>> Thinking back over the past 15 years of the modern cloud computing era we were first told that cloud was only for startups. It was for experiments, entire kickers. No IT executive would ever move production workloads or strategic data into the cloud. No financial services firm is another example would ever move anything into the cloud. Multi-cloud then emerged as a symptom of multi-vendor or of mergers and acquisitions or both. Fast forward now to 2022 and customers clearly want to take advantage of the best services that each cloud offers. For example, Azure for Microsoft apps, Amazon for IS, Google cloud for AI, Oracle for database, et cetera. However, this approach requires expertise in each cloud's primitives, tools and APIs and it puts the burden on customers to integrate apps and workloads across clouds, which increases cost, it exposes security risks and it creates time to market friction. The future of cloud is no longer just on-prem to cloud or so-called hybrid, but cloud to cloud. What many call multi-cloud and at the cube, we like to think beyond the conventional view of multi-cloud, and it's why we use the term super cloud as a metaphor for cross cloud services that are purpose built to solve a specific problem. While at the same time leveraging the best that various cloud providers have to offer. Karan Batta is the vice president of product management at OCI for Oracle and Kris Rice is the vice president of software development at Oracle database, and both are joining me in this cube conversation to discuss how Oracle and Microsoft are helping customers address cross cloud integration issues, making it possible for customers to use popular Azure based tools and Oracle databases and what the firm's claim is a simplified, secure and more facile experience, effectively making two clouds appear as one to developers and, and users. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Thanks for having me, Dave >> Karan, let's start with the news. What are you announcing? Why is it important to each company and what does it mean for your customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Dave. I think, you know, what, what I can tell you is Microsoft and Oracle actually share a massive enterprise customer base. The same customers that are using Office 365 are also the same customer that are storing their critical, mission critical data on Oracle database. So we have thousands of customers that we share jointly and many of them use all sorts of different products from both technology companies. And, you know, multi-cloud, as you, as you sort of rightly pointed out has become the right approach for a lot of our customers to be able to run applications across different cloud providers in a very simplistic manner. You know, that's why we're, you know, with this new announcement we're reducing the complexity of connecting these things together. You know, all of the platform level capabilities, the networking capabilities, the identity management of it, you know, we're calling this new service Oracle database service for Microsoft Azure, and it really brings together a, a cohesive Azure like experience for Oracle customers. It's, you know, it's, it's going to be a new way to actually deploy multi-cloud applications. >> How is this service different from what the Oracle interconnect for Azure partnership that you announced pre pandemic? I think it was 2019. >> Right, right, right. So almost two years ago, you know, we announced this partnership with Microsoft that essentially interconnects the two data center regions from, from Azure and from Oracle. And, you know, it, it provided a great opportunity for customers to, to start their multi-cloud journey by making things like data transfer fees free, et cetera. And now we're close to 11 regions globally, you know, for those interconnected regions. The feedback that we got from customers was, you know, it was a great step in the right direction, but they needed more. And so this experience essentially builds on top of that interconnect, the physical interconnect on the data center side by giving customers an Azure like experience that allows them to basically deploy Oracle databases in a, in a very cohesive fashion with their Azure applications. It also gives them things like, you know, joint support, it gives them things like, you know, joint billing data, et cetera. But it basically allows them to get a first class experience for Oracle database services, you know, across the two clouds. >> It's interesting. I mean, I think back to the history of the industry, you know, before Oracle acquired Sun it would work with every hardware company then of course, you know, had its own hardware. And now it's working with, with Microsoft, who's in essence is a platform, you know, infrastructure company. So it's, it's quite a, quite a journey. Chris, I wonder, wonder if we could bring you into the conversation. What Oracle databases can Azure customers access now? Where, where does autonomous fit? Is that part of the package? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the, the initial offering is going to have all flavors of the Oracle database cloud. So that includes what we call now, the base database, which is database in a VM, the workhorse of the excess CS. So if you truly need the the extra horsepower of the exit data machine and of course it's going to include autonomous right out of the gate. So for customers that want to kick the tires on an Oracle database link with Azure there's no faster path than using autonomous. >> Yeah, so a lot of integration that you guys have done. Well, how does this service compare to other, you know, customers like to compare, they're always talking about their, their choices. How does it compare to others? How, what is the cost associated with this? What can you tell us? >> So from a cost stance, there there's no extra cost. So the only cost is on the base service. So if you get the autonomous, the base database, the exit data, your cost is in that base service. And we include all this plumbing that we've done to make it work best with Azure. And that includes wiring the metrics the logs, the vent home, the audit records to the Azure side of the house. >> And, and, and