>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon web services re:Invent 2017. I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend. Our next guest is Laura Stevens, data scientist at the American Heart Association, an AWS customer, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi, it's nice to be here. >> So, the new architecture, we're seeing all this great stuff, but one of the things that they mention is data is the killer app, that's my word, Verna didn't say that, but essentially saying that. You guys are doing some good work with AWS and precision medicine, what's the story? How does this all work, what are you working with them on? >> Yeah, so the American Heart Association was founded in 1924, and it is the oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to curing heart disease and stroke, and I think in the past few years what the American Heart Association has realized is that the potential of technology and data can really help us create innovative ways and really launch precision medicine in a fashion that hasn't been capable to do before. >> What are you guys doing with AWS? What's that, what's the solution? >> Yeah so the HA has strategically partnered with Amazon Web Services to basically use technology as a way to power precision medicine, and so when I say precision medicine, I mean identifying individual treatments, based on one's genetics, their environmental factors, their life factors, that then results in preventative and treatment that's catered to you as an individual rather than kind of a one size fits all approach that is currently happening. >> So more tailored? >> Yeah, specifically tailored to you as an individual. >> What do I do, get a genome sequence? I walk in, they throw a high force computing, sequence my genomes, maybe edit some genes while they're at it, I mean what's going on. There's some cutting edge conversations out there we see in some of the academic areas, course per that was me just throwing that in for fun, but data has to be there. What kind of data do you guys look at? Is it personal data, is it like how big is the data? Give us a sense of some of the data science work that you're doing? >> Yeah so the American Heart Association has launched the Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine, and as a result, with Amazon, they created the precision medicine platform, which is a data marketplace that houses and provides analytic tools that enable high performance computing and data sharing for all sorts of different types of data, whether it be personal data, clinical trial data, pharmaceutical data, other data that's collected in different industries, hospital data, so a variety of data. >> So Laura, there's a lot of think fud out there around the ability to store data in a cloud, but there's also some valid concerns. A lot of individual researchers, I would imagine, don't have the skillset to properly protect data. What is the Heart Association doing with the framework to help your customers protect data? >> Yeah so the I guess security of data, the security of the individual, and the privacy of the individual is at the heart of the AHA, and it's their number one concern, and making anything that they provide that a number one priority, and the way that we do that in partnering with AWS is with this cloud environment we've been able to create even if you have data that you'd like to use sort of a walled garden behind your data so that it's not accessible to people who don't have access to the data, and it's also HIPAA compliant, it meets the standards that the utmost secure standards of health care today. >> So I want to make sure we're clear on this, the Heart Association doesn't collect data themselves. Are you guys creating a platform for your members to leverage this technology? >> So there's, I would so maybe both actually. The American Heart Association does have data that it is associated with, with its volunteers and the hospitals that it's associated with, and then on top of that, we've actually just launched My Research Legacy, which allows individuals of the community to, who want to share their data, whether you're healthy or just sick, either one, they want to share their data and help in aiding to cure heart disease and stroke, and so they can share their own data, and then on top of that, anybody, we are committed to strategically partnering with anybody who's involved and wants to share their data and make their data accessible. >> So I can share my data? >> Yes, you can share your data. >> Wow, so what type of tools do you guys use against that data set and what are some of the outcomes? >> Yeah so I think the foundation is the cloud, and that's where the data is stored and housed, and then from there, we have a variety of different tools that enable researchers to kind of custom build data sets that they want to answer the specific research questions they have, and so some of those tools, they range from common tools that are already in use today on your personal computer, such as Python or R Bioconductor, and then they have more high performance computing tools, such as Hal or any kind of s3 environment, or Amazon services, and then on top of that I think what is so awesome about the platform is that it's very dynamic, so a tool that's needed to use for high performance computing or a tool that's needed even just as a on a smaller data set, that can easily be installed and may be available to researchers, and so that they can use it for their research. >> So kind of data as a service. I would love to know about the community itself. How are you guys sharing the results of kind of oh this process worked great for this type of analysis amongst your members? >> Yeah so I think that there's kind of two different targets in that sense that you can think of is that there's the researchers and the researchers that come to the platform and then there's actually the patient itself, and ultimately the HA's goal is to make, to use the data and use the researcher for patient centered care, so with the researchers specifically, we have a variety of tutorials available so that researchers can one, learn how to perform high performance computing analysis, see what other people have done. We have a forum where researchers can log on and enable, I guess access other researchers and talk to them about different analysis, and then additionally we have My Research Legacy, which is patient centered, so it's this is what's been found and this is what we can give back to you as the patient about your specific individualized treatment. >> What do you do on a daily basis? Take us through your job, are you writing code, are you slinging API's around? What are some of the things that you're doing? >> I think I might say all of the above. I think right now my main effort is focused on one, conducting research using the platform, so I do use the platform to answer my own research questions, and those we have presented at different conferences, for example the American Heart Association, we had a talk here about the precision medicine platform, and then two, I'm focused on strategically making the precision medicine platform better by getting more data, adding data to the platform, improving the way that data is harmonized in the