>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Melon Yen, founder and partner of operator Collective Madeleine, Welcome to the Cube. Thank you so much. So tell us a little bit about your background. >>So Operator Collective is actually my fourth organization that been apart of starting, and all of them have had an aspect of it that had a strong community to it. And so that was one of the reasons why, um, as you hear about in a second, I could put together this kind of crazy idea for a fund that looks like no other. >>Um, So what inspired you to start this company? And how did you navigate getting funding? >>Sure. So? So, because that operator collective is my fourth company. The 1st 1 was actually a nonprofit. The 2nd 1 was a venture backed company that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years, and the 3rd 1 was something called Faster, which is the world's largest B two b B two b community for SAS Softwares of service, the company that was a venture backed startup that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years. Even though I helped launch it, I didn't actually officially joined as an employee until about 18 months in, and by that time it's employees 65 I noticed a number of things, which is there were largely homogenous group of people who were there before me, all really great people. But you tend to know people like you and the hyper growth stages of startups. You tend to turn around and say, Who can I get? And so you and you turn to the people that you know, And so you end up with companies that look like yourself and so spent a lot of time looking at what was going on in the venture world, which is that in the area that I focus on, which is enterprise and software enterprise software. It is over 90% male in terms of veces as well as founders and the world revolves around in the venture world revolves around veces and founders. And so I looked around and said, Well, where the operators, the people who build and grow and scale up these companies, they're largely not. They're not efficiently and effectively part of this ecosystem and then second, where the women and people of color And so but as I started to dig in more and talk to people, what I realized was that the VCs and founders actually wanted to bring in the operators. They wanted to bring in the people with different backgrounds, but the network's didn't naturally overlap. And so I thought, there's got to be a way to bring them in, because I know the operators and the operators also want to participate. But the system isn't optimized to make it efficient or friendly are comfortable for them to be able to participate. So that's why I decided to put operator collective together. >>Wow, So you are key noting today for cloud. Now, um, what has this experience been like? And what is the main message you want to give to the award winners and to the cloud now community. >>So it's incredibly inspiring to be with all of the women who are being honored tonight as well as, frankly, the organizers. The organization itself Cloud now is incredibly impactful. And so one of the reasons I was so excited to be asked is a number of the women who were being honored. I either know or have heard of. And the recognition is something that is very important because we need to tell the stories and recognize these people who are not. Maybe the usual suspects, the ones who maybe not our everyday names. And so I was super excited to be here. >>So you were talking about how it's about 90% male in the VC and founder community, Um, in one of your articles, which are amazing, by the way you said, Don't let the excuse of cultural fit be a vehicle for perpetuating sameness, and I thought that was so profound. So, um, are you still seeing this notion of cultural fit being a huge issue and if so, what can be done? Teoh mitigate it? Yeah, I think there's >>more awareness now of the fact that if you hire for cultural fit, you'll end up with 65 people who are exactly like you. And that's not optimizing for a successful company because right there studies that show that diverse teams outperform out innovate, homogeneous teams. But what's also interesting is the same study says that, but homogeneous teams are more certain that they've gotten to the right answer, even if they've got into the answer less less often than the diverse teams. And so when you have people who are just like you, then everyone agrees with each other than you don't realize that. Maybe there's another way of looking at something and so cultural fit is is a warning sign. I think to say that. Okay, well, there just like me, I'm very comfortable sometimes. Being uncomfortable is good. >>That's a great message. I think it's really hard to to say like, Oh, I'm okay with being comfortable. Um, so in, in in in one of your other articles, you bring up this idea of, um, don't check all the boxes, but rather fill in the gaps. So can you explain more about that? >>Yeah. So the idea behind that is, if you look for only the typical candidates. The ones who maybe think of a startup founder went to Stanford. Where's the hoodie? Right? Did computer science then that's fine. There are plenty of those people who have been successful, but you're ignoring all the people who didn't. And so, in fact, I'm the beneficiary of people who were willing to not just check all the boxes because I >>didn't >>check any of the boxes. If you look at, if you look at my background, I should not have been able to raise. Is the first time fund and a first time fund manager to be able to raise a $50 million fund because I'm a um Ah, let's see, I'm a solo GP, right? So, General partner who