what what other things are like this out there? Can you share with us? What should customers, you know, compare this to? >> So the majority of what customers have done so far is it, it is DIY. So multi-cloud to date has been very DIY. Anything could be done that we've done. However, customers that have to roll up their sleeves they'd have to learn both clouds, learn the nomenclature of both clouds, they'd have to learn the networking infrastructure and they'd really have to roll their sleeves up and DIY it. What we've done is we've, we've done all that work for them. So it's as simple as a few mouse clicks and the two clouds can be talking together. >> Thank you, okay. Karan, you, you ever see the movie good morning Vietnam and they redact out all the, all the, like the words in the news that they didn't want, want read on the news. And so we hear Microsoft and Oracle, they're talking about multi-cloud, Google sort of talks about unifying cross cloud developer experiences with, with Antos. But when you go, when you go to like reinvent the word multi-cloud is redacted, like the movie. Do you anticipate customers are going to push more from multi-cloud in the future? What are you hearing? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think customers are going to demand this of their cloud providers in the future. I think these are going to be table stakes moving forward. You know, as, as you rightly pointed out, Dave, I think, you know, customers and, and and actually cloud providers are focused on mostly transition from on-prem to the cloud. And I think in the future, you know, once everybody's picked their first cloud provider it's going to be, you know, the focus is going to shift from that to the interoperability across these two clouds or, or multiple clouds. You know, customers will want to have leverage against other cloud providers. Customers will want to pick the best of breed, complimentary services, et cetera, and also have, you know, decisions based on economics, right? So I think, you know, there's going to be a massive acceleration of customers want the support from, from all of their cloud providers. You know, which is why we're basically simply listening to customer feedback. And, you know, as mentioned earlier, we share so many different customers together it totally made sense for Microsoft and Oracle to start investing in it. This is not the entire answer. I think it's start of this journey in, in the future. >> Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. You know, I never say never with, with the hyperscalers or any large technology company. I, I wonder Karan, if we could stay with you. Can you give us some practical examples of, of what this service means for customers? How it's going to help them do something that they couldn't do before? What should we be focused on? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I think it opens up a whole set of new possibilities. You know, I, I mentioned earlier kind of made a statement where, you know, the world's data kind of lives on Oracle databases. It's, it's the core of, of any mission critical data today. It's still the most popular database use in, in the world. And so, you know, customers want to be able to modify they want to be able to extract more information and and get more knowledge out of their data. And this opens up the possibility where you can use, you can have access to that Oracle database from Azure and you're able to connect it to all the complimentary services which allow you to extract more knowledge or, or insight out of that data. So whether you're moving it into, let's say Azure synapse analytics to do analytics workloads or whether you're moving it to the HUD cluster using Azure HD insight, or you're simply just looking at the data in different forms and factors through power BI. I think it opens up a whole new set of possibilities you just couldn't do it before. On the second hand, it also helps you modernize your existing on-premise estate of Oracle. So we have the largest backs, the largest financial services customers, the largest government customers running the largest exit data footprint on premise. It helps you modernize that into the cloud and then, and use complimentary services from Azure. >> Got it. Chris, what's the support model look like for this new service? You know, who do I, whose throat do I choke? >> I was going to say, so you brought us back to when we had multiple vendors in the vendors we've all lived through it, right. Vendors pointed fingers at each other. So, keeping that in mind, what we've done is we have a collaborative plan with Microsoft in place. So building on the, the interconnect from 2019 we have that collaborative support model. So right in this new console that we've built you can log a ticket and immediately both sides will be aware of the context and what's going on so that we can resolve those problems and avoid the finger pruning of vendor at vendor. >> Okay, great. So if somebody pick up a broom and, and start sweeping and fix the problem, I love it. To both of you guys, maybe you could kind of riff a little bit on the future. I, I mean, we use this term super cloud, which is, you know, cross multiple clouds so you're doing that. And we envision, you know, this this wonderful globally distributed system where you're not even thinking about the underlying infrastructure. Are you considering partnering with other major cloud providers to offer similar services? Or are you going to go sort of deeper with, with Azure? What's your feeling on that? >> I think, you know, I think the the capability here that we've built isn't specific to Azure, for sure. I think there's absolutely possibility of, of, you know, working with other clouds in the future. I think, you know, we'll continue to sort of listen to our feedback from the, from our largest customers. You know, and if the market demands, you know, it's, it's, it's going to be, as I said, table stakes. And, you know, as I said earlier, and and I think It'll be in the best interest of all the cloud providers to just work together in the future. >> And, and Dave, to go back on the other half of your question, are we going to go deeper? We are going to be going deeper. So