platform, and improving the amount of data that we have, and the diversity, and the variety. >> Alright, we'll help you with that, so let's help you get some people recruited, so what do they got to do to volunteer, volunteer their data, because I think this is one of those things where you know people do want to help. So, how do they, how you onboard? You use the website, is it easy, one click? Do they have to wear an iWatch, I mean what I mean? >> Yeah. >> What's the deal? What do I got to do? >> So I think I would encourage researchers and scientists and anybody who is data centric to go to precision.heart.org, and they can just sign up for an account, they can contact us through that, there's plenty of different ways to get in touch with us and plenty of ways to help. >> Precision.heart.org. >> Yup, precision.heart.org. >> Stu: Register now. >> Register now click, >> Powered by AWS. >> Yup. >> Alright so I gotta ask you as an AWS customer, okay take your customer hat off, put your citizen's hat on, what is Amazon mean to you, I mean is it, how do you describe it to people who don't use it? >> Okay yeah, so I think... the HA's ultimate mission right, is to provide individualized treatment and cures for cardiovascular disease and stroke. Amazon is a way to enable that and make that actually happen so that we can mine extremely large data sets, identify those individualized patterns. It allows us to store data in a fashion where we can provide a market place where there's extremely large amounts of data, extremely diverse amounts of data, and data that can be processed effectively, so that it can be directly used for research. >> What's your favorite tool or product or service within Amazon? >> That's a good question. I think, I mean the cloud and s3 buckets are definitely in a sense they're my favorites because there's so much that can be stored right there, Athena I think is also pretty awesome, and then the EMR clusters with Spark. >> The list is too long. >> My jam. >> It is. (laughs) >> So, one of the interesting things that I love is a lot of my friends are in non-profits, fundraising is a big, big challenge, grants are again, a big challenge, have you guys seen any new opportunities as a result of the results of the research coming out of HA and AWS in the cloud? >> Yeah so I think one of the coolest things about the HA is that they have this Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine, and the strategic partnership between the HA and AWS, even just this year we've launched 13 new grants, where the HA kind of backs the research behind, and the AWS provides credit so that people can come to the cloud and use the cloud and use the tools available on a grant funded basis. >> So tell me a little bit more about that program. Anybody specifically that you, kind of like saying, seeing that's used these credits from AWS to do some cool research? >> Yeah definitely, so I think specifically we have one grantee right now that is really focused on identifying outcomes across multiple clinical trials, so currently clinical trials take 20 years, and there's a large variety of them. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the Framingham heart study, the Dallas heart study, the Jackson heart study, and trying to determine how those trials compare, and what outcomes we can generate, and research insights we can generate across multiple data sets is something that's been challenging due to the ability to not being able to necessarily access that data, all of those different data sets together, and then two, trying to find ways to actually compare them, and so with the precision medicine platform, we have a grantee at the University of Colorado-Denver, who has been able to find those synchronicities across data sets and has actually created kind of a framework that then can be implemented in the precision medicine platform. >> Well I just registered, it takes really two seconds to register, that's cool. Thanks so much for pointing out precision.heart.org. Final question, you said EMR's your jam. (laughing) >> Why, why is it? Why do you like it so much, is it fast, is it easy to use? >> I think the speed is one of the things. When it comes to using genetic data and multiple biological levels of data, whether it be your genetics, your lifestyle, your environment factors, there's... it just ends up being extremely large amounts of data, and to be able to implement things like server-less AI, and artificial intelligence, and machine learning on that data set is time consuming, and having the power of an EMR cluster that is scalable makes that so much faster so that we can then answer our research questions faster and identify those insights and get them to out in the world. >> Gotta love the new services they're launching, too. It just builds on top of it. Doesn't it? >> Yes. >> Yeah, soon everyone's gonna be jamming on AWS in our opinion. Thanks so much for coming on, appreciate the stories and commentary. >> Yeah. >> Precision.heart.org, you want to volunteer if you're a researcher or a user, want to share your data, they've got a lot of data science mojo going on over there, so check it out. It's theCUBE bringing a lot of data here, tons of data from the show, three days of wall to wall coverage, we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of A W. S. Public sector summit. I'm john Kerry hosting CUBA. We're live in Washington D. C. For two days, an actual event with an expo floor with real people face to face and of course we're streaming it digitally on the cube and cube channels. And so our next guest, Mark Francis chief digital health integration officer Electronic caregiver, Mark great to see you tech veteran and former intel back in the day. You've seen your ways of innovation. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So we were talking before we came on camera about all the innovation going back in the computer industry but now with health care and delivery of care telemedicine and how the structural systems are changing and how cloud is impacting that. You guys have an interesting solution on AWS that kind of, to me connect the dots for many tell us what you guys do and take us through the product. >>Sure. Happy to do so uh our company is electronic caregiver were actually founded back in 2009. We're based in Los cruces new Mexico so off the grid. Um but since that time we have been spending a lot of time and money doing foundational R and D pilots and product development work. Really say how do you bridge that chasm between the doctor's office and the patient home in a way that you can put a patient facing device and equipment in a patient's home that's going to drive high level of engagement, obtain actionable curated data that's presented out to caregivers and the caregivers can then act upon that to help direct and deliver high quality care. >>So basically is the future of medicine, >>the future of medicine. Right. Right. We look at medicine, we look at the future of medicine as being a hybrid model of in person care plus remote care. And we really see ourselves at the epicenter of providing a platform to help enable that. >>You know the big story here at the public sector. Some and we've been reporting on a digitally for the previous year is the impact the pandemic