any of us back then could have predicted things like Pin arrests O R. Spotify Or or that Netflix would have gone from shipping your DVDs to be in the online streaming company and all those innovations happening, we think that we're at the beginning of that stage of satellite industry. So what ground station is is It's a service that you can use like any other cloud service. Just pay for what you used on demand. You can scale up you, Khun scale down. And we think that we're in the early stages of opening up innovations in this >> industry >> and its satellite specific. So it's a satellite services of connectivity. How how's it work? What's that >> s what happened to you. You would have a you just go into the eight of us counsel on you schedule a contact. And most of these early use cases there for our low earth orbit. Satellites are medium earth orbit satellites, and we have deployed these satellite antennas. And what's really important about this is we put them right next to our data centers or availability zones. So now you're getting the entire power of the cloud. And so what happens is you would schedule contact and either up Linker downlink your data during that contact period. And we just charge per per minute. And >> so it's like the two was servers and still has three. With storage and thie used. Case wasn't solved. The provisioning problem. So you guys are doing it for up Lincoln down Lincoln to satellite usage and data over satellite. Pretty >> direct. Correct. And so And the other thing that's really nice about it is just like the cloud would announce enable people to go global and minutes ground station allowed you to go global also. So, traditionally, what would happen if you would buy a satellite antenna or you'd Lisa Sal? I'd intended somewhere in the world and you're only catching so many passes of those satellites. We are deploying these at our data centers through out the world, and so you're able to at a very low cost. Now touch these passes of the sound lights. >> You know, Brett, Rebekah and I were talking on the intro around the role of technology. How it's causing a lot of change. You mentioned that window of 10 years where, before YouTube, after YouTube, all these new services came on. Think about it. Those didn't exist around before. Two thousand four time frame. Roughly two thousand 10 2 4 2 4 to 5. Then the mobile revolution hit. Similar wave is coming into government and seeing it. Amazon Webster Public Sector Summit is our fourth year. It gets bigger. The inclusion of space is a tell sign of commercialization of some of the tech coming in infiltrating process, change within government and use cases. So I would agree with you that that's relevant. >> Yeah, And >> next level is what? What was that window? What's gonna happen that 10 year? >> You don't change? It is hard to predict, but we know from our past experience on what we've done in the cloud. We know that when you remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting like buying servers are doing networks and things like that. It frees people up to do innovations on DH And when you look at what's happening in the satellite industry, virtually every industry, every person can benefit from a better understanding of this earth and from satellite imagery and satellite sensing. And so, if you start moving forward with that and you ask what can happen, we've got governments throughout the world that are very concerned about deforestation. And so, for example, today they find out 54 station after the trees are gone. And what if you could instead, for a very low cost, download pictures of satellite images and get it in more of a really time type basis? Or get it in that same hour that, uh, sound like took the picture. Now what you could do is catch the deforestation when the boulders air show up, not after the trees went down, so >> get in front of it. Used the data is a data business just about other use cases, because again, early adopters are easily the developers that are hungry for the resource. We saw that with cloud to industry, I mentioned now those service thousands and thousands of new services a year from a baby s jazz. He loves to talk about that at reinvent, and it's pretty impressive. But the early days was developers. They were the ones who have the value. They were thirsty for the resource. What are the sum of that resource? Is what's the low hanging fruit coming in for ground station that you could share that tell sign for >> where it's going? Interest not only for the his new developers in these new things, but large, established sound like companies are very interested in that, because when I was talking about earlier, you can cover areas with our service in ways that were very expensive to do. Like until you Ground Station would have been a little hard for us to roll out, had we not first on eight of us if you didn't first have things like Ace two and three and your ways of of storing your data or our petabytes scale worldwide network. And so when you look at that, you're able to get multiple different organizations doing some really cool things. We're in partnership with Cal Poly, Cal Poly and Cal Poly's been in the space industry for a long time. Back in 1999 they were one of the inventors of original Cube sat, and today what they're doing is they have this STDs, Sally Data Solutions service on. It's an initiative that they're doing and they did a hackathon. And when you look at all the areas that could benefit from from space and satellite tourists, all kinds of things pop up. So, for example, if your cattle rancher and you have a very large area, sometimes cat cat will get stuck in an area like a canyon or something. You don't find out about it. It's too. It's too late. So Cal Poly did this hackathon on DH. What they came up with is, it's very inexpensive now to put a I ot device on it on the cows on with the ground station. You can now download that information you can communicate to a satellite, and now we can find out how where those cows are and get them if they're in a dangerous situation. I >> think the eye OT impact is going to be huge. Rebecca, think about what we talked about around Coyote. I ot is the edge of the network, but there's no networks, not flat. It's in space. The earth is round right, so You know, it's kind of like a Christopher Columbus moment where if you have the data, all you need power and connectivity. So battery power is getting stronger every day. Long life batteries. But the connectivity with ground station literally makes a new eye ot surface area of the earth. Absolutely. I mean, that's pretty groundbreaking. >> This is a really exciting time to be in the space industry. A couple things are driving it. One is that the capabilities that were able to put up in space for the same amount of weight and the same amount of payload is increasing dramatically. The only thing that's happening is that the cost for lift the cost to put satellites and and orbit is