today we've gone far enough that like I said, metrics logs, those things are flowing. We're also in progress of looking at the rest of the portfolio in Azure and seeing which things can and should integrate more tightly with OCI. So as Karan said broader, but also deeper at the same time. >> Great, thank you. But my last question is, you know, we, again, we use this term super cloud to, to, to me anyway and us multi-cloud has largely been running, you know, on different clouds, it's, it's sort of a symptom, just kind of the way things shook out. And maybe this, maybe super cloud is what multi-cloud should be, but, but what do you think are the key ingredients that make multi-cloud real, lots of people are talking about multi-cloud what, what makes it tangible? >> I think, you know, to, to begin with, I think it's, it's, it's removing the complexity of learning new clouds, right? I think that's the biggest challenge that customers have is you've you've already picked one cloud, you've, you've, you've trained your, your, your employees, you've trained your developers and your application, you know, engineers and learning a new cloud, onboarding a new cloud is an extensive challenge and, and, you know, requires a lot of time and effort. And I think, I think what the other cloud providers can do is actually make sure that they provide these experiences that office gate all of the guts and all of the plumbing under the covers so that the customer doesn't have to learn new things. I think they have, they can focus on their business value which is actually running the app and running the database. I think they can sort of leave the infrastructure component to the cloud providers to actually have the right interoperability, the right APIs, et cetera. So I think the experience is going to be critical moving forward. >> Kris, anything you'd add to that? Bring us home if you would. >> The things I would add is back to observability and manageability. So today a lot of customers consider themselves multi-cloud if they're leveraging two clouds. What we are truly talking about is a multi-cloud workload where a compute node on cloud A is talking to a database on Oracle, things like that. So then you get into the observability of the stack so that you can monitor and react to how the things are going. So I think it has to go a, a hair higher in that these, these layers of observing the entire multi-cloud experiences in one place. >> That's great guys. Thanks so much for coming to The Cube and, and share. Congratulations on the progress. I, I love that we have you guys back and we can see how you're moving forward, collaborating, you know, customers, it's a win-win win so appreciate your time. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for live from Las Vegas. We're here at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave a long time, very excited to have in-person events back ish. I'll say we're going to be talking about automation as a boardroom imperative. We have two guests joining us here, James Matras here consulting principal. America's intelligent automation leader at UI and Irv. Dennis retired EA partner, and former CFO of HUD gentlemen. Welcome to the program. Exciting topic automation as a boardroom imperative, James says COO and start with you. How do you discuss the value of automation as being a key component and driver of transformation? >>That's a great question. I think what we've seen in the last couple of years is the evolution of what automation used to be. Two is going nine. And we've seen the shift from what we call generation one, which is very RPA centric type automation to more generation two, which is the combined integration of multiple technologies. It can target an intern process and it's quite important that you understand the pivotal shift because it's not enabling us to move from a task micro top agenda to a macro agenda actually impacts an organization at a strategic level. The ability to be able to look at processes more deeply to automate them in an end to end process collectively and use these different technologies in a synergistic manner truly becomes powerful because it shifts the narrative from a micro process agenda into more systemic area. >>So gen zero is an Emmanuel gen one is RPA point tools that individual maybe getting their personal productivity out. And then now you're saying gen three is across the enterprise. Where are we in terms of, you know, take your experience from your practical experience? Where do you think the world is? It's like probably between zero and one still. Right. But the advanced folks of thinking about gen three, w what's your, >>Yeah, it's a great question. And, um, when you and I, I can do the comparison being private and public sector on this because I was 37 years with E Y then went into retirement and CFL at HUD CFO. Ed was, was a HUD was nowhere. They had to just do all the intelligence digitalization, um, throughout, uh, from scratch. The private sector is probably five or six years ahead of them. But when you think about James talks about the gen one, two and three, the private sector is probably somewhere between two and three. And I know we're talking about the board in this conversation. Um, boards probably have one and two on their radar. Some boards may have three, some may not, but that's where the real strategic focus for boards needs to be is looking forward and, and getting ahead. But I think from a public sector standpoint, lot to go private sector, more to go as well. But, uh, there's a, there's a bit of a gap, but the public sector is probably only about three or four years behind the private sector >>To be okay. Let's look at the numbers, look at, look at the progress for the quarter. And now it's like discussion on cyber discussion on digital discussion on automated issue. It really changed the narrative over the last decade. >>Yeah, I think when you think of boards today, the lots of conversation on cyber that that conversation has been around for a while. A lot of conversation on ESG today, that conversation is getting, getting very popular. But I think when you think of next three, a Jen talks that bear James talks about, um, that's got to start elevating itself if it's