has had on the industry and and not just normal disruption, you know technology and start ups, disruption happens, structural changes being forced upon industries by the force majeure. That is the pandemic education, health care and so video and data and connected oriented systems are now the thing structurally that's changing it. That's causing all kinds of business model, innovations and challenges. Yeah. What's your take on that? Because this is real. >>Yeah. It is real. It it's funny that this is actually my third digital health company. Um First one was in in uh Silicon Valley early remote patient monitoring company. We end up selling it to bosh uh when I joined intel to be part of our digital health group, we did that for five years and ended a joint venture with G. E. So people have been playing around in remote patient monitoring telehealth for some time until the pandemic though there wasn't really a strong business model to justify scaling of these businesses. Um uh the pandemic change that it forced adoption and force the government to allow reimbursement coach as well. And as a result of that we've seen this pure if aeration of different product offering service offerings and then payment models around telehealth broadly speaking >>well since you started talking the music started cranking because this is the new music of the industry, we're here on the expo floor, we have face to face conversations going on and uh turn the music down. Hey thanks guys, this is a huge thing and I want to uh highlight even further what is the driver for this? Because is it, I mean actually clouds got some benefits but as you guys do the R. And D. What's going on with what's the key drivers for medicine? >>Yeah, I would take two things from a from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is finally in place to enable this type of charity distance before that it really wasn't there now that's there and the products that folks are used are much more affordable about the provider's side and the patient side. The main driver is um uh there's a lot of underlying trends that were happening that we're just being ignored Whether it was 50% non adherence to treatment plans, massive medication mismanagement um lack of professional and informal caregivers, all those things were kind of happening underneath the surface and then with Kobe, it all hit everybody in the phase. People started using telehealth and then realize, hey, we can deliver high quality care, we can deliver value based care mixed with a hybrid model of tele care plus patient care. And it turned out that, that, that works out well. So I think it's now a realization that tell care not only connects patients but solve some of these other issues around adherents, compliance, staffing and a number of other >>things and that this is a structural change we were talking about. Exactly. All right, So talk about amazon, what do you guys are doing on AWS? How's that all work? >>That's working out great. So as we, as we launch at a 2.0, we built it on 24 foundational aws and Amazon services. It's a serverless architecture, um, uh, which is delivered. What enables us to do is we have a whole bunch of different patients facing devices which we now integrate all into one back end through which we can run our data analytics are machine learning and then present curated actual data to the providers on top of that. We've also been developing a virtual caregiver that's really, really innovative. So we're using the unity engine to develop a very, very realistic virtual caregiver that is with the patient 24 hours a day in their home, they develop a relationship with that individual and then through that they can really drive greater you know more intimate care plan and a more intimate relationship with their human caregivers that's built using basic technology behind Alexa pauline lacks as well as IOT core and a lot of other ai ml services from from amazon as well. >>Not to get all nerdy and kind of seeking out here because under the hood it's all the goodness of amazon. We've got a server list, you got tennis is probably in there doing something who knows what's going on there, You've got polly let's do this and that but it also highlights the edge the ultimate network edges the human and if you've got to care for the patient at home or wherever on the run whatever. Yeah you got to get the access to the data so yeah I can imagine a lot of monitoring involved too. Yeah can you take us through how that works? >>Yeah and for us we like to talk about intelligence as opposed to data because data for data sakes isn't actionable. So really what can we do through machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to make that data more actionable before the human caregiver because you're never going to take a human out of the equation. Uh But uh we had a lot of data inputs, they're both direct data inputs such as vital signs, we also get subtle data input. So with our with our uh with Addison or virtual caregiver uh the product actually come to the camera away from intel called the real sense cameras. And with that we get to see several signs of changes in terms of gate which might be in the indicative of falls risk of falls. We can see body temperature, pulse, heart rate, signs of stress, lack of sleep. Maybe that's a sign of uh adverse reaction to a new medication. There's a bunch of different direct and indirect inputs. We can take run some analysis against and then say hey there's something here you might want to look at because it might be indicating a change in health. >>So this is where the innovation around these bots and ai come in because you're essentially getting pattern matching on other signals you already know. So using the cameras and or sensors in to understand and get the patients some signaling where they can maybe take action call >>fun or Yeah, that's exactly. And the other thing we get, we get to integrate information related to what are called social determinants of health. So there's a whole body of research now showing that 65% of someone's health is actually driven by non clinical issues. So again issues of food security, transportation, access to care, mental health type issues in terms of stress and stuff like we can start gathering some of that information to based upon people's behaviors or for you to assessments which can also provide insights to help direct care. >>So maybe when I'm doing the Cuban reviews, you guys can go to work and look at me. I'm stressed out right now, having a great time here public sector, this is really cool. So take a minute to explain the vision. What does this go from here? I'll see low hanging fruit, telemedicine, check data, observe ability for patient for optimizing care, check what happens next industry disruption, what how these dominoes have been kind of fall? >>Yeah, for us uh we really are seeing more providers and more payers system. Integrators looking now to say how do I put together a comprehensive solution from the doctor's office to inpatient hospital to home that can remove it. A lot of barriers to care addi which is our platform is designed to be interoperable to plug into electronic health care systems, whether it's Cerner, Epic or Athenahealth, whatever it might be to be able to create that