>> Narrator: From Seattle, Washington it's the CUBE covering AWS Imagine non-profit. Brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're on the waterfront in Seattle, it's an absolutely gorgeous couple of days here at the AWS Imagine Nonprofit Conference. We went to the AWS Imagine Education Conference, this is really all about nonprofits and we're hearing all kinds of interesting stories about how these people are using AWS to help conquer really big problems. We're going to shift gears a little bit from the two footed problems to the four footed problems and that's animals and everybody likes animals but nobody likes animal shelters and nobody likes the ultimate solution that many animal shelters used to use to take care of problems. But thank you to our next guest, that is not quite the case so much anymore. So we're really happy to have Angie Embree on. She is the CIO of Best Friends Animal Society, Angie great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well and thank you for having me. >> Oh absolutely! So before we got on I just heard this crazy, crazy statistic that when your organization started in 1984 approximately 17 million animals were killed in US shelters per year. That number is now down to 700 thousand, that is a giant, giant reduction. And yet you, with big audacious goals really are looking to get that to zero. So, that's a giant goal, give us a little bit of background on the organization and how you decided to go after a goal like that and some of the ways you are actually going to achieve it. >> Well, the organization started in 1984 and it started with a group of friends in Southern Utah who decided that, you know the killing in America's shelters just had to go. So really the Best Friends founders started the no-kill movement along with a gentleman in San Francisco by the name of Rich Avanzino. And as you said, they took you know the killing down from 17 million in 1984 to approximately 733 thousand now. The organization started as just the sanctuary, we have the largest no-kill companion animal sanctuary in the country where we hold about 17 hundred animals every day. And we also have, you know, knowing that we needed to help out the rest of the country we have built life saving centers in Houston, Texas. Or we're working on Houston, Texas but Los Angels, California, New York City, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Georgia, it seems like I've left somebody out but, >> Probably, but that's okay. >> We have life saving centers all over the country. So it was really, you know, when they realized what was going on in America's shelters it was really the idea that we should not be killing animals for space. So, just recently in fact, I will say recently but in the last few years, Julie Castle our CEO put kind of, did our moon shot, put that stake in the ground and said we're going to take this country no-kill by the year 2025. >> Right. >> So it's super exciting. >> So it's really interesting because you guys are trying to execute your vision, and it's easy to execute your own vision, but it's a whole different thing when you're trying to execute your vision through this huge infrastructure of shelters that have been around forever. So, I wonder if you can explain kind of what's your relationship with shelters that you don't own. I guess, I think you said before we turned on the cameras there are affiliates, so how does that relationship work? How do you help them achieve your goal which is no-kill. >> Yeah, so we have over 27 hundred network partners around the country. And what we do is we help to educate them on, you know we understand their problems, we have creative programs to solve those problems. So we help to educate them on, you know, how they can implement these programs within their shelters. We provide them grant funding, we have an annual conference every year where they can come and learn. But they're really our partners and you know we know we can't do it alone. It's going to take us, it's going to take them and it's going to take everybody in every community to really step up and help solve the problem. >> Right, and what was the biggest thing that changed in terms of kind of attitude in terms of the way they operate the shelter because I think you said before that a lot of the killing was done to make room. >> Right, killing is done usually for space. >> So what do they do know? Clearly the space demands probably haven't changed so what are they doing alternatively where before they would put the animal down? >> Well alternatively we're doing transport programs. So there are areas in the country that actually have a demand for animals. So instead of killing the animals, we put them on some sort of transport vehicle and we take them to the areas that are in demand. We also do what's called a trap-neuter-return program. So one of the biggest problems across the country are community cats so those, a lot of people call them feral cats but they're community cats and usually have a caretaker. But what we do is we trap those cats, we take them into the shelter, we neuter them and vaccinate them and then return them to their home. That keeps them from making a lot of other little cats. >> Making babies (laughs) >> So yeah, cat's are one of the biggest problems in shelters today because of the community cats, they're feral cats and they're not adoptable. So if we can, we don't have to kill them. We can, you know, we can keep them from reproducing as I said and then we can put them back in their habitat where they live a long healthy life, happy life. >> Right, so you said you've joined the organization 5 years ago, 5 and 1/2 years ago and you're the CIO, first ever CIO. >> I am (laughs) >> What brought you here and then now that you're here with kind of a CIO hat, what are some of the new perspective that you can bring to the organization that didn't necessarily, that they had had before from kind of a technical perspective? >> Well, what brought me here was, I never expected to be here, if you would have told me I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society you know 10 years ago I would have said you're kidding because I didn't really realize that there were professional positions in organizations like Best Friends. But I, you know, my journey begins the same as, began the same as a lot of peoples did. I was that little kid always bringing home animals and you know my mother hated it. You know it was always something showing up at our doorstep with me, you know. And I just loved animals all my life and as I went through college and got my degree and started my professional career, then I thought well I'm going to of course have animals because I can have as many as I want now, right! (laughs) So I started adopting, and I didn't even realize until I was in my 30s that they were killing in shelters and I learned that in Houston, Texas when I lived there. I was working for IBM at the time, and one day a lady came on the television and she said they were doing a new segment and she said we're a no-kill shelter and I thought oh my god if there are no-kill shelters then there are kill shelters, right? >> There must be the other. >> Yeah so, to make a long story short then I started not working in animal welfare but doing more to support the movement and donating. Adopting from shelters and fostering animals and then one day I had been to Best Friends as a visitor vacationing in this beautiful part of Utah. But I saw the CIO ... >> Position. >> position open and I said I'm going for it. >> Good for you. >> Yeah. >> Good for you, so now you're there so what are some of the things you've implemented from kind of a techy, you know kind of data perspective that they didn't have before? >> Well, they didn't have a lot. >> They probably didn't have a lot, besides email and the obvious things. >> Being the first CIO I don't know that I knew what I was walking into at the time because I got to Kanab, and Kanab Utah where the sanctuary is, is the headquarters. And Kanab is very infrastructure challenged. >> (laughs) Infrastructure challenged, I like that. >> There is one ISP in Kanab and there is no redundancy in networks so we really don't have, you know, you come from the city and you think, you take these things for granted and you find out oh my god, what am I going to do? And Kanab is you know the hub of our network, so if Kanab goes down, you know the whole organization is down so one of the first decisions I made was that we were going to the cloud. >> Right, right. >> Because we had to get Kanab out of that position and that was one of our, one of the first major decisions I made and we chose AWS as our partner to do that so that was very very exciting. We knew that they had infrastructure we couldn't dream of providing. >> Right, right. >> And, you know we could really make our whole network more robust, our applications would be available and we could really do some great things. >> You're not worried about the one ISP provider in Kanab because of an accident that knocks a phone pole down. >> Yeah, yeah. >> All right but then you're talking about some new things that you're working on and a new thing you talked about before we turned the cameras on community lifesaving dashboards, what is that all about? >> Okay, so a couple of years ago the community lifesaving dashboard is the culmination of two years of work. From all across the Best Friends organization not just the IT department, in fact it was the brainchild of our Chief Mission Officer