not within the boardroom right now, because that will be the future of the company. And the way I think of it from a board's conversation is if a company doesn't think of themselves as a technology company in all aspects, no matter what you do, you are a technology company or you need to be. And if you're not thinking along that way, you're gonna, you're gonna lose market share and you're going to start falling behind your competitors. >>Well, and how much acceleration did the pandemic bring to just that organizations that weren't digital forward last year are probably gone? >>I think it certainly has shifted quite a lot. There's been a drive, the relevance of technology and hard plays for us in the modern workforce in the modern workplace has fundamentally changed the pandemic. We reimagine how we do things. Technology has progressed in itself significantly, and that made a big difference for, for all the environments as a result of that. So certainly is one of the byproducts of the pandemic has been certainly a good thing for everybody. >>Where does automation fit in the board? Virginia? You've got compensation committee. You've probably, I mean, there's somebody in charge of cyber. You got ESG now there's automation part of a broader digital agenda. Where's what's the right word. >>You know, I, I would personally put it in a enterprise risk management from a standpoint that if you're not focused on it, it's going to be a risk to the enterprise. And, um, when you think of automation and intelligent automation and RPA, uh, I think boards have a pretty good sense of how you interface with your customers and your vendors. I think a big push ought to be looking internally at your own infrastructure. You know, what are you, what are you doing in the HR space? What are you doing in a financial statement, close process? What are you doing your procurement process? I suspect there's still a lot of very routine transactions and processing within those, that infrastructure that if you just apply some RPA artificial intelligence, that data extraction techniques, you can probably eliminate a lot of man hours from the routine stuff. And, and the many man hours is probably not the right way to think of it. You could elevate people's work from being pushing numbers around to being data analyzers. And that's where the excitement is for people to see. >>It's not how it's viewed at organizations. We're not eliminating hours. Well focusing folks on much more strategic down at a test. >>Yes. I would say that that's exactly right now in the private sector, you're always going to have the efficiency play and profitability. So there will be an element of that. I know when at HUD we're, we're focused, we were not focused on eliminating hours because we needed people and we focused on creating efficiencies within the space and having people convert from, again, being Trent routine transactions, to being data analyzers and made the jobs, I'm sure. Fund for them as well. I mean, this is a lot of fun stuff. And, and if, uh, uh, companies need to be pushing this down through their entire infrastructure, not just dealing with our customers and the third parties that they deal with >>Catalyst or have been public sector. So you mentioned they may be five or six years behind, but I've seen certain public sector organizations really lean in, they learn from, from the private sector. And then even when you think about some of the military, how advanced they are absolutely. You know, the private could learn from them and if they could open it up. But >>So, yeah, I think that's, that's well said I was in this, you know, the that's the civilian part with, with the housing and urban development. I think the catalyst is, uh, bringing the expertise in, uh, I know when I, when I came, I went to HUD to elevate their financial infrastructure. It was, it was probably the worst of the cabinet agency. The financials were a mess. There was no, there was a, uh, there was not a clean audit opinion for eight years. And I was there to fix that and we fixed it through digitalization and digital transformation, as well as a financial transformation. The catalyst is just creating the education, letting people know what is, what, what technology can do. You don't have to be a programmer, but it's like driving a car. Anybody can drive a car, but we can't mechanic, you know, work as a mechanic on it. >>So I think it's creating education, letting people know what it can do. And at HUD, for example, we did a very simple, I was telling James earlier, we did a very simple RPA project on an, an, a financial statement, close process. It was 2,600 hours, six months. Once we implemented the RPA, brought that down to 70 hours, two weeks, people's eyes exploded with it. And then all of a sudden, I said, I want everyone to go back and come back with, with any manual process, any routine process that can convert to an RPA. And I got a list of a hundred, then it came then became trying to slow everything down. We're not going to do it overnight. Yeah, exactly. >>So, but it was self-funding. It was >>Self-funded. Yes. >>And, and how do you take that message to customers that it could be self-funding how how's that resonating >>Very well. And I think it was important. I always like to say, it's a point of differentiation because you look at, uh, mentioned earlier that organizations are basically technology companies. That's what they are. But now if you look across that we no longer compete at the ERP level without got SAP, Oracle, it's not a point of differentiation. We don't compete the application layer where they've got service. Now, black line, how we use them is helpful. We competed the digital layer and with automation is a major component of that. That's where your differentiation takes place. Now, if you have a point of differentiation, that is self-funding, it fundamentally changes the game. And that's why it's so important for boards to understand this, because that risk management, if you've not doing it, somebody is getting ahead of the game much faster than you are. >>Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned ERP and it, and it triggered something in my mind. Cause I, I said this 10 years ago about data. If