hasn't been a VC before with the first time fund, I don't have the traditional venture background. My previous background was I was an intellectual property attorney. Um, then help start a company as a result of that and then and then also when you check the boxes, 40% of the seas went to Stanford or Harvard, and when you look at the numbers, I didn't check all the boxes, but precisely because I didn't check all the boxes, I was able to actually look at this differently and say, Hey, that's not the model that that I want to build. And frankly, if I tried to build the same model that everyone else did, my background so doesn't look like anything. I wouldn't have been successful. And by taking it and saying, Look, I'm gonna build a model that's totally different from the ground up that allowed me to build a platform in a community that looked like no one else is as a result of that was able to raise money from institutional investors, for instance, which very rarely back first time funds. And so, by not checking all the boxes, um, I was able to build a model, but by other people also saying, Look, she doesn't check any of our typical boxes. But we >>would like this >>idea because it's so different than everyone else is. We will. We are now, you know, part of the fund >>and sometimes different is good, and it's what's what's needed? Absolutely. Um, so speaking of that, um, in terms of operator collective, what workplace environment are you trying to strive for. >>So what we say is we seek to back founders from all backgrounds who believe you share are believed that culture, diversity and operational excellence are a key part of building truly great companies. So we strive to be inclusive way. We strive to have a variety of backgrounds. We use a lot of the tools that of the companies, because we focus only on enterprise and B two B software and technology and infrastructure. And so we also try to use a lot of those tools. So we are mostly women team and we are distributed team. We largely work out of our homes and we work a lot on Zoom and we all a lot of us have kids too, and so what we do is we adjust the schedule so we can do drop off in the morning. We work like crazy, right? We work long hours, but we also do it so that people can can take their kids to doctor's appointments or pick up their kids at the end of the day. But we what was important to me was that we created environment that worked with our busy lives, and it wasn't that we were trying to take, take take these incredibly talented women and make it fit into just the corporate norm. Because you can have an incredibly successful work relationship. I mean, you can have an incredibly successful, um career if you don't have to sacrifice everything else in your life for it, >>right? Right. And that balance is so important. Um, so what advice would you give to aspiring female entrepreneurs who maybe have, ah, not so technical background or who are struggling to navigate in this male dominated industry. >>So one of the things >>I talked about in my keynote today was was that you never get this right. You're never going to raise a fund. If if you do this, you're never gonna raise a fund. And so when you're starting a company, you will go when you talk to a lot of people as you should, because you will get lots of great information. Ah, lot of people are going to say, Well, you're never gonna have a You're never going to start a company if you don't have a technical co founder never going to start a company. If you're gonna try to do X and So while you some might say, Well, you should just ignore those people actually say, Don't ignore those people because they are saying that other people are going to think that too. But think of a way to counter that. And that actually help make the operator collective business model stronger. Because we said Okay, we know that's gonna be the mindset. Let's turn it around and actually make this a strength. And so, for female founders or any founders, what I would say is listen to a lot of people talk to a lot of people here what they have to say. Ultimately, trust your instinct. Trust your gut. And because you know what's best for the company that you're trying to build. >>Great words of advice. Melon. Thank you so much for being on the Cube. Thank you >>so much for having me. Absolutely. >>I'm Sonita Gari. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Trump and low park California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Now here's Sonya to garden. >>Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is modest to get day, the cofounder of branch motto. Welcome to the cube. Thank you so much for having me. So you're receiving an award today for being a top female entrepreneur in cloud innovation. How does that feel? >>It feels awesome. I'm humbled to be in such amazing company with some great ladies that have started really great companies, so pretty excited to be here. >>Great. So just give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure. Uh, my background, well, I probably don't have the regular Silicon Valley background. I was born and raised in communist Romania, uh, in a pretty small town called Barco, uh, in the Rijo Romania called Moldavia. I was very good at math. Um, and my parents, uh, pushed me to explore applying to schools in the United States, which I did. Um, and I applied to 23 colleges and the DOB, uh, getting a full scholarship from Cornell where I studied computer engineering. Um, I dreamt of working for big companies, which I did for a while, uh, until one day when I remember I was doing a master's to Stanford and one professor told me I was, I told