Holly Sizemore. But it's really, in animal welfare there's never been a national picture of what the problem really is regarding killing animals in shelters. So we did this big. >> Because they're all regional right? They're all regional shelters, very local. >> They're all local community shelters, yes. And transparency isn't forced, so you know some states force transparency, they reinforce in the report numbers but a lot of states don't. >> At the state level. >> Yeah, a lot of states don't, so. You know when you're killing animals in shelters you really don't want people to know that. >> Yeah, yeah it's not something you want to advertise. >> Because the American public doesn't believe in it. So anyway we worked really hard to collect all this data from across the country and we put it all into this dashboard and it is now a tool where anybody in the public, it's on our website, can look at it and they can see that where we're at from a national level. They can see where they're at from a state level, they can drill down into their community and they can drill down to an individual shelter. >> Wow. >> And the idea behind the dashboard is to really, is to get communities behind helping their shelters. Because as I said earlier, it's going to take us all. >> Right. >> And not only Best Friends and our partners but the public plays a big part of this. >> Right, and so when did that roll out? Do you have any kind of feedback, how's it working? >> It's working wonderfully, we rolled it out at our conference in July. >> So recently, so it's a pretty new initiative. >> Yeah it's just a few weeks old. >> Okay. >> We rolled it out at our national conference and we were all a bit nervous about it, you know especially from a technology perspective. >> Right, right. >> We knew that being the first of it's kind ever in animal welfare that you know it was going to get a lot of publicity both inside and outside the movement. >> (laughs) How you want to say both pro and con. >> Yeah, and it's sitting on our website, well really pro and con. >> Right, right. >> But it's sitting on our website and we're like okay, we don't know what kind of traffic we're going to get, you know what are we going to do about this? So we spent a lot of time with Amazon prior to the launch, you know having them look at our environment and getting advice, discussing it with them. >> Not going to bring down that ISP in Utah. >> No, thank god! (laughs) >> (laughs) >> No it wasn't, thank god we were in the cloud. So Amazon really helped us prepare and then the day of the launch, we knew the time of the launch. So we actually had a war room set up, a virtual war room and we had Amazon employees participating in our war room. We watched the traffic and we did get huge spikes in traffic at all times through the day when certain things were happening. And I'm happy to say from a technology perspective it was a non-event because we did not crash we stayed up, we handled all the traffic, we scaled when we needed to, and we did it you know, virtually at the press of a button. >> Awesome. >> Or the flick of a switch, whatever you want to say. >> That's what you want right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> You just don't want anyone to know, I was like give a good ref, nobody's talking about you you probably did a good job. >> Yeah, exactly yeah. >> Good, so before I let you go so what are some of your initiatives now looking forward. You've got this great partner in AWS, you have basically as much horsepower as you need to get done what you need to get done. What are some of the things that you see, you know kind of next for your roadmap? >> Well, we have a lot. >> Don't give me the whole list (laughs) >> No I'm just going to hit on a few key points. I think, you know we used Amazon initially as our cloud infrastructure but I think the biggest thing we're looking at is platform as a service. There is so much capability out there with predictive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, ARVR, you name it facial recognitions, so we're really investigating those technologies because we think they have you know they could have a huge impact on our movement and really help us achieve life saving. >> Right, right. >> And, I think that, you know we're starting we have our fledgling data science program. We're using the Amazon data lake technology, Athena, Glue, they were just telling me about data lake formation which I just a few minutes ago emailed my data guy and said start looking at data lake formation. >> Right, right. >> So, I mean we're really investing in the platform as a service. The other thing I see is that we're, animal welfare is sort of broken from a technology perspective and a data perspective. In that we have no interoperability and you know we don't have the data available. So lets say you want to adopt a 5-year old animal. Well, you go to a shelter you can't get 5 years of history on a 5 year old animal. So it's really starting to fix the foundation for the movement as a whole, not just Best Friends. So, making sure that you know the veterinary data is there, all the data from the pet ecosystem is there. So we're investigating with AWS they're actually coming to our sanctuary in a couple of months, we're going to do a workshop to figure out how we do this, how we really fix it so that we have interoperability between every shelter when an animal moves from shelter to rescue or whatever so that their data follows them wherever they go. So adopters are fully informed when adopting an animal. >> Because you're in a pretty interesting position, because you're not with any one particular shelter you kind of cross many many boundaries. So you're in a good position to be that aggregator of that data. >> Yeah, I don't know that we want to be the aggregator but we want to lead the movement towards doing that. Just getting the technology players, the shelter management systems, the other people who play a role in technology for animal welfare, getting them in a room and talking and figuring out this problem is huge. >> Right. >> And with a partner like Amazon we feel it can be solved. >> Right. Well Angie thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing your story, really really enjoyed hearing it. >> All right thank you so much. >> All right, she's Angie, I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at AWS Imagine in Seattle, thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> from Seattle WASHINGTON. It's the Q covering AWS. Imagine by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Geoffrey here with the Cube. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS. Imagine Education event. It's a second year of the event. It's about 800. People were here last year, too, I think was 400 people. So it's growing quickly, like everything at a W s. It's all about education. That's that's public school, private school, university K through 12 community college, everything you can imagine. It's a really comprehensive kind of area that Amazon's focusing on. We're excited. Have our next guest really from the school district emanating from school district? He's Travis Pocky, the senior director Information Service is for Portland Public School. I'm a proud graduate of the Portland public school system. So, Travis, great to see you. Great to see you. Absolutely. So for stop impressions of the show, you said you weren't able to make it this year. I got to sit in the key notes this morning with Theresa and Andrew. A couple sessions just kind of your impressions of being at an event like this, >> you know, it's really fantastic tohave an event that ties together AWS and education. And in that education space. It's a great resource for people that are using AWS within the education community. So this has been fantastic. >> Yeah, it's good because the education is not necessarily touted as the most progressive in his street. Exactly. So the fact that they made this commitment is pretty significant. Exactly. So you had a recent a recent significant event within your kind of I d journey cloud during one of you could tell us what you guys just recently completed. >> Sure. So we recently migrated our peoples off application from our on Prem Data Center to the cloud. And, you know, one of the one of the real challenges we had was there was no extra money to do this work. So we had kind of come across the idea that the hardware was end of life. It was gonna be about a $500,000 replacement cost. In addition to that, we had several on staff positions that really weren't available. It had become such a niche skill set that we really had a lot of trouble trying to get those positions filled. So, in addition to that my boss came around the corner and said, By the way, we have a 10% budget cut. So how do we resolve all of that plus address? This really big problem with the system, not even >> time, was ticking, right? Your hardware time was >> ticking. It it was really bad. I mean, we were at a point where we were getting young 9 12th page refresh times. And, you know, the user community had kind of gotten to the point where our numbers for satisfaction looked really good because we didn't get complaints because the user community had gotten so disillusioned by making those complaints and not getting any results that they just gave up on complaining. So way were out of time, >> year out of time. So, you know, typically, a cloud migration of an old application is not necessarily the easiest place to get started on your cloud