in the nineties, you, you couldn't have picked SAP necessarily as the winner of ERP. But if you could have picked the companies that were using ERP could have made a lot of money in the stock market because they outperform their peers. And the same thing was true with data. And I think the same thing is going to be true with automation in the coming decade. >>Couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly the point that differential acceleration happening this. And it's harder because of the Europeans. Once you knew what it was, you can put the boundaries on it. Digital, the options are infinite. It's just continuous progress as are from there. >>I've got a question for you. You talked about some great stats about how dramatically faster things were took far less time. How does that help from an adoption perspective? I know how much cultural change is very difficult for folks in any organization, but that sort of self-serving how does that help fuel adoption? >>Well, it's interesting. Um, it's, it is a, we're actually going to talk about this tomorrow. It is a framework and it's got to start at the leadership has got to start with governance. It's got to start with a detailed plan. That's executable. And it's got to start with getting buy-in from not only your, the, the organization, but the people you're dealing with outside the organization. Um, it's, it's, uh, I think that's absolutely critical. And when you bring this back to the boardroom, they are the leaders of the companies. And, and I, James, I talked about this as we're getting ready for tomorrow's session. I think the number one thing a board can do today is an own personal self assessment. Do they understand automation? Do they understand what next generation three is? Do they understand what the different components can do? And do they understand how the companies are implementing it? And if I was a board member, uh, on our boards, I say, we need to understand that or else this is nothing's going to happen. We're going to be here at the reliance of the CEO and the CFO strategy, which may or may not include or be thinking about this next three. So leadership at the top is going to drive this. And it's so critical. >>We were talking about catalyst before. And you mentioned education and expertise. I'm always curious as to what drew you to public sector because it's, yeah, I mean, very successful, you know, you're, you're with one of the global SIS directly, you can make a lot more money and that side. So what was it did, was it a desire to it's a great country? Was it >>Take one for the team and I'm going to do a selfish plug here. I just actually wrote a book in this whole thing called transforming a federal agency. What's the name of the book transforming and federal agency. And it's, uh, I spent my time at E Y for 37 years, fully retired. I wanted to give back and do meaningful work. And we lived in Columbus, Ohio, as I was talking about earlier, I was going to go teach and I got a call from the president's personnel office to see if I wanted to come. And these, the CFO at HUD with secretary Carson and change turn the agency around, uh, that took me a little while to say yes, because I wasn't sure I wanted something full time. It was a, it was in DC. So I'd be in a commuting role back and forth. My family's in Columbus. >>Um, but it was, uh, I did it and I loved it. It was, uh, I would pray, I would ask anyone that's has the ability to go into public service at any point in their career to do it. It's it was very rewarding. It was one of my favorite three years of life. And to your point, I didn't have to do it, but, uh, if I wanted to do something and give back and that met the criteria and we were very successful in turning it around with the digital transformation and a lot of stuff that we're talking about today gave me the ability to talk about it because I helped lead it >>For sharing that and did it. So did it start with the CFO's office? Because the first time I ever even heard about our RPO RPA was at a CFO conference and I started talking to him like, oh, this is going to be game changing. Is that where it started? Is that where it lands today? >>From an infrastructure standpoint, the CFO has the wonderful ability to see most processes within a company and its entire lifestyle from beginning to end. So CFO has that visibility to understand where efficiencies can happen in the process. And so the CFO plays a dramatically important role in this. And you think about a CFO's role today versus 20 years ago, it's no longer this, the bean counter rolling up numbers that become a business advisors to the board, to the CEO and to the executive suite. Um, so the CFO, I think has probably the best visibility of all the processes on a global basis. And they can see where the, the efficiencies and the implementation of automation can happen. >>So they can be catalysts and really fueling the actual >>Redesign of work. Yes, they, they, they probably need to be the catalyst. And as a board member, you want to be asking what is the CFO's strategic imperative for the next year? And if it doesn't include this, it's just got to get on the agenda. >>Well, curve ball here is his CFO question and you know, three years or two years ago, you wouldn't have even thought, I mean, let me set it up better. One of the industries that is highly automated is crypto. Yeah. You wouldn't even thought about crypto in your balance sheet a couple of years ago, but I'm not sure it's a widespread board level discussion, but as a CFO, what do you make of the trend to put Bitcoin on balance sheets? >>Yeah, I'm probably not the right person to ask because I'm a conservative guy. >>If somebody supported me and he said, Hey, why don't we put crypto on the balance sheet? >>I would get much more educated. I wouldn't shut it down. I would put it into, let's get more educated. Let's get the experts in here. Let's understand what's really happening with it. Let's understand what the risks are, what the rewards are. And can we absorb any sort of risk or reward with it? And when you say put it on the balance sheet, you can put it on in a small way to test it out. I wouldn't put the whole, I wouldn't make the whole balance sheet for