him, I was like, I don't think I could ever start a company. And he was like, what if you don't? Like, who do you think? Well, so I was like, Oh, I never thought about it that way. Um, and that's when I think my entrepreneurial dream started. And a few years later I started, um, phone co-founders and started a few different companies that eventually ended up being branch. That's a long answer to your question. >>No, that's perfect. So what inspired you to start branch and how did you navigate getting funding? >>Um, it's a, it's an interesting story. I think we came together, my cofounders and I were in business school, Stanford, we all want to start a company and we did what all business school students do. We just started something that sounded cool but maybe it didn't have such a big market. Um, and uh, then pivoted and ended up building an app. So we worked on an app or the mobile photo printing app called kindred. We worked on the Apple for quite some time. It was, um, over a year we sold over 10,000 photo books. I've seen a lot of images of babies and pets and we reviewed manually every single book and we had a really hard time growing. So if you think about the mobile ecosystem today, and if you compare it to the web on the web, the web is a pretty democratic system. >>You, um, you have the HTTP protocol and you are able to put together a website and make sure that the website gets found through social media to research to all this other platforms. Apps are much harder to discover. Um, the app ecosystem is owned by the platforms. And we had a really hard time applying. I was coming from the web world and all the things I had done to market websites just in the work with the apps. And it was hard. Uh, you know, you could only Mark at the top and how out all the content inside the app. That's a lot more interesting than the app itself. So we, we felt that we were like really, really struggling and we would need it to kind of shut the company down. And then we realized that one of the things that we were trying to build for us to a disability to allow people to share and get to content within the app, which is in our case was photo books was actually something that everyone in the ecosystem needed. >>So we, we asked a lot of people and it seemed like this was a much bigger need. Uh, then, you know, the photo books. And, uh, we had started to already build it to solve our own problem. So we started building a linking and attribution platform, um, to help other app. And mobile companies grow and understand their user journey and help build like interesting connections for the user. So, you know, our mission is to, um, to help people discover content within apps, uh, through links that always work. Uh, and it's been a wonderful, like an F pretty exciting journey ever since. That's really inspiring and, and solving a real world problem, a real world problem. >> So it's interesting when you ask about fundraising. Uh, it was so hard to raise money for the photo book app. And we raised actually from, uh, uh, pay our ventures and they actually, even now I remember, uh, the guy patch man sat us down in a very Silicon Valley fashion at the rosewoods and was a very hot day and there was like Persian tea being served and he gave us money and he said, you know, I just want to do something. >>I am not investing in the idea. I'm investing in you as a team. Uh, and if you pivot away from photo books, you know, uh, which we did and I think we pivoted the way because we ended up finding a much, much bigger problem. And we felt that, you know, we could actually make a, an actual change into the mobile cloud ecosystem. And that's how, that's how it all started. Uh, and it wasn't actually was easier to raise money after we had a really big problem. We had a good team that had been working together for almost two years. We had product market fit. >> So, uh, so yeah. So what are some things that have influenced you in your journey to become an entrepreneur? Um, some things interesting. Um, well I would say the Stanford design school. Um, I think I came from working for Siemens, which is a giant company. >>And I started doing this project and I remember one of the projects was we built, um, an, uh, a toolbar we were supposed to where we're doing a project for, um, Firefox, which, you know, Mozilla was utilize browser, uh, which was in some ways the precursor to Chrome. And we're trying to help it grow. And we didn't know. And one of the ideas was we, we built this toolbar for eBay and eBay hadn't had a toolbar for Firefox. And we, you know, we were some students for two weeks. We build this toolbar bar and then someone bought the car to our toolbar. And I was like, wow. Like how incredible is it that you can just kind of put your thoughts on something and just get something done and make an actual impact someone's life. And I think that's when the spark of the entrepreneurial spark, it was during that time that, um, Michael Dearing course, a professor and one of my D school courses also told me the thing that if I don't do it, who will? >>And I think that's when, that's when it all started. I think the things that have helped me along the way, I mean, my cofounders, I think I've been incredibly lucky to find cofounders that are incredibly eager to be good at what they do and also very different from me. So I think if you think about why many companies implode, it's usually because of the founding team. We've been together for almost seven years now. Uh, and it's been an interesting way to find balance through so many failed companies. So many stages of growth branches over 400 people now. So you know, our