journey. Did you already have some experience with powder? Was this really kind of your first foray into this area? >> You know, I had worked at a start up a few years before, and we did our entire infrastructure on eight of us. So that was my my introduction to AWS and HBO Service's. And there was a lot of there's a lot of people that were looking away from that as a solution. It didn't seem like the viable thing to do. And yes, we were advised not to try the e r P first. But that was our use case. And if >> we were gonna do it, we were gonna do it big. So we did. He brought in some consultants. I would assume that helped out. Are you guys doing all in house? >> Actually, what we did was we looked for a managed service provider. So are our use case in that we had many positions that we couldn't get filled was that we needed the virtual infrastructure. But we also needed the people to do some of those tasks for us. So that was That was our partnership, was we work with a manage solution provider called High Street and High Street. Really helped us with that process. >> It So how long did it take? When did you get complete? >> Um, we went from idea to completion in four months. >> Idea to completion in four months. Yes. Wow. >> And that was That was unprecedented. No, nobody expected it to work. Certainly nobody expected it to work that fast. And when you do these migrations Ew, you I understand that it is going to be a high stress situation. And the one of the major things that AWS did for us was it gave us that virtual infrastructure so that we could run in tandem. We could actually continue to run completely as we were in production and run the new systems and run all the tests. So we were able to get cut over in no time with almost no stress. I think we had one problem when we went live. >> So then what did your boss say when he came around the corner? Good job, Travis. Okay, great. So you know, there's there's a whole bunch of components to cloud right that have a lot of benefits security. Like we said, it's actually a lot more secure than a lot of time on your own stuff. There's cost savings, and there's infrastructure leverage that you can get, but more importantly, and we've heard a lot of the stories here is it opens up on opportunity for innovation, opens up an opportunity to try any things to move fast. So I wonder if, if you know that kind of unintended consequence of this process or do you think you've kind of sold the house people that you know? Look, it worked. We did it fast. Assume it's close to budget or close two timing. And now, you know, sit here for two days and listen to all the crazy, cool, innovative things that people are doing with X, right, etcetera. So where do you go? Where do you go next? >> You know, one of the one of the unintended consequences of it was was granting us a D R process. So we had a We had a very basic deal, our system in place and by moving to the cloud, Not only do we make it insulated from any events that might happen in our primary building, which is also our primary data center, but it gave us that ability due to fail over and persist through through a significant event. One of the other things that's done those it's given our develop access to tools that they just didn't have access to before. So, one of the places where were expended experimenting pretty heavily. Yoon is is Lambda. So server lis functions trying to get to the point where we can enhance our existing software by making calls out to our Amazon vpc and data that exists out there without having to make hard core modifications to the internal systems right way were actually able to do a demo of that within 30 minutes. So that's that normal process would take about two weeks to >> write. So it was there, Is there new stuff on the horizon is just our use, like a kid in a candy store, like now, you know, look at the power flexibility that we have it. We just didn't have the kind of strapped payroll data center before. >> Absolutely, Right now we're trying. I think the biggest struggle is trying to figure out what we tackle next. There's a lot of things out there, you know. We have ah, data interchange platform. It would be great if we could replace that with AWS functions and lame duck calls. >> Um, it >> I think that's probably going to be our next biggest tackle. Is is that after that, we'd really like to start rewriting some of our in house written APS completely in AWS service is and I think that's gonna be a huge win for the district. >> Okay. And then do you guys purchase a lot of these other softer applications? Is a lot of companies here That blackboard is just the one that always comes into my head not to pick on them specifically, but you guys have a ton of those types of applications and installed as well. >> Way definitely tend to leverage bought first. Okay, But some of them likes women have been fantastic partners for us. And that's one of the ones that we've really leaned on because of how intricate some of our policies are school meant as the capability to implement that for us, >> right? Right. Well, sounds pretty exciting, but that's but the question is, when does the grand opening of the of Grant? That's what I wanted. I need the date. So afterwards you could wait a little. They just finished a beautiful remote. I don't even know how many millions and millions of dollars are spent, but a lot. Very yes, a lot. All right. Well, Travis, congratulations. Four months. The AARP move. I don't know. Throw that as a challenge. Maybe somebody else could beat it. That's pretty good. Absolutely. Alright. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you. Alright, He's Travis. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? Aws. Imagine education in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington it's The Cube covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're here in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now they have another education conference, excuse me, Imagine Conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing, such a small conference with such great global representation. We've got our first guest, all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada and the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera. It's a mouthful, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. >> It was very impressive, the keynote by Andrew Co Intersession by Amazon. We were impressed, we were included in the keynote and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. >> Great, so before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you are trying to accomplish as an institution. So give us a little bit of background on the college, how big it was, and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. >> We are a Spanish University. We belong with CEU San Pablo Foundation which owns three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not for profit universities and in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago and right now we have reached 2500 international students which represents around 30-33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students. >> So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students and then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? >> It was a trend in higher education institutions but for us it was very important for two reasons, one the sustainability of the university, but also and I think the main reason is that we wanted to have our students to have a global experience. We wanted to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. >> Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? >> So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. For this we have a very helpful firm partnered on campus. It was the IT department with Jose Roch in charge of this department and through technology we have been able to escalate and automate, get the automation of all of this process in order to reach bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the needed of our international students, our new population of international students. >> Right, so you were highlighted today for a very specific thing, for a very specific device, which is Alexa, and voice as an interface and we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year, in terms of the kids asking it, you know, when is my test, is my homework due, these types of things, but you guys are actually taking it to the next level. Explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. >> So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students national and international students and one other things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that is not only in English, but also in Spanish. Like this we are covering the two most speaked language on campus, English and Spanish. >> So it's bi, so you've got a bilingual Alexa in the room. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us it was very important as explained before that technologies had been asked to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. >> Right and using English is kind of universal language, regardless of what their native tongue is. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation, was it written in Spanish, how did some of those logistics work out? >> So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon, they were very, very, very helpful for us. With Ana Cabez and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon and they guided us how to develop the Alexa skills for the goals that we set with them, what we wanted to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. >> And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write, so how many different skills did you write especially for your students? >> So we, what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the services in one only skill. So we are integrating services related with what my next assignment on Blackboard, which are my grades, how can I book a room in the library or another space of the university, locations of the different services or professors of the university. We are integrating a lot of services, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. >> So that's interesting, I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have. But you've got integration points in all these other systems. The room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. >> The learning management system. >> So how many points of integration are there? >> A lot we are working right now, we are focusing around five, seven integration points, because also we are integrating it with our CRM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending of if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. We think that integration with CRM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situations. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's not a general notification for all of the students on campus. >> Right, that's awesome. Again, highlighted in the keynote really I think is the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows, talk to a lot of big companies, everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat, that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world in which you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guys' school? >> So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, ten years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption and in this sense we are working a lot to improve the students' experience of our students on campus because if not we think that it makes no sense to study on campus when you can go online. >> Jeff: Right. >> So that's why we're using technology to improve the students' experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through the digital transformation. In order that we have more time for these value added interaction between the staff, academic and nonacademic staff, with the students. >> Right, and then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the nonacademic staff because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? >> So I seen all the institutions and you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor of these innovations, but the big number of professors and staff have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for these value added interaction with their students. For this in order to avoid only top-down decisions we have created digital ambassador programs which this program what we do is to share with our professors and with our nonacademic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. >> So you're six months into it you said since you launched it. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm just curious if you could share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like long and unintended consequences, you know, as you go through this process. >> So one of things is in Spain, Alexa was launched in November, last November so it's very new. >> Jeff: Very new. >> Very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months, it have exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology. They were impressed that the university so quickly reacted to the introduction of the technology. The other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. We have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students. And we have the huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. >> Right, right, just curious too, to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it. They're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google Assistant this or ask your Alexa this, you know, we still haven't learned it. From where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said get away from these emails in the middle of the night that ask, when's my paper due and I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpieces of a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? >> So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions would have use of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not to know. So if they can ask voice, virtual assistant, as in one case, they have the freedom when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think its a big difference between emails, in an email you decide when you send the information to the students, with voice technologies, the student, it's the student who is asking when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think it's important for them. >> It's huge because they never ask for the email. >> No, they, and after they tell us that it wasn't important information that they didn't check the email. >> Right. >> They complain that they don't have the right information. >> Right, well Inaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started, you've got a long ways to go. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you. He's Inaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time. 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>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE covering IMAGINE: A Better World, a Global Education Conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at AWS IMAGINE Education. First year of the show, 900 registrants, 20 countries represented, really all the public sectors show, but this one's just focused on education as its own track. A lot of really interesting innovation going on, and as part of the keynote, we saw a really cool concept video about bringing Alexa into the class. The Echo Dot talking, and so, we're excited to have kind of the guy driving this whole project. He's David Hakanson, the CIO of Saint Louis University. First off, what a great keynote you had this morning. >> Thank you, thank you, and we're really excited to announce this today. So, today we announced that we are putting an Amazon Echo Dot in every single residence hall room. So, over 2,300 devices that will be in every room awaiting students for this fall. The device will be essentially their virtual assistant. They can ask questions specific to the university, through our custom skill, or any other question that's normally through the Alexa platform. >> So, the voice of God is talking above us, but that's okay. So, it was interesting when you were starting your presentation earlier today, I'm like, what are the applications going to be? I mean, what are these kids going to do with this? Like, we've got a Dot at home. We ask it to play music all the time, but you really did your homework on trying to think through what are the different use cases, what types of information are going to help the kids get their information a little bit faster, a little easier? >> That's right. We want this to be valuable for our students, and our students are active inside and outside of the classroom. Our university does over a million hours of community service a year, so we attract a very active student. We don't want them to be spending time searching for information. We want them to get that information immediately. Whether it's something simple, such as when is the library closed? Or, what channel is their favorite show going to be on? We want them to be able to get very fast access to information because right now, they have to search through web pages or calendars to find out what's going on on campus or other key information, and that takes time. >> Right. Well, it's funny because there's a lot of conversation about the educational experience, and really trying to develop an engaging experience for the kids in school, for the students, but the question is always, you know, how do you define engagement, what is engagement, and what are the actual things, the physical activities, that are going to drive this? And you guys, amazing stat. You said you went from concept to delivery in three months, and in that process, really explored a lot of interesting concepts. I wonder if you can add a little bit more color to that development process. >> Absolutely. It started with a six week pilot program, where we tested different virtual assistant technology to see what did the students really like, and they chose the Amazon Echo system. And once we made that decision, we were able to go from that concept to completion in three months, which was fantastic for us because we wanted to make sure we were ready for the fall semester. To do that, we worked very closely with AWS and the Alexa for Business team, as well as the partner, the skill development partner, called Empowered. We were able to use the partner ecosystem to allow us to move very quickly, and through that process engaging our students, engaging our stakeholders to make sure that the device was going to meet their needs, not just be something that looked good on their desk. >> Right. So was voice part of the initial design criteria, or did that come when you were looking at different type of interactive devices? Because clearly, the kids today are super adept on their phone, and they can text with their eyes closed with one finger tied behind their