Dell on day one. So that's why I would think about it. Just tell, tell me more, get me educated. How did you think about it? How can it help our business? How can I help our shareholders? How does it grow the bottom line? And then, then you start making decisions. >>Cause CFOs, let me find nature often conservative and most CFOs that I talked to just say no way, not a chance, but you're, maybe you're not as conservative as you think. Well, >>No, but I will never say go away on anything. I mean, cause I want to learn. I want to know. I mean, um, if you like all this stuff, that's new, it's easy to say go away, right? Yeah. But all of a sudden, three years later, the go away, all your competitors are doing it at a competitive advantage. So never say go away, get yourself educated before you jump into it. >>That's good advice. Yeah. In any walk of life question for you, or have you talked about the education aspect there? I'm curious from a risk mitigation perspective, especially given the last 18, 19 months, so tumultuous, so scary for all those organizations that were very digital, they're either gone or they accelerated very quickly. How much of an education do you have to provide certain industries? And are you seeing certain industries? I think healthcare manufacturing, financial services as being leaders in the uptake? >>Well, I think the financial service industries, for sure, they, they, they get this and then they need to, uh, cause they, you know, they're, they're a transaction and based, uh, industry. Uh, so they get it completely. Um, you know, I think maybe some manufacturing distribution, some of the old line businesses are, you know, they may not be thinking of this as progressively as they should. Um, but they'll get there. They're going to have to get there eventually. Um, you know, when you think about the education, my, I thought you were gonna ask a question about the education of the workforce. And I think as a board member, I would be really focused on, uh, how am I educating my workforce of the future? And do I have the workforce of the future today? Do I have to educate them to have to bring in hiring for it? Do I have to bring third-party service providers to get us there? So as a board member really focus on, do I have the right workforce to get us to this next stage? And if not, what do I need to do to get there? Because >>We'll allocate a percentage of their budgets to training and education. And the question is where do they put it >>In? Is it the right training and education, right? >>Where do they focus though? Right now we hear you iPad talking about they're a horizontal play, but James, when you and Lisa, we were asking about industry, when you go to market, are you, are you more focused on verticals? Are you thinking, >>No, it's on two things. So which often find is regardless of the sector with some nuanced variation, the back office functions are regionally the procure to pay process as the same fundamentals, regardless of the sector where the differentiation comes in at a sector of service is when you start going to the middle of the front office, I mean a mining has only one customer. They sold their product to image the retailer has an endless number of them. So when you get to the middle and front office and really start engaging with a customer and external vendors, then a differentiation is very unique and you'd have a lot of sort of customers having sector specific nuances and variations in how you use the platform. And that's where the shift now is happening as well is the back office functions that are largely driven by the CFO. If now getting good, robust value out of it, there's pivot to make it a differentiator in the market, comes in the front and middle office. And that's where we starting to say, sector specific genres solutions, nuances really come to the fall >>Deep industry expertise. Do you think digital at all changes that the reason I ask it because I see Amazon as a retail and then they're in cloud and they're in grocery other in content Apple's in, in financial services and you're seeing these internet giants with a dual agenda, they're disrupting horizontal technology and then there's disruptive industries. And my premise is it's because of data and digital. Do you ever see that industry specialization changing that value chain >>Without a doubt? And I think it's happens initially. It starts off. When people have started looking at the process, they realize there's such key dependencies on the upstream and downstream components of the value chain that they want to control it. So they actually start bridging out of what the core practices or the core business to own a broader agenda. And with digital, you can do it. You can actively interact more systemically that installs triggering, well, maybe I have a different product offering. Maybe I can own this. Could I monetize the information I had at my disposal today in a completely new line. And that really what gets truly innovative and starts creating a revenue increase as opposed as the cost saving. And that's what they're really going after. It's how do I, >>The vertical integration is not new. The plenty of ended up Koch industries, Tyson foods, but now it's digital. So presumably you can do it faster with greater greater scale >>Without a doubt. And you don't have to move your big ERP and things like that. Cause that's the only way it takes five years to move my technology backbone with digital. I can do the interaction tomorrow and we can build up enough to be able to sustain that in the short term. >>Right. And speaking of speed, unfortunately, guys, we are out of time, but thank you. Fantastic conversation automation as a board imperative guys, that's been great James or >>Thank you for your time. Thank you so much >>For Dave a long day. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue. We are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back. Okay.

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