you pick us seamless platform for provider to use. We can push all of the data to their platform if they want to use that or they could use our platform and dashboard as well. We make it available to healthcare providers but also a lot of people are trying to age in place and they're getting treated by private duty providers, senior housing providers and other maybe less clinical caregivers. But if you're there every day with somebody you can pick up signs which might prevent a major health episode down the road. So we want to close that circle our our vision is how do we close the circle of care so that people get the right information at the right time to deliver the right >>care. So it's kind of a health care stack of a new kind of stack. So I have to ask you if there was an eye as pass and sass category um infrastructure as a service platform as a service. And then says it sounds like you guys are kind of combine the lower parts of the stack and enable your partners to develop on top of. Is that how it >>works? Yes it does. Yeah. Yeah. So with addie, the interesting thing that we've done it's designed to have open a P. I. For a lot of modules as well. So if we're working with the american Heart Association and we want to do a uh cardiac care module from using their I. P. We could do that if we want to integrate with Uber health or lift we could do that as well if we want to do something in the amazon and pill pack, it's a plug in that we could do that. So if I'm a patient or or a loved one at home instead of going to 10 different places or use our platform and then pull up four different apps. Everything can be right there at their fingertips. You can either do it by touch or you can use this voice because it's all a voice or a touch of interaction. >>So just because I'm curious and and and for clarification, the idea of going past versus SAS platform versus software as a service is why flexibility or customization? Why not go SAS and be a SAS application? >>Uh we've talked mostly about, we've we've gone back and forth platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. So that's more the debate that we've had. It's more about the scalability that we can offer. Um uh not just in the United States, but globally as well. Um and really that's really the thing that we've been looking at, especially because there's so many different sources of data, if you want to provide high quality care that needs to be integrated. We want to make sure that we created a platform, not just for what we provide but for what others in the environment can provide. >>So you really want to enable other people to create that very much layer on top of you guys, do you have out of the box SAS to get people going or is that just >>With the release of adding 2.0, now we do. So now folks go to our website and they contact our development those tools and and those libraries are available. >>Now, this is an awesome opportunity. So for people out there who are wanting to innovate on you, they can just say, okay, I'll leverage your the amazon web services of healthcare essentially. >>That's a nice bold ambitious statement. Yeah, but I mean kind of but if we if we can achieve that, then we'd be quite happy and we think the industry, you're gonna partner >>benefit of that. It's an ecosystem play. Exactly, yeah. It's kind of like. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And for us, what we do covert is a perfect example going back to that. So when Covid hit um were based in las cruces, new Mexico last winter lost crew system to el paso and overwhelmed. They're at capacity. Different health care systems came to us, they asked if we partner with them to deliver a basically a triage program for folks that were coming into the er with Covid. So we designed a Kobe at home programs. So you get diagnosed, get a kit, go home and using telehealth virtual visits, remote monitoring. Be able to stay healthy at home without doing community spread. And by making sure that you were being watched over by a care professionals 24 hours a day. We did that um worked with 300 people Malcolm would all of them said healthy. We were able to expand uh inpatient capacity by 77%. We saved the system over $6 million in in three months. We've now been asked and we're actually replicating that in Memphis now and then also we've been asked to do so down in Mississippi >>mark, great conversation. Uh real quick. I only I don't have much time left but I want to ask you, does this mean that we're gonna see a clip of proliferation of in home kind of devices to assist? >>Yeah, we will. Uh, what we've seen is a big pivot now towards hospital at home model of care. So you have providers saying, you know, I'll see you in my facility but also extend capabilities so I can see you and treat you at home as well. We've also seen a realization that telehealth is more than a than an occasional video visit because if all you're doing is replacing an occasional in person visit with an occasional video visit. You're not really changing things now. There's a whole different sensors ai other integrations that come together to be able to enable these different models >>for all the business school folks out there and people who understand what's going on with structural change. That's when innovation really changes. Yeah, this is structural change. >>Absolutely. >>Mark, thanks for coming on. Mark Francis chief Digital Health Integration Officer Electronic Caregiver here on the Q. Thanks. Coming >>on. Thank you. My pleasure. >>Okay, more coverage after this short break. I'm john Kerry, your host Aws public Sector summit, We'll be right back mm mm mm

>> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back everyone it's theCube's exclusive coverage here, day two of the Amazon Web Sources public sector summit. This is the public sector across the globe. This is their reinvent, this is their big event. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and also David Vellante's been here doing interviews. Our next guest is, we got Doug Van Dyke, he's the director of U.S. Federal Civilian and Non Profit Sectors of the group, welcome to theCube, good to see you. >> John, thank you very much for having me. >> So you've been in the federal, kind of game, and public sector for a while. You've known, worked with Theresa, at Microsoft before she came to Reinvent. >> 15 years now. >> How is she doing? >> She's doing great, we saw her on main stage yesterday. Force of nature, love working with her, love working for her. This is, like you were saying, this is our re-invent here in D.C. and 14,000 plus, 15,000 registrations, she's on the top of her game. >> What I'm really impressed with her and your team as well, is the focus on growth, but innovation, right? it's not just about, knock down the numbers and compete. Certainly you're competing against people who are playing all kinds of tricks. You got Oracle out there, you got IBM, we've beaten at the CIA. It's a street battle out there in this area in D.C. You guys are innovative, in that you're doing stuff with non-profits, you got mission driven, you're doing the educate stuff, so it's not just a one trick pony here. Take us through some of the where you guys heads are at now, because you're successful, everyone's watching