back. Voice is still relatively new. At least, maybe it's not as new as I think, so how did you get to the voice as the main UI for kind of this new, cutting edge information system? >> So, we started with voice saying we want a virtual assistant that's voice based because we see that as the future. So, if you're on your smart phone looking for information, you're still having to go to a website or to different data sources to get that, whereas asking a question is much faster, and getting that answer, it's a much faster transaction. So, we started with that saying how can we use voice technology to help our students be more productive, and then, engaged our students in that conversation, and they were very excited about that. >> Right. So, one of the really cool things about Alexa and the Dot is the programmability, which, obviously, you guys took advantage of. So, a little color on kind of how you chose what to program, but I think even more exciting is what kind of opportunities that opens up as an individual student, as a CS project in the class, and as you said, your university has a lot more going on than just incoming students. You've got graduate degrees, medical things going on, so I wonder if you can shed a little light on kind of how you developed what you have for the launch date, but you know, some of the future things that you see down the road. >> That really goes to the Alexa for Business foundation that we chose, and Alexa for Business was the differentiator for us. It was a key area because through that tool and ecosystem, we could manage the devices, and we could group the devices. So, we could group a learning community of engineers, of students studying engineering, and give them specialized skills or allow them to develop a skill and have that only on their devices, not on everyone else's devices. So, the ability to manage these allowed us to really focus on that educational experience, allow students to start creating skills, and then be able to manage and deploy them at scale. >> That's great. I can't wait to come back a year from now and hear kind of what happened. I'm sure there's going to be all kinds of cool surprises, tough surprises, you know, upsides and downsides 'cause you said they're getting installed this week and the kids are showing up in a couple weeks. >> That's correct, that's correct. (laughing) We're moving very quickly. >> Alright David. Well again, I'm going to give you the last word as you touched on it a little bit, but you know, how working with Amazon and AWS specifically you know, kind of impacted this project and how does that help you, you know deliver your objectives more efficiently and faster? >> Yeah, the only way we could have gone from concept to completion in three months was by working closely with AWS and the partner ecosystem. We could not have done this at any scale or efficient timeframe without them. They were a fantastic partner, helping us all the way from choosing the right partner to develop the skill to helping us on how do we get all these devices to work on our network, to how do we get all these devices working on our network and installed within a couple days, and so, from beginning to end AWS has been instrumental in our success to bring this new innovative technology to our students. >> Okay, well we might have to have a field trip out to Saint Louis and check it out. >> You're welcome to come. >> Alright, he's David, I'm Jeff. We're at AWS in downtown Seattle at AWS IMAGINE. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> On the Amazon Meeting Center. In downtown Seattle. It's theCUBE. Covering Imagine a Better World. A global education conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington at the AWS Imagine education conference. It's the first one. Teresa Carlson just kicked off the keynote. About 900 registrants from over 20 countries worldwide. We saw it happen with the public sector before. They went from 50 people to 15 thousand, I think she said in seven years. I'm imagining that Imagine is going to have the same track. Cause education is so, so important. And we're excited our next guest came all the way from the other side of the pond. The other side of the Atlantic. He's Peter O'Rourke, Director of IT for the University of Suffolk. Peter, great to see ya. >> Thanks Jeff for the welcome. Yes it's been fantastic to be here with this exciting crowd. And as Teresa said it would be great to be here in seven years. At a huge event. >> A huge event, it'll probably be in Vegas. They like to have those big ones down in Vegas. So what brings you here? It's a long way, education is clearly super important. Digital transformation and cloud. We see it all over the place. But what's the application that you're looking at, what are you excited about in bringing kind of cloud economics to the University of Suffolk? >> Well Jeff, the key thing in education has got to be about students' experience. And that's the thing we've got to keep driving at all the time. What's exciting about partners like Amazon is the potential that they talk about. It's not what they're doing today. It's what they're talking about and going to do tomorrow and the day after. And as I've just said, this is day one. >> Right. >> This is an exciting journey to engage with. With these partners. >> So how have the student experience kind of expectations morphed over time? As you get kind of digital-native kids coming up into the school now and kind of, you know we've seen it on the business side. The consumerization of IT cause people expect their interactions with their companies, their banks and their retailers to be like it is with their phone and computer. How are you seeing the expectations change from your students on what they want and how they want to interact with all the services that you guys provide them. >> Good question. And again the mobile phone is the key here. People arrive at your organizations, whether they are universities or retail establishments. And they already know how they're going to work with you. And when you can't do that. That's a huge disappointment. So these people are using things in their daily life. To arrange trips, theater tickets, cinema. And when you can't work like that, there's a huge disconnect. >> Right, right. The other big issue that happens I've seen more and more is mobile. And you know, universities. You guys are always limited on space. >> Yeah. >> There's always lots of construction and new buildings and new labs and new academic offices and classrooms. So space is always an issue. How does you know, mobile specifically as you mentioned, enable you to provide a different experience, a better experience, a more varied experience when you've got all these other kind of constraints you're faced with. >> How mobile can help with that. It's about allowing your users to consume their content where and when they want to. It's exactly how they live their daily lives. So you know maybe you can't a lecture today. But why should that really matter? >> Right. >> You should be able to pick this up later. >> Right. And that last piece is the staff. And you know a lot of the teachers weren't necessarily educated in CS. That wasn't kind of why they got into the business. Especially if they are in say, history or philosophy. Or some of maybe the softer sciences. How are you seeing their adoption of technology to be, you know don't be afraid of it. This actually can be a great enabler to help you do your job better. How are you seeing their adoption of some of this technology in some of the softer academic areas? >> Well, again good question. But it's a huge challenge. I think for too long what we've tried to do from a technology perspective. Is to turn absolutely brilliant academic colleagues into technologists. And that's not why they came into education. >> Right. >> What's exciting about what's happening now is that we're able to enable them to use much, much simpler technology tools or interfaces that are actually doing amazing things in the background. And they don't need to understand how it does it. And that's the way it should be. >> Right. So last question. What are you expecting to get out of this conference for a day and a half here in Seattle? Ton of educators, ton of people from your indsutry. First ever event of this type for AWS. What are you hoping to take away? >> I'm hoping to take away a ton of exciting ideas. That are almost impossible to install. But there's going to be one or two gems in there that we can work with people like Amazon going forward. And we're going to come back in a year's time. And we'll want to talk about what we've done. >> Right. >> That's the exciting thing. >> That is the key right, what have you done? >> Yes. >> And now with cloud you can do, they've talked about a project in the keynote that was three months from ideation to actually starting to ship stuff. So we can do it. >> That's what we've got to do. >> Right alright Peter, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. And good luck with the rest of the conference. >> Thanks Jeff, thanks for talking to me. >> Alright, Peter, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Imagine Education in Seattle, Washington. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in Downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine: A Better World, A Global Education Conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington, at the AWS, I think it's called the Meeting Space. There's a lot of AWS buildings around here. It's AWS Imagine: Education, first year of the conference, about 900 registered folks, 22 countries represented. Really excited, this thing is going to grow. We've seen it before with AWS. We saw it with Summit: Reinvent. AWS Public Sector. We're excited to be here for the very first time and our next guest is Dr. Scott Ralls. He is the President of Northern Virginia Community College. Scott, great to see you. >> Thank you, it's good to be here Jeff, appreciate it. >> A lot of mentions of NOVA, and that's you guys. >> That's us, yeah. >> That's not the PBS programming. You guys are kind of out front on some of these initiatives, with 3sa and AWS Public Sector. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the Veterans' Apprenticeship Program, which has been in place for a little while. >> Just a little bit about NOVA, we're a community college just right outside of the Virginia suburbs of D.C. We're the, I'd say, the biggest college that nobody's heard of outside of our region. We have about 100,000 students. >> 100,000? >> 100,000. >> And how many campuses? >> Six campuses. >> For us, our niche is information technology. It's where the internet runs through our region, and so that cloud computing, we have the highest concentration of cloud computing cyber degrees. That's why the AWS partnership is so key for us, because it's about the opportunity for our students. And for AWS, it's about filling those jobs. Also, we have a lot of employers in our region that hire based on AWS credentials. AWS is the backbone for them. That's why for us as a community college, being jobs-focused, filling that gap, that's why it's key for us. >> That's Tyson's corner, right? That's where AOL started-- >> That's right, that's right, that's right. >> and there's a whole history. >> You've got all the cyber right around there. One writer has said that we're the bullseye of the internet. It's a unique place, but it's a unique opportunity for our students. >> Right, and the smart money's on the AWS second headquarter being in that neighborhood, but we don't-- >> Knock on wood. >> Knock on wood. We would love to see that. >> I'm just curious then if you've been educating people to get jobs in this IT sector, how you've seen that evolve over time? Because it used to be there were a lot of sys admin jobs or a lot of jobs that now automation and cloud is taking away. On the other hand, there's a lot of new jobs that the technology's enabling, like happens every time. How are you seeing the landscape change? >> I really think that's the way it has been. 30 years ago, when I was breaking into this workforce and world, that same conversation was going on. Automation was going to take all the jobs. There's been all kinds of new opportunities that emerge and that's the same thing we see, and certainly in Northern Virginia we see that so, for us, as a community college, we're doing it two ways. You asked about the apprenticeship program, that was our first entree with AWS so we are one of their primary training providers, education providers for apprenticeship. Those are the veterans and others that are hired by AWS, they come to our college for the education component, the certifications, the IT skills. The second part for us is the new cloud degree which we introduced in February, which is a two-year, first cloud degree in the country that will help other students who are not those coming through apprenticeship to also break into this important area. >> This is an associate's degree like all the other degrees you guys offer >> That's right. as a two-year program. I'd be just curious, what are some of the curricula? What are some of the core classes that they take that are part of that degree? >> One of the things that we've been doing, we use a lot of data analytics on the workforce side that others do not so part of it's our engagement, talking with the AWS leaders about what's needed. Part of it's also watching what AW, what credentials, what skills AWS is hiring for and then others who use the AWS platform, so you will see certain types of credentials that are built in, security plus, Linux plus, AWS Solutions Architect built in. Also even programming language, it's like Python because of its importance in that regard. We kind of use that as the, using that intelligence, if you will, to be able to build out what the degree should look like. Because we're paying attention to how AWS hires and how the IT users of AWS, how they're hiring and what the skills are that they're looking for. >> How hard is it to get that through at the school, to actually have an associate degree based on cloud? Were they receptive of the idea, did everybody see it coming, was it a hard push? >> We did it within one year, we did it within one year. >> Did it in one year? >> Within one year. >> Everything in the cloud happens fast. >> We moved fast on this. It is built off of our IT degree, so it's a specialization of that degree, so it was really, I think what made it move faster for us was two things. One is AWS has a great program called AWS Educate, which essentially provides a lot of the curriculum content. It's the kind of things if you were starting a degree, you would have to go out and create on your own. Having that rich content. Other partners, like Columbus State, who is also, Santa Monica, others that are working on cloud degrees and we can partner with each other. Then having the apprenticeship as sort of a North Star to tack on with respect to how companies are hiring and what skills are needed. That allowed us to move fast. >> Beyond Educate and the actual materials and curriculum materials, what does partnering with AWS do for you guys? What has that enabled you to do as part of this program that you couldn't do or it'd be a whole lot harder? >> Not everybody looks at community colleges. Being partnered with AWS, who they are, is key for us, it's important for us. I think it's also they recognize how important it is for them. Not everybody recognizes that. One thing that's unique for us as a community college, we have a lot of students who come to us who already have four-year degrees to get that skills part. It's almost like a graduate school. The apprentices are that way. Most of the apprentices already have four-year degrees in computer science, and we're providing that finishing piece. I think AWS sees in us how to broaden the, to scale, to fill that talent gap. I really think the only way you're going to diversify the talent gap and scale the talent gap is through institutions like ours. >> It's really an interesting statement on the role of community colleges in this whole refactoring of education. One, as you said, a lot of people have four-year degrees, so this concept of ongoing education, continue to get new skills as the opportunities dictate. Have that very specific knowledge and these certifications that are not Intro Philosophy or English Lit 205. These are very specific things that people can apply to their job today. >> The curriculum changes so fast, so we have to be willing to change, our instructors have to be willing to get that new thing. The history curriculum doesn't change that quickly, but the IT curriculum and particularly as it relates to cloud and cyber and other areas. If we're not doing that, then we're out of the ballgame, and when we're out of the ballgame that means our students are out of the ballgame, and that's what it's all about. >> When you come to an event like this, what are you hoping to get out of an event like this? Flew across the country, unfortunately through all the terrible smoke and stuff we have on the west coast. What are some of the things you hope to gain here with some of the other educators? >> One thing that always happens at AWS events is the connections that you make. Part of it is you do hear people, like we heard this morning, that you wouldn't have the opportunity to hear before, on machine learning and other areas. A lot of it's about the connections, so actually tomorrow morning a lot of the community colleges and others who are creating cloud programs will be working together tomorrow. AWS does a great job of maximizing our time, so we're part of the program, but we're also breaking off to really partner and that allows us all to move quicker. When we can build off of each other and then have the resources like AWS makes available to us. >> Sounds like you're moving pretty quick-- >> We're trying, we're trying. >> To get all that done and to get it done in a year. >> We have to keep up with where they're going. >> It's not what academic institutions are generally known for, speed and change. >> We're not your average academic institution. >> There ya go, alright. He's Dr. Scott Ralls,-- >> Thank you, 'preciate it. thanks for taking a few minutes with ya. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS public sector, Imagine, in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching, catch ya next time. (electronic tones)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center, in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. About 900 people from 20 countries really coming together for the first ever AWS summit from public sector group, really focused just on education. We've got a little bit of a twist here, our next guest really coming from more of the artsy side of the house, which is always great to hear from. We've got Linda Drew, she's the Vice Chancellor, and Andy Cook, the Chief Operations Officer, both from Ravensbourne University in London. Welcome. >> We're really pleased >> Thank you. to be here, really excited. >> For the people that aren't familiar with Ravensbourne, give us a little overview of the school. >> We're in the center of London in Greenwich, which is right by the river. We have about two-and-a-half-thousand students and about 250 faculty. We specialize in design, media, and technology, and the interaction, and all that kind of stuff. >> Pretty fun space to be right now. >> Absolutely gorgeous place to be. >> There's so much talk about IT and the tech and IT in operations, but there's so much neat stuff happening really more on the creative side and in the arts. Leveraging technology in all different, new ways. >> Absolutely, it's kind of hand and glove, really. All the innovation that's happening is happening with the way that tech is disrupting what's happening in the creative workspace, and vice versa really. The two things are effecting each other. >> The channels of distribution now, being so open, there's no greater time to be an artist, a creator, because your path to publishing, your path to your audience is really, really short and direct, assuming you can get their attention. >> Absolutely, I think we recognize there's a huge opportunity there for us in terms of developing a competitive advantage in the sector using new, emerging technologies to forge a new path for the institution and help educate and bridge the skills gap for industry. >> What are the things you guys do, one of the classes is broadcast production, and we were talking to all of our guys behind the cameras that nobody can see, and that again is an evolving space and you guys, it's kind of an interesting play, on one hand you're talking about Shakespearian plays, on the other hand you're looking at the newest, latest, greatest way to get that out to consumers, to viewers, to schools, while training the people in the middle with the latest and greatest tools. You guys have started a AWS Elemental Experiment. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of color on that project. >> I can start, and I'll tell you about the impact that it has, and Andy might be able to follow up on some of the technical stuff. We've had a project going with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and it's one of their education programs where what we do is a three-way relationship between them, their plays being shot in Stratford-upon-Avon or in London, and one aspect of what happens is that what we do is host the live program that is shot in our TV production studio and jointly the recorded program and the live action is streamed to schools, several hundred schools at a time. Some of our recent shows have been reaching upwards of 85,000 school students at a time. >> 85,000? >> Absolutely. >> That is great reach. We'd been using the more traditional technology before and that was having some issues with school teachers and others that were saying they weren't getting a great service out of the live stream, and our students were a bit frustrated with what they were learning about the streaming technologies. Since having moved to AWS Elemental, that's really increased the satisfaction both of what our students are learning but also in what they're delivering in terms of the live streamed program and because they're streaming more than one thing, because we know that they're also streaming not just the content but also the British sign language. They're also streaming signed content as well. >> Great, great. Andy, you're on the hook for actually getting these systems up and working, right? >> (laughs) Well, I'm not sure about that, but I think Linda said it all, I think the previous stack of technology that we were using in this area were not reliable, we were getting a lot of jump outs with the streams, lots of complaints from our schools. This shift to Elemental has been transformational. Lots of really complimentary feedback from the schools that are taking part in this exercise. It's been really good. >> That's good, the story over and over with cloud basically anything is that the amount of scale and resources and expertise and hardware and software that Amazon can bring to bear on your behalf compared to what you can do on you own, it's just not the same and you're a relatively small school. It's that same scale delta whether it's a medium-size company, a big company, or multi-national. These guys have that massive scale across so many customers, and you get that delivered to your doorstep. >> As you well know, there's a massive shift taking place in the broadcast industry away from the, towards IP-driven technologies, so we see this as a real opportunity to develop our curriculum, add cloud technologies in to our existing courses and go on that journey away from the more traditional technologies to a cloud-based approach. >> I'm just curious if you've adopted cloud stuff in more your standard IT practices, or where are you on that journey? Or was the client satisfaction issue on these broadcasts what accelerated that adoption faster than your normal stuff? >> I think it's been quite closely related, in some ways. It's a bit kind of chicken and egg. We were already looking at ways of enhancing our infrastructure and this kind of stuff came along at the same time, so we just say how quickly can we get to move some of this stuff for our standard operational focus. >> I think most universities are in some sort of hybrid state running on premise services with some, putting their feet gently into the water of cloud technologies, but I think we're looking at really accelerating that journey towards AWS now for our infrastructure. >> I'm curious, were you here for the keynote this morning? >> Yeah, definitely. >> Did you see the Alexa movie with the kids in the dorm room? >> Yeah. >> Really exciting. Very exciting. >> I think one of the slides really sums up our journey and thoughts around working with Amazon. It's the IT transformation piece, then there's a adoption of machine learning in terms of improving the student experience, and then there's adopting cloud courses into our curriculum, so those three areas are really where we're looking to build a relationship with Amazon. >> It's interesting to see what defines this new education experience, because the kids have different expectations, they've all grown up with apps and mobile. To your point on the attention, if something's not working, they're used to flipping to another channel, switching to another input, so if it doesn't work, you only have their attention for a short period of time. I think it is really interesting to rethink what are the actual activities that define this new engagement and this new student experience while they're in your institution, and I thought that was a really pretty slick demo. >> That was a great example, really good demo. Some of the really exciting things that have come out of us adopting this technology thus far includes some students coming to us with ideas of setting up our very own television channel that we can broadcast on campus using this technology and a way of streaming it to students' phones and tablets so that they've got content about the university and it's activities on a regular basis. >> The ROI calculation for you to execute that when it's cloud-based is very, very different, right? >> Absolutely, yes >> It's pretty simple. (all laughing) Just buy a new rack of servers and the whole to-do. I'll give you the last word, what are you hoping to get out of these couple days here, what have you seen so far, any hallway conversations that are really getting your attention? >> Hopefully, not just a deeper relationship with AWS, but the traction to help us work towards innovating on creativity and technology into the future. >> Great. >> Brilliant. >> Andy goes I'm going to go with the Chancellor, smart man. (all laughing) >> Absolutely. >> Linda and Andy, thanks again for taking a few minutes-- >> Thank you very much. >> Absolute pleasure. and hope you enjoy the rest of your time here. >> Thank you. >> (mumbles) thank you. >> She's Linda, he's Andy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS Imagine Education in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching. (electronic tones)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in Downtown Seattle, it's the theCUBE. Covering, Imagine: A Better World, a global education conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in Downtown Seattle Washington at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. First one they've ever done about 900 registrants. People from over 20 countries are here. Theresa Carlson gave the kickoff and it's a pretty exciting event. We've seen this movie before with Amazon. They get involved in a project, and it grows and grows and grows. So this is all about education. It's about education institutions. It's about students obviously, which are the core of education, and we're really excited to have our next guest. It was a big announcement that happened today. He's Marvin Martinez, the President of East Los Angeles College. Marvin great to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> So you're getting ready to go up on stage. it's a big announcement so tell about what it is. It's called the California Cloud... >> Computing. >> Computing Initiative. >> So this is what we've done. We've been developing for the last year a certificate where students can take a number of classes, which is basically a total of 15 units, and they're able to earn at the end of 15 units, a