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Jeff Frick. We're joined by Megan Smith. We're very excited to have you on the show. >> It's good to be here >> She is the third US CTO and also the CEO of a new company, Shift7.co, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to be here. It's so fun to be at Hopper, >> Rebecca: It is, it is! >> It's cool, it's the Grace Hopper celebration, because we're trying to celebrate women in computing, and we're what, at 18 thousand people now, >> The biggest ever, >> Plus I think, 6 thousand people joining on the livestream, which is great. >> Before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about your role as the 3rd US CTO, and just talking about getting more technology into government to help leaders work together, and move faster. Tell us a little about this initiative. >> What's so great, is it's not partisan, fixing the government and making it work better, so all the work that we were doing continues. What we were able to put in place, during the Obama administration, and continues to Trump, were things like, the CT office. Having technical people, so I worked at Google, people work at Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, these companies who have that background, to join in on policy conversations, one, to join in on capacity building the government, so data sciences and tech and, let's have our services be as great as Amazon, or as Twitter, or Oracle, and not be sort of retro, really serve the American people. And then also, helping the American people in general, with capacity building, things like computer science for all. So that was an initiative that continues to get all of our children to have coding at school. That all children, you couldn't graduate from high school without having had some experience on learning of coding Coding is a 21st century fluency, it's a skill we all need, Like freshman biology. You want to know some biology, you want to know some coding, you want to know how to write, so making sure they have is tech-up, which was a program we started to help train Americans, there's six hundred thousand jobs open, in the United States, and they pay 50% more than the average American salary. The companies are starving. How do we rapidly get more Americans into these jobs? It turns out that people have, of course, created these fabulous code boot camps, you can train in three months for these jobs, some of them are paid, some times they pay you, all different kinds, some are online, some are offline, they're all over the country. So we're able to get more people to consider, a job like that, culturally they think, Well I don't, why would I, I don't know how to do that. Well you can, this is a fun and interesting and exciting career, you can do digital marketing, you can do user interface design. You can get involved in front end or back end coding, product management, all those things, sales. And so, how do you pull lots more Americans in, get our companies fueled so we have really the economic opportunity, and they're all over the country. Location wise, and topic wise. So we did tech hour now, and a tech jobs tour, which is not what we did in government, but we continue some of that work. >> This weird dichotomy, because on one end, people are worried about tech taking jobs, on the other hand, there's a ton of open tech jobs. And there's this transition period, that's difficult, obviously for people that didn't grow up, but one of the keynote speakers today, told a really heartening story, that she didn't get into it until the day she had to leave her abusive husband, and now she is a coder >> That's Doctor Sue Black, who was just given the Order of the British Empire, I mean, she is an incredible computer scientist. Yes, she escaped an abusive marriage with three small children, in her early 20s, I think. Ended up moving into public housing, and dealing with three children only being the school from 9 until 3, and eventually getting her PhD in computer science, and really, she started Techmoms now, she continues to do research in other things, but she's really trying to use her story, and her organizing capacity, to have more people realize this isn't hard like figuring out gravity waves that won the Nobel prize. This is hard like writing a hard essay, so we all can learn to write an essay. It takes some mastery work, you don't learn it in kindergarten but by the time you're in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th grade, you can do it. >> It's not rocket science. >> Right, so coding is like that. >> The other piece you said that's very interesting, is the consumerization of IT. We've seen it at enterprise, a huge trend. But, now I expect everything that's on my phone, when I interact with Facebook or Amazon, or whatever, to be in all the applications, so, as you said, that's influencing government, and the way they have to deliver services, and I would imagine, too, with kind of the next wave of kids coming in, graduating, going into public service, they certainly have that expectation, right? They've been working on their phone forever of course it should be on the phone. >> And so we want everybody in our country fluent in computer science and coding at a basic level, like again, like freshman biology or takin' chemistry in high school, or taking writing. So that everyone could realize this is not rocket science we could have these kinds of capabilities as part of our services, from Housing and Urban Development, from the Department of Education. You know, a lot of us use our phones to get places, you know, on our maps, and so that's actually data coming from the US Geological survey, if you're looking at the weather, you're looking at NOAA's satellites, this is open government data. We were able to open over two hundred thousand data sets, from all over government, not private data, but public data, that you could make an entire app store, or Google play set of products on top of that. Government wouldn't have to pay for that, it just packages up the API as well. A really good example of that, is the US census team. There's nothing more big data than census, they have all of our information from a data perspective, and so they did opportunity.census.gov, and they said to various agencies, let us help you bridge these data sets into something that someone could build on top of, like we're seeing from the courses sector, we saw wonderful things like, Housing and Urban Development