you, you're not small anymore. What's the story? >> So, I think the differentiator for us is our focus on the customers. You know, we've got a great innovation story at the Department of Veterans Affairs with vets.gov. So five years ago if a veteran went out to get the services that the government was going to provide them, they've have to pick from 200 websites. It just wasn't to navigate through 200 websites. So, the innovation group at Veteran's Affairs, the digital services team, figured out, let's pull this all together under a single portal with vets.gov. It's running on AWS, and now veterans have a single interface into all the services they want. >> Doug, one of the things I've been impressed, my first year coming to this. I've been to many other AWS shows, but you've got all these kind of overlapping communities. Of course, the federal government, plus state and local, education. You've got this civilian agencies, so give us a little bit of flavor about that experience here at the show. What trends your hearing from those customers. >> So what's great for me is I've been here almost six and a half years, and I've seen the evolution. And you know, there were the early customers who were just the pioneers like Tom Soderstrom, from JPL, who was on main stage. And then we saw the next wave where there were programs that needed a course correction, like Center for Medicare Medicaid with Healthcare.gov. Where Amazon Web Services came in, took over, helped them with the MarketPlace, you know, get that going. And now we're doing some great innovative things at CMS, aggregating data from all 50 states, about 75 terabytes, so they can do research on fraud, waste, and abuse that they couldn't do before. So we're helping our customers innovate on the cloud, and in the cloud, and it's been a great opportunity. >> Oh my God, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Soderstrom two years ago. >> Okay. >> Everybody gets real excited when you talk about space. It's easy to talk about innovation there, but you know, talk about innovation throughout the customers, because some people will look at it, and be like, oh come on, government and their bureaucracy, and they're behind. What kind of innovation are you hearing from your customers? >> So there's an exciting with Department of Energy. They, you know there's a limited amount of resources that you have on premise. Well, they're doing research on the large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. And they needed to double the amount of capacity that they had on premise. So, went to the AWS cloud, fired up 50,000 cores, brought the data down, and they could do research on it. And so, we're making things possible that couldn't be done previously. >> What are some of the examples that government entities and organizations are doing to create innovation in the private sector? Cause the private sector's been the leader to the public sector, and know you're seeing people starting to integrate it. I mean, half the people behind us, that are exhibiting here, are from the commercial side doing business in the public sector. And public sector doing, enabling action in the private sector. Talk about that dynamic, cause it's not just public sector. >> Right. >> Can you just share your? >> These public, private. Great example with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. They have a new program called NEXRAD. It's the next generation of doppler radar. They have 160 stations across the world, collecting moisture, air pressure, all of the indicators that help predict the weather. They partner with us at AWS to put this data out, and through our open data program. And then organizations like the Weather Bug can grab that information, government information, and use it to build the application that you have on your I-Phone that predicts the weather. So you know whether to bring an umbrella to work tomorrow. >> So you're enabling the data from, or stuff from the public, for private, entrepreneurial activity? >> Absolutely. >> Talk about the non-profits. What's going on there? Obviously, we heard som stuff on stage with Teresa. The work she's showcasing, a lot of the non-profit. A lot of mission driven entrepreneurships happening. Here in D.C, it's almost a Silicon Valley like dynamic, where stuff that was never funded before is getting funded because they can do Cloud. They can stand it up pretty quickly and get it going. So, you're seeing kind of a resurgence of mission driven entrepreneurships. What is the nonprofit piece of it look now for AWS? How do you talk about that? >> Sure. Well again, one of the areas that I'm really passionate about being here, and being one of the people who helped start our nonprofit vertical inside of AWS, we now have over 12, I'm sorry, 22,000 nonprofits using AWS to keep going. And the mission of our nonprofit vertical is just to make sure that no nonprofit would ever fail for lack of infrastructure. So we partnered with Tech Soup, which is an organization that helps vet and coordinate our Cloud credits. So nonprofits, small nonprofit organizations can go out through Tech Soup, get access to credits, so they don't have to worry about their infrastructure. And you know we.. >> Free credits? >> Those credits, with the Tech Soup membership, they get those, yeah, and using the word credit, it's more like a grant of AWS cloud. >> You guys are enabling almost grants. >> Yes, cloud grants. Not cash grants, but cloud grants. >> Yeah, yeah great. So, how is that converting for you, in your mind? Can you share some examples of some nonprofits that are successful? >> Sure. A great presentation, and I think it was your last interview. A game changer. Where these smaller nonprofits can have a really large impact. And, but then we're also working with some of the larger nonprofits too. The American Heart Association, that built their precision medicine platform to match genotype, phenotype information, so we can further cardiovascular research. They have this great mission statement, they want to reduce cardiovascular disease by 20 percent by 2020. And we're going to help them do that. >> You guys are doing a great job, I got to say. It's been fun to watch, and now, we've been covering you guys for the past two years now, here at the event. A lot more coming on, in D.C. The CIA went in a few years ago. Certainly a shot heard around the cloud. That's been well documented. The Department of Defense looking good off these certain indicators. But, what's going on in the trends in the civilian agencies? Can you take a minute to give an update on that? >> Yeah, so I started earlier saying I've seen the full spectrum. I saw the very beginning, and then I've seen all the way to the end. Where, I think it was three years ago at this event, I talked to Joe Piva, who is the former CIO for the Department of Commerce ITA, the International Trade Association. He had data center contracts coming up for renewal. And he made a really brave decision to cancel those contracts. So he had 18 months to migrate the entire infrastructure for ITA over on to AWS. And you know, there's nothing like an impending date to move. So, we've got agencies that are going all in on AWS, and I think that's just a sign of the times. >> Data centers, I mean anyone who