dropping dramatically. And so what's happening with those two things is were able to get a lot more organisations putting satellites up there. And what's turning out is that there's a tremendous number of images and sensing capabilities. It's coming down actually more than the humans are able to analyze. And that's where the cloud comes in is that you take and you download this information and then you start using things like machine learning and artificial intelligence and you can see anomalies and point them out to the humans and say, for example, these balls are just showed up. Maybe we should go take a look at that. >> You know, imagery has always been a hot satellite thing. You see Google Earth map three D mapping is getting better. How is that playing into it? Is that a use case for you guys? I mean, you talk about the impact. Is that something we all relate to >> you and I would submit that we are in the early stages of that. It's amazing what we can do with their damaging today. And everybody on their phones get Google maps and all the other things that are out there. But we're in early stages of what we could do with that. So some areas that we're looking at very closely. So, for example, during the California wildfires last year, NASA worked on something to help out the people on the ground. You know, with ground station, what you'll be able to do is do more downloads and get more information than a more real time basis, and you'll actually be able to look at this and say the wildfires are happening in these areas and help the citizens with escape routes and help them understand things that were actually hard to determine from the ground. And so we're looking at this for natural disasters as well as just Data Day solutions. >> It's such an exciting time, and you and your pointing at so many different use cases that have a lot of potential to really be game changers. What keeps you up at night about this, though? I mean, I think that they're as we know, there's a lot of unintended consequences that comes with these new technologies and particularly explosion of these new technologies. What are what are your worries? What what is the future perils that you see? >> So So we definitely are working with these agencies of the federal government and commercial things on making sure that you can sit. You're the data. But again, that was one of the benefits of starting with a ws. We started with security being a primary of part of what we did. And so when when you have ground station, you do a satellite uplink for downlink, and then you immediately tell it where in the world you want the data to be stored. So, for example, we could download, Let's say, in another part of the world, and then you can bring it back to the nine states and store it in your we call a virtual private cloud. It's a way for our customers to be able to control their environment securely. And so we spent a lot of time explain to people how they could do that and how they could do it securely. And so, uh, well, it doesn't keep me awake at night, But we spend a tremendous amount of time working with these organisations, making sure that they are using best practices when they're using our solution. Right? >> Talk about the challenges you mentioned, storing the securely role of policy. We're living in a world now where the confluence of policy science tech people are all kind of exploding and studio innovation but also meet challenges. What are some of the things that you guys are doing? Obeys the bar improving? I mean, I'll say there's early days, so you're seeing areas to improve. What if some of the areas that you're improving on that are being worked on now on impact >> So you mentioned policy side of it. What I'd like Teo say is any time there's a new technology that comes out way. Have to do some catching up from, You know, the policy, the regulator point in front of you right now because the satellite industry is moving so fast. Um, there's a scale issues on. So governments throughout the world are looking at the number of satellites they're going up in, the number of communications are happening, and they're working with that scale on Andi. I I'm very proud to say that they're reacting. They were acting fairly quickly on DH. That's one of the areas that I think we're going to see more on is as this industry evolves, having things like having antennas insert and antennas and satellite certified quickly is one of the things that we need to talk. >> Some base infrastructure challenges mean Consider space kind of infrastructure. At this point, it plenty of room up there currently, but can envision a day with satellites, zillion satellites up there at some point. But that gets set up first. You're saying the posture. The government is pro innovation in this area. >> Oh, you're wasting a lot of interest in that way. We launched ground station governments both here in this country as well as throughout the world, very interested in this on DH. They see the potential on being able to make the satellite's on satellite imagery and detection available. And it's not just for those largest organizations like the governments. But it's also when you commercialize this and what we've made it so that small, medium sized businesses now, Khun, get into this business and do innovative things. >> Question. I want to ask. You know, we're tight on time, Rebecca, but we'll get this out. In your opinion. What? What do you think the modernization of public policy governments means? Because the paint on your definition, what modernization is This seems to be the focus of this conference here, a ws re public sector summit. This is the conversation we're having in other agencies. They want to modernize. >> What does that mean to you? It takes on many things. Many perspectives. What? What I find a lot is modernizations is making helping your workers be more productive. And so we do this with a number of different ways. So when you look at ground station. Really? Benefit of it isn't. Can I get the image? Can I get the data? But how can I do something with it? And so when you start applying machine learning artificial intelligence now you can put a point toe anomalies that are happening. And now you can have the people really focus on the anomalies and not look at a lot of pictures. They're exactly the same. So when you look at a modernization, I think it's some economists with How do we make the workforce that's in place more productive >> and find those missing cows? It's Fred McMillan. Thank you so much for coming on the Q. Thank >> you. It was a pleasure. We've >> got a lot of great mark. We got many more gas. Got Teresa Carlson. Jay Carney? >> Yeah. Yeah. General Keith Alexander, About how date is being used in the military. We got ground station connectivity. I really think this is a great opportunity for io. T wait to see how it progresses. >> Excellent. Thank you. >> Becca. Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned to the Cube.