said, okay, our challenges are housing affordability, mobility, these are the challenges instead of having HUD make an app for Americans to come to, they just can explain what their problem is, what data sets, and then engage extraordinary companies, like airbnb, Redfins, Zillow, these fabulous tech companies, who can make instead a product for 100% of the Americans, rather than only wealthy or middle class Americans, and so they did things like, opportunity score, and airbnb helping you figuring out, if I rent a room in my house I can make my rent more affordable, very creative apps, that we can see, same thing for the Department of Ed or Department of Labor, and as the data gets out there, and as apps come, also the opportunity for data science and machine learning. What if, as much as we serve ads to ourselves, in these algorithms, what if we use the algorithms to help Americans find a job that they would love? You know, job matching, and these kinds of opportunities. of the problems in the world, and helping government get more fluent at that. And the way to do that is not so much, jam the government You have to do this, but find terrific talent like we see at Hopper, and have them cycle into the government, to be co-leaders just like a surgeon general would come. >> Are you facing recruitment challenges in that same way though? In the sense that technology is having a hard enough time recruiting and retaining women, but the government, too, is that seen as enough of an employer of choice for young talented, bright ambitious, young women? >> I'm not in government now, but when we were in there, we found a very interesting thing. Alex Mcgovern, who had been the general counsel of Twitter who was Stephanie's CTO with me and led a lot of our tech quals we called TQ like tech IQ in policy, together with economists and lawyers and others have if we're going to decide net neutrality, let's include everyone, including computer scientists, and we're going to sue bridge and open source, So we talked about that, and on the way going in Mcgovern, he said, wouldn't it be cool if, just like when you look at a lawyer's resume, you might see that they clerk and they served their county through clerking and through the judicial system, as well as being a private lawyer, they were a public defender, that's a pretty normal thing to see on a legal resume. If you looked at medical, you might see them going into NIH or doing some research, if you looked at a scientist, they might have gone to, done some NSF work or others. But for the tech crew, there is of course amazing technical people in NASA, NAH and the Department of Energy, and there's great IT teams, but there's not this thing that the Silicon Valley crew resume would say, oh, yeah, I served my country. So that's why, under President Obama, we were able to create these incredible programs. The Presidential Innovation Fellows, which was a one year term of service, The United States Digital Service, which is a three months to a two year term of service in the VA. What's more amazing if you build Amazon, than to go as a second act and help our veterans? It's an incredible honor, to the point of, will they come? Yes, that's what we were hoping, could we have that be a normal thing, and yes it's become a normal thing. And the Trump administration continues it. The 18F team is in the general services administration, they're on 18th and F so they have a code name. But that particular team is located around the country, not only in DC but in San Francisco, in Chicago, and others. So you see this tech sector flowing now into the government on a regular basis, and we welcome more peoples. The government is who shows up to help, so we need the tech sector to show up cause we've got a lot of money as a country, but if we're not effectively using it we're not serving the American people and foster children, veterans, elders, others need the services that they deserve and we have the money, so let's make it happen the way the tech sector is delivering Amazon packages or searches. >> What is your feeling, this is not your first Grace Hopper obviously, but what is your feeling about this conference, and advice that you would give to young women who are here, maybe for their first or second time, in terms of getting the most their time here? >> You know, I think the main thing is, it's a celebration, that's fun and you can walk up to anyone, so just talk to everyone. I've been talking to a million people on the floor, fabulous. Students are here, more senior technical leaders are here. We've been running speed mentoring, we're running a program called the Tech Jobs Tour, it's at Techjobstour.com, it's a #Americanshiring, and we've been going to 50 different cities and so we're running a version of that, and we do speed mentoring, so come to the speed mentoring sessions, it's a five minute pop, talk to someone about what you're tryin' to do. Lot's of programs like that, get into the sessions, come to the keynotes which are so inspiring, and Melinda Gates was amazing today, Dr. Fefe Lee was incredible, just across aboard, Dr Sue Black was here, I thought it was great today, actually, just to reflect on Melinda's keynote, I think this might have been the first time, I was talking to her, that she's really talked about her own technical experience >> That struck me, too! As a coder, starting in computer science. I didn't really understand that she had really started very early, with Apple 3 and the story of her dad >> And her love of her Apple 3, right! and really high school coding, which is so important for young people in high school and middle school, even younger. The Muscogee Creek Tribe, in Oklahoma, is teaching robotics in head start, so we can start in preschool. Just make it fun, and interesting. They're funny, they don't do battle bots, because you don't really want to teach 3 and 4 year olds to fight, so instead they have collaborative robots. >> Robots who work together Age appropriate. >> Well Megan Smith, this has been so fun talking to you, thanks so much for coming on our show. >> Thanks for having me. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this, I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick (music)