were startup nine years into it, we've never had a data center. I think most startups don't.. >> Born in the cloud. >> Born in the cloud. Thanks so much Dave, for coming on. Appreciate the time. Congratulations on your success. AWS public sector doing great, global public sector. You guys are doing great. Building nations, we had Baharain on as well. Good luck, and the ecosystems looks good. You guys did a good job. So, congratulations. >> John, Stu, thank you very much for having me here today. >> Live coverage here, we are in Washington D.C. For Cube. Coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be back with more. Stay with us, we've got some more interviews after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's partner ecosystem. >> Welcome back, live here on theCUBE along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. Welcome to AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Again, live from Washington, D.C., your nation's capital, our nation's capital. With us now is our host for the week, puts on one heck of a show, I'm want to tell you, 10,000 strong here, jammed into the Washington Convention Center, Theresa Carlson from World Wide Public Sector. Nice to have you here, Theresa. >> Hi, good afternoon. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Love theCUBE and thank you for being here with us today. >> Absolutely. >> All week in fact. >> It's been great, it really has. Let's just talk about the show first off. Way back, six years ago, we could probably get everybody there jammed into our little area here, just about I think. >> Pretty much. >> Hard to do today. >> That's right. >> How do you feel about when you've seen this kind of growth not only of the show, but in your sector in general? >> I think at AWS we're humbled and excited and, on a personal level because I was sort of given the charge of go create this Public Sector business world-wide, I'm blown away, I pinch myself every time because you did hear my story. The first event, we had about 50 people in the basement of some hotel. And then, we're like, okay. And today, 10,000 people. Last year we had it at the Marriott Wardman Park and we shut down Connecticut Avenue so we knew we needed to make a change. (laughing) But it's great, this is really about our customers and partners. This is really for them. It's for them to make connections, share, and the whole theme of this is superheroes and they are our superheroes. >> One of the heroes you had on the stage today, John Edwards from the CIA, one of your poster-children if you will for great success and that kind of collaboration, said something to the effect of quote, "The best decision we ever made at the CIA "was engaging with AWS in that partnership." When you hear something like that from such a treasured partner, you got to feel pretty good. >> You just have to drop the microphone, boom, and you're sort of done. They are doing amazing work and their innovation levels are really leading, I would say, in the US Public Sector for sure and also, not just in US Public Sector but around the world. Their efforts of what they're doing and the scale and reach at which they're doing it so that's pretty cool. >> John, you've talked about the CIA moment, I'd like to hear the story, share with Theresa. >> Oh, you're going to steal my thunder here? >> No, I'm setting you up. That's what a good partner does. It's all yours. >> Well, John, we've talked multiple times already so I'll say it for the third time. The shot heard around the cloud was my definition of seminal moment, in big mega-trends there's always a moment. It was when Obama tweeted, Twitter grew, plane landing on the Hudson, there's always a seminal moment in major trends that make or break companies. For you guys, it was the CIA. Since then, it's just been a massive growth for you guys. That deal was interesting because it validated Shadow IT, validated the cloud, and it also unseated IBM, the behemoth sales organization that owned the account. In a way, a lot of things lined up. Take us through what's happened then, and since then to now. >> Well, you saw between yesterday at Werner Vogels' keynote and my keynote this morning, just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have. Everything from the UK government, GCHQ, the Department of Justice with the IT in the UK, to the centers for Medicare for HHS, to amazing educational companies, Cal. Polytech., Australian Tax Office. That's just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have and all of their stories were impactful, every story is impactful in their own way and across whatever sector they have. That really just tells you that the type of workloads that people are running has evolved because I remember in the early days, when you and I first talked, we talked about what are the kind of workloads and we were talking a little bit about website hosting. That's, of course, really evolved into things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, a massive scale of applications. >> Five or six years ago when we first chatted at re:Invent, it's interesting 'cause now this is the size of re:Invent what it was then so you're on a same trajectory from a show size. Again, validation to the growth in Public Sector. But I was complimenting you on our opening today, saying that you're tenacious because we've talked early days, it was a slog in the early days to get going in the cloud, you were knocking on a lot of doors, convincing people, hey, the future's going to look his way and I don't want to say they slammed the proverbial door in your face but it was more of, woah, they don't believe the cloud is ever going to happen for the government. Share some of those stories because now, looking back, obviously the world has changed. >> It has and, in fact, it's changed in many aspects of it, from policy makers, which I think would be great for you all to have on here sometime to get their perspective on cloud, but policy makers who are now thinking about, we just had a new modernization of IT mandate come out in the US Federal Government where they're going to give millions and millions of dollars toward the modernization of IT for US Government agencies which is going to be huge. That's the first time that's ever happened. To an executive order around cyber-security which is pretty much mandated to look at cloud and how you use it. You're seeing thing like that to even how grants are given where it used to be an old-school model of hardware only to now use cloud. Those ideas and aspects of how individuals are using IT but also just the procurements that are coming out. The buying vehicles that you're seeing come out of government, almost all of them have cloud now. >> John and I were talking about D.C. and the political climate. Obviously, we always talk about it on my show, comment on that. But, interesting, theCUBE, we could do damage here in D.C.. So much target-rich environment for content but more than ever, to me, is the tech scene here is really intrinsically different. For example, this is not a shiny new toy kind of trend, it is a fundamental transformation of the business model. What's interesting to me is, again, since the CIA shot heard around the cloud moment, you've seen a real shift in operating model. So the