certificate in cloud computing. And the goal is to get them trained quickly to get them out to work quickly. Eventually we hope that the certificate evolves into a degree program, so then we're hoping that the students come back and they get their associate of our certificate and they're able to get even a better job, which is really the goal of this program is we want to get them started, want to get them excited, get them into an entry-level type of job, then they will know they like it. They're going to come back. They'll get that degree, you know do even better right. >> So let me, I just want to make sure I get this. This is a California Cloud Workforce Project. So it's really about the workforce and giving these kids the skills. So it's funny though Marvin where everybody says technology is taking away jobs. They forget yeah they take away some jobs, but there's new jobs created. >> All the time. >> All the time, there's a ton of openings especially in the engineering field and in the cloud, but so what are some of the cloud skills specifically that that kids are taking to get the certificate? >> Well you know the skills they're taking specifically so they could eventually work with some of the major industries in our area. Obviously from Amazon and other similar industries and similar businesses, and there's many of them. Los Angeles you know quickly is becoming the new Silicon Valley. So a lot of industries are moving. They call us all the time, they call me all the time, and say that you have trained students. We will hire them right now and we'll pay them a good salary. So no doubt it's a motivation for us because that's who we are as community colleges. We are here to serve students. We are here to get them trained, get them up there quickly and respond to the needs of industry, that area. >> So it's a really interesting planning that it's the community colleges that you guys have all come together. I think the number's 19 as part of this. So A, you know that you're doing it as a unified effort. So kids at a broad area can take advantage, and also you're also partnering with individual high schools. Each Community College is partners with an individual high school. So how does that work? How does that kind of come into fruition? >> Well you know, one thing that we want to do is that as we work with high schools, high schools today are also under pressure to ensure that their students are being trained well and that if they just get a high school diploma they can go and work somewhere. But also today high schools are getting smart. They're saying hey how do we work with a local college so that when students graduate, they graduate with a high school diploma and a degree from a college. So and why are they doing that because they know in order to be competitive, a young person needs to have these degrees. Today if you want to be competitive a high school diploma may not be enough. So we notice that motivation there. Secondly we're able to get students on a college campus, get them developed get them, they're mature, get them to take a college-level course and then they're able to go out and obviously and work once they complete this program. So the relationship is a natural one. It's one that high schools are seeking from us, which is great. That has not been the case all the time. Usually we've gone to them, but now they're coming to us and saying we need you help us out. >> The part I like about it too is the kids are smart. And they're like why am I taking philosophy? How am I going to use philosophy in my job, that or why am I taking this or why am I taking that? These are really concrete skills that A, they can go look in the newspaper today or I guess I don't know if they look in newspaper for jobs because couldn't find a newspaper if you threw it at them, but they could go seek the job listings at the Amazon sites and also they are working with this technology, they live in this technology, so it's not something foreign or something new. It's something they experience every day. So it's got to be a pretty easy sell I would imagine. >> It's an easy sell. Young people today are different than the way that we grew up. I grew up at a time where there were no cell phones, there was no bottled water. It was a whole different time. Young people today as you're seeing grow up with these technologies. It's part of the who they are. They more than just embraced it. So they welcome to use it in any way they can. So when we propose programs like these, guess what happens? They enroll en masse and that's because they understand it. They identify with it. Will they be willing to enroll in a Shakespeare class? They might but not as much as a class like this one. So no doubt the population today has changed, so part of my job is to introduce programs on the campus that I know will generate that kind of enrollment and interest. So we know that a program like this will do that and we just need to recognize the fact that the world has changed. Let me just add that we don't do that world's education institutions. As institutions we're some of the most conservative institutions in the history of this country. So for us to change it takes quite a lot. So what's forcing us to change, what was forcing us to change is that enrollment is down and not just in many of our colleges in LA but throughout the country. Enrollment is-- >> In Community colleges generally or colleges in general? Community colleges. >> Community colleges throughout the nation enrollment is down. And enrollment is down for a number of reasons. There's more jobs out there, so students are looking to go out and work, but also enrollment is down because of the curriculum and the courses that we have are just not interesting to them. So I think a program like this will help the campus. A program like this will get more students to come and take advantage of an incredible education that they can get at our campuses. >> I was just curious kind of what were the drivers of enrollment before that have kind of fallen away? Was it a particular type of skill set? Was it just that they don't want it generic anymore? They got to go get a job? I'm just curious if there was something that you had before that was appealing that you have now that's just not appealing anymore? >> Good questions. So the last time our economy was in bad shape when the employment was down. That was back around 2008-2009. Well guess what happened in our campuses? Enrollment was up. So when the economy is in bad shape people come back to school. When the economy is in great shape like it is today where there is a lot of jobs, enrollment is down. So we don't see the economy going down at all in a number of years. >> Anytime soon. >> So we have to develop programs that we think will be of interest to students first. Secondly we have to respond to the needs of the new economy. The new economy is now being dominated by these new technologies. We know about it, young people know about it. So when we develop a program like this and we know that it will generate interest. It will generate enrollment. And in many ways that's what drives the funding for a college. We're funded on the basis of how many people we enroll. So if we don't enroll a lot people, we have less money, so no doubt there's a motivation for us, a motivation for the entire system, to really partner with Amazon. And figure out a way for us to really get students train and to get them, hopefully get them a good job. >> So you segued perfectly. My last question was going to be kind of the role of Amazon in AWS, in terms of being a partner. I mean they obviously you know are thinking about things. Theresa's fantastic. She just talked about being from an education family, but at the same time you know they have their own reasons to do it. They need workers right? They need people to fill these jobs to fulfill Amazon's own growth beyond their ecosystem, their partners and customers etcetera. So what does it mean for you as an educator and part of this consortium of community colleges to have somebody like AWS come in and really help you codevelop and drive these types of new programs? >> Well it means everything. Number one we know that Amazon is a major employer. We know that the jobs that they have available are good-paying jobs. They have a career path and so we know it's a good direction for young people to take. So part of my job as an educator is many ways it's like a parent. You want to take care of your family, you want to take care of the kids and put them in the right path so they have the most success possible. Amazon offers that kind of path. So for us to partner with someone like Amazon is great. Secondly, students know who Amazon is. I don't have to sell them. They know who they are, and they know what Amazon can do and they know that it's a great career path for them. So now that I think it could be a great partnership for us but also it's an opportunity for Amazon to even continue further developing that workforce in Los Angeles in California. >> Alright Marvin, well thank you so much for spending a few minutes and I wish you nothing but the best with this California Cloud Workforce Project. Make sure I get it right? >> It's right. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, alright he's Marvin, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in Seattle at the Amazon Imagine Education event. First time ever, keep watching. It's going to grow and grow and grow. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)