question I have for you, Theresa, if you can comment on this is: how has that changed? How has the procuring of technology changed? How has he human side of it changed? Because people want to do a good job, they're just on minicomputers and mainframes from the old days with small incremental improvement over the years in IT but now to a fundamental, agile, there's going to be more apps, more action. >> You said something really important just a moment ago, this is a different kind of group than you'll get in Silicon Valley and it is but it's very enterprise. Everybody you see here, every project they work on, we're talking DoD, the enterprise of enterprises. They have really challenging and tough problems to solve every day. How that's changed, in the old days here in government, they know how to write acquisitions for a missile or a tank or something really big in IT. What's changing is their ability to write acquisitions for agile IT, things like cloud utility based models, moving fast, flywheel approach to IT acquisitions. That's what's changing, that kind of acquisition model. Also, you're seeing the system integrator community here change. Where they were, what I call, body shops to do a lot of these projects, they're having to evolve their IT skills, they're getting much more certified in areas of AWS, at the system admin to certified solution architects at the highest level, to really roll these projects out. So training, education, the type of acquisition, and how they're doing it. >> What happened in terms of paradigm shift, mindset? Something had to happen 'cause you brought a vision to the table but somebody had to buy it. Usually, when we talk about legacy systems, it was a legacy mindset too, resistant, reluctant, cautious, all those things. >> Theresa: Well, everything gets thrown out. >> What happened? Where did it tip the other way? Where did it go? >> I think, over time, it's different parts of the government but culture is the hardest thing to, always, change. Other elements of any changes, you get there, but culture is fundamentally the hardest thing. You're seeing that. You've always heard us say, you can't fight gravity, and cloud is the new normal. That's for the whole culture. People are like, I cannot do my project anymore without the use of cloud computing. >> We also have a saying, you can't fight fashion either, and sometimes being in fashion is what the trends are going on. So I got to ask you, what is the fashion statement in cloud these days with your customers? Is it, you mentioned there, moving much down in the workload, is it multi-cloud? Is it analytics? Where's the fashionable, cool action right now? >> I think, here, right now, the cool thing that people really are talking about are artificial intelligence and machine learning, how they take advantage of that. You heard a lot about recognition yesterday, Poly and Lex, these new tools how they are so differentiating anything that they can possibly develop quickly. It's those kind of tools that really we're hearing and of course, IOT for state and local is a big deal. >> I got to ask you the hard question, I always ask Andy a hard question too, if he's watching, you're going to get this one probably at re:Invent. Amazon is a devops culture, you ship code fast and you make all these updates and it's moving very, very fast. One of the things that you guys have done well, but I still think you need some work to do in terms of critical analysis, is getting the releases out that are on public cloud into the GovCloud. You guys have shortened that down to less than a year on most things. You got the east region now rolled out so full disaster recovery but government has always been lagging behind most commercial. How are you guys shrinking that window? When do you see the day when push button commercial, GovCloud are all lockstep and pushing code to both clouds? >> We could do that today but there's a couple of big differentiators that are important for the GovCloud. That is it requires US citizenship, which as you know, we've talked about the challenges of technology and skills. That's just out there, right? At Amazon Web Services, we're a very diverse company, a group of individuals that do our coding and development, and not all of them are US citizens. So for these two clouds, you have to be a US citizen so that is an inhibitor. >> In terms of developers? In terms of building the product? >> Not building but the management aspect. Because of their design, we have multiple individuals managing multiple clouds, right? Now, with us, it's about getting that scale going, that flywheel for us. >> So now it's going to be managed in the USA versus made in the USA with everything as a service. >> Yeah, it is. For us, it's about making sure, number one, we can roll them out, but secondly, we do not want to roll services into those clouds unless they are critical. We are moving a lot faster, we rolled in a lot more services, and the other cool thing is we're starting to do some unique things for our GovCloud regions which, maybe the next time, we can talk a little bit more about those things. >> Final question for me, and let John jump in, the CIA has got this devops factory thing, I want you to talk about it because I think it points to the trend that's encouraging to me at least 'cause I'm skeptical on government, as you know. But this is a full transformation shift on how they do development. Talk about these 4000 developers that got rid of their development workstations, are now doing cloud, and the question is, who else is doing it? Is this a trend that you see happening across other agencies? >> The reason that's really important, I know you know, in the old-school model, you waited forever to provision anything, even just to do development, and you heard John talk about that. That's what he meant on this sort of workstation, this long period of time it took for them to do any kind of development. Now, what they do is they just use any move they have and they go and they provision the cloud like that. Then, they can also not just do that, they can create armies of cores or Amazon machine images so they have super-repeatable tools. Think about that. When you have these super-repeatable tools sitting in the cloud, that you can just pull down these machine images and begin to create both code and development and build off those building blocks, you move so much faster than you did in the past. So that's sort of a big trend, I would say they're definitely leading it. But other key groups are NASA, HHS, Department of Justice. Those are some of the key, big groups that we're seeing really do a lot changes in their dev. >> I got to ask you about the-- >> Oh, I have to say DHS, also DHS on customs and border patrols, they're doing the same, really innovators. >> One of the things that's happening which I'm intrigued by is the whole digital transformation in our culture, right, society. Certainly, the Federal Government wants to take care of the civil liberties of the citizens. So it's not a privacy question, it's more about where smart cities is going. We're starting to see, I call, the digital parks, if you will, where you're starting to see a digital park go into Yosemite and camping out and using pristine resources and enjoying them. There's a demand for citizens to democratize resources available to them, supercomputing or datasets, what's your philosophy on that? What is Amazon doing to facilitate and accelerate the citizen's value of technology so it can be in the hands of anyone? >> I love that question because I'll tell you, at the heart of our business is what we call citizen service, paving the way for disruptive innovation, making the world a better place. That's through citizen's services and they're access. For us, we have multiple things. Everything from our dataset program, where we fund multiple datasets that we put up on the cloud and let everybody take advantage of them, from the individual student to the researcher, for no fee. >> John F.: You pick up the cost on that? >> We do, we fund, we put those datasets in completely, we allow them to go and explore and use. The only time they would ever pay is if they go off and start creating their own systems. The most highly curated datasets up there right now are pretty much on AWS. You heard me talk about the earth, through AWS Earth that we have that shows the earth. We have weather datasets, cancer datasets, we're working with so many groups, genomic, phenotypes, genomes of rice, the rice genome that we've done. >> So this is something that you see that you're behind, >> Oh, completely. >> you're passionate about and will continue to do? >> Because you never know when that individual student or small community school is out there and they can access tools that they never could've accessed before. The training and education, that creativity of the mind, we need to open that up to everybody and we fundamentally believe that cloud is a huge opportunity for that. You heard me tell the 1000 genomes story in the past of where took that cancer dataset or that genome dataset from NIH, put it into AWS for the first time, the first week we put it up we had 3200 new researchers crowdsource on that dataset. That was the first time, that I know of, that anyone had put up a major dataset for researchers. >> And the scale, certainly, is a great resource. And smart cities is an interesting area. I want to get your thoughts on your relationship with Intel. They have 5G coming out, they have a full network transformation, you're going to have autonomous vehicles out there, you're going to have all kinds of digital. How are you guys planning on powering the cloud and what's the role that Intel will play with you guys in the relationship? >> Of course, serverless computing comes into play significantly in areas like that because you want to create efficiencies, even in the cloud, we're all about that. People have always said, oh, AWS won't do that 'cause that's disrupting themselves. We're okay with disrupting ourselves if it's the right thing. We also don't want to hog resourcing of these tools that aren't necessary. So when it comes to devices like that and IOT, you need very efficient computing and you need tools that allow that efficient computing to both scale but not over-resource things. You'll see us continue to have models like that around IOT, or lambda, or serverless computing and how we access and make sure that those resources are used appropriately. >> We're almost out of time so I'd like to shift over if we can. Really impressed with the NGO work, the non-profit work as well and your work in the education space. Just talk about the nuance, differences between working with those particular constituents in the customer base, what you've learned and the kind of work you're providing in those silos right now. >> They are amazing, they are so frugal with their resources and it makes you hungry to really want to go out and help their mission because what you will find when you go meet with a lot of these not-for-profits, they are doing some of the most amazing work that even many people have really not heard of and they're being so frugal with how they resource and drive IT. There's a program called Feed the World and I met the developer of this and it's like two people. They've fed millions of people around the world with like three developers and creating an app and doing great work. To everything from like the American Heart Association that has a mission, literally, of stopping heart disease which is our number one killer around the world. When you meet them and you see the things they're doing and how they are using cloud computing to change and forward their mission. You heard us talk about human trafficking, it's a horrible, misunderstood environment out there that more of us need to be informed on and help with but computing can be a complete differentiator for them, cloud computing. We give millions of dollars of grants away, not just give away, we help them. We help them with the technical resourcing, how they're efficient, and we work really hard to try to help forward their mission and get the word out. It's humbling and it's really nice to feel that you're not only doing things for big governments but you also can help that individual not-for-profit that has a mission that's really important to not only them but groups in the world. >> It's a different level of citizen service, right? I mean, ocean conservancy this morning, talking about that and tidal change. >> What's the biggest thing that, in your mind, personal question, obviously you've been through from the beginning to now, a lot more growth ahead of you. I'm speculating that AWS Public Sector, although you won't disclose the numbers, I'll find a number out there. It's big, you guys could run the table and take a big share, similar to what you've done with startup and now enterprise market. Do you have a pinch-me moment where you go, where are we? Where are you on that spectrum of self-awareness of what's actually happening to you and this world and your team? In Public Sector, we operate just like all of AWS and all of Amazon. We really have treated this business like a startup and I create new teams just like everybody else does. I make them frugal and small and I say go do this. I will tell you, I don't even think about it because we are just scratching the surface, we are just getting going, and today we have customers in 155 countries and I have employees in about 25 countries now. Seven years ago, that was not the case. When you're moving that fast, you know that you're just getting going and that you have so much more that you can do to help your customers and create a partner ecosystem. It's a mission for us, it really is a mission and my team and myself are really excited, out there every day working to support our customers, to really grow and get them moving faster. We sort of keep pushing them to go faster. We have a long way to go and maybe ask me five years from now, we'll see. >> How about next year? We'll come back, we'll ask you again next year. >> Yeah, maybe I'll know more next year. >> John W.: Theresa, thank you for the time, very generous with your time. I know you have a big schedule over the course of this week so thank you for being here with us once again on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Many time CUBE alum, Theresa Carlson from AWS. Back with more here from the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, Washington, D.C. right after this. (electronic music)