roles have shifted over time and it's been like, uh, an interesting journey and I think recently more in the past few years, I think one of the things that has helped me find balance has been having a group of female founder friends. Um, it's really interesting to have a peer group that you can talk about things with and be vulnerable with. >>And I didn't have that in the first few years and I wish I did. My cofounders are amazing, but I think in some ways we are also coworkers. So having an external group has been incredibly helpful in helping me find balance in my life. So I think a lot of women feel that way. They feel that it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated workspace. So what advice would you give to female entrepreneurs in this space? Yeah, I mean it is really hard and I think confidence is something that I've noticed with myself, my peers, the women that I've invested in. I do investing on the side. Uh, I would say believe that you can do it. Uh, believe that the only, the sky's the limit believe that, um, you can do more than you think you can do. I think sometimes, uh, you know, our, our background and the society around us, um, doesn't necessarily believe that we can do the things that we can do as women. >>So I think believing in ourselves is incredibly important. I think the second part is making sure that we build networks around us. They can tell us that they believe in us. They can push us beyond what we think is possible. And I think those networks can be peers. Like my funeral founder group, we call each other for ministers or, uh, I think investors. Um, I think it can be mentors. And I've had, I've been lucky enough to have amazing women investors, uh, women mentors. Um, and I, it's been a really incredible to see how much they helped me grow. So I think the interesting thing is when I was just getting started, I didn't look for those communities. I didn't look for a guy. I just kinda felt, Oh, I can do it. But I didn't actually realize that being part of a community, being vulnerable, asking questions can actually go help me go so much further. Um, so the advice would be to start early and find a small group of people that you can actually rely on, and that can be your advocates and your champions. So, yeah. Well, thank you so much for those words of wisdom. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on the cube. I'm your host, Sonia to Gary. Thanks for watching the cube. Stay tuned for more.

>>From and low park California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Now here's Sonya to garden. >>Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Shamila Bandler who is the director of production engineering at Facebook. to the cube. Thank you Sonya. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? Absolutely. >> Um, I grew up in India and it was in 2001 I moved to United States. I joined a company in financial sector fidelity investment. That was my first job in the U S it was a very important team I was working on, which was responsible for mission critical applications and trading floor. So if you know a little bit about stocks, you can think about the sense of urgency. That's where I learned early on in my career while I was working there. I also did my part time masters at Howard university. >>Um, that time was very crucial in my growth because it taught me resilience doing two things at the same time. 2005 was a life changing event where for personal reasons, I relocated to a Bay area from East coast and I joined a startup going from a big company to a small company. Again, put me in a situation which I was never used to. The startup taught me again being very resilient moving fast, which got acquired by Dell. That's when I switched to management. I sat on the decision for three months when my director asked me, you should be in management. And it wasn't, I wasn't afraid. I was too naive to like step away from individual contribution to the Tech's role to step into management. They were persistent and I took on the management role and there was never turning back because what I was giving back to the company, to the team and also seeing more women join my team. >>That was something I was truly enjoying. Then I did a couple of small companies transforming their business from a on-prem business to cloud. Um, that was again, growing the team from ground up and building a team in like two years was very, very motivating. And it was about a year and a half ago when I joined Facebook where a opportunity came knocking. I really wanted to work at this keel. And six months into the role I was supporting Facebook's monitoring ecosystem. And then last year my role changed. I started supporting Facebook's revenue generating platforms, which is ads, marketplace, commerce, and payments. And I'm absolutely loving it. >> That's very inspiring. Thank you. See you were a past winner of cloud now and now you're on the cloud now, advisory board. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what's the experience been like? >> Absolutely. I still remember, it was about four years ago. >>I'm the founder of cloud. No, Jocelyn had reached out to me that you should absolutely put the nomination. I had self-doubts, but then I thought, okay, I have done three transformations, let me give it a shot. And I attended that event on Google, Google campus. And the most important thing I took away from that evening was the amazing inspiring speakers. And the other pure winners from that, there was never looking back. It's just not being the award recipient. I think it boosted my confidence that what I have done and then also put more responsibility on me that how can I see more women leaders grow and get more women in the tech. Then last year of when I pitched to my management team that we should host cloud now event on Facebook campus. I got immense support from them. We did it. And this is when I felt that giving back to the community. >>This is what it means. At the same time after the event, Jocelyn said, I think you should be on the advisory board because we can get more of them and join this mission and we can accelerate the missions. A goal which is getting more and more women in tech. We have a lot of work still to do. >> Um, and so today you hosted the welcome and the scholarship, um, presentation. So how has that experience and tell us a little bit more about cloud now is um, STEM scholarship fund opportunity. It was a great experience. I think whole Borton school and Shanti Bhavan. I mean, when I look at the backgrounds of some of the scholars, it's just amazing. I mean, we all are privileged. I feel I'm privileged. Um, whether it's education or from the families. I think our parents took really good care of ourselves. >>But when I look at some of the fascinating stories of the scholars, some of them like absolute poverty, homelessness, there was one story which was like a person was homeless and the social economic statuses they come from, you wouldn't even think like, how can they even like done into like great software engineers at some amazing top companies. When I look back, the whole philanthrophy mission of, um, you know, cloud now is on this international STEM scholarship. It is making sure these underprivileged scholars have a fair chance because they didn't start at the same place where I feel I have started, you know, being a kid, you know, going to a school and it's amazing that we are able to contribute to this mission. Well that's great. And you're giving them an opportunity to share their skills with the world. Absolutely. Um, so what impact do you hope cloud now will have in the future? >>I think we still have a long way to go. I mean if I just look at, um, around me, uh, it's amazing that Facebook is very much into seeing more and more diversity and inclusion. And I know the numbers are changing even in other companies, but they're not changing at the rate where we want. Cloud now has gotten into a place in eight years very well connected with the winners. All of them, all the winners I look at past eight years are in very prominent positions. We have a privilege. At the same time, we also have a huge responsibility if in whatever field, whatever domain, whatever rules V. V, R. N if we can influence and change the equation very, we are making it a fair ground. I think we can see more and more women in tech. And what advice would you give to women who want to be in tech but maybe feel a little intimidated by the male dominated industry? >>I think sometimes we are owed our own enemies. Um, it's easier said than done. Um, I think believing in yourself. So when I was put in drawers, absolutely there were moments I was not comfortable at all and I started doing things not worrying about the outcome. Whatever I felt was right at that time I never thought, uh, this problem is some other team's problem and I'll wait for it. I just went ahead and whatever I could do in my capacity. And that was seen and I think women are really, really good in collaboration and soft skills. I would say use your strengths and use it well because that's what the companies need today. And are you personally seeing a rise in women in tech? Like um, in your team or at Facebook? Are you seeing that there are more women? Absolutely. When I joined the production engineering monetization team last year we had 13 women. >>We have 26 women in the team now. So that's my team is about hundred plus. So about 26% is great. I had no women managers in the team. I can proudly say I have two women managers in the T team. As I say, we still have a long way to go. My hope is in the organization, Ironman. If we can see more women in production engineering, then I would say like, yes, it's, it's getting there. And last question. Um, uh, there are a lot of shifts in the tech industry and new companies, new emerging tech. What's the opportunity now for women? I think AI is, um, you know, machine learning and AI is on the top because it's not just associated with one domain. AI can be applied anywhere. I feel women lik whether it's healthcare, whether it's in technology, it's, it's going to be applied, you know, everywhere. The other is cloud computing. Again, with the public and private clouds on the rise, more and more companies moving into hybrid cloud model. A, I feel for women, you know, going into these fields will like, just open up more opportunities for them. Shana, thank you so much. This is really inspiring and thank you for being part of cloud now. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm Sonya. Thanks for watching the cube. Um, stay tuned for more.

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Joining us today is Tao Johnson, who's the CEO and founder of Kaizen Technology Partners. Now welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure, I actually have a finance degree and have no idea what technology was. I started as a finance analyst at Sun Microsystems and had no idea who they were or what job awas but having the interest to be a CFO one day, our CEO in another company, I figured I'd go into sales and really understand what drives a company growth and revenue. So I was actually trained by Scott McNealy's best of the best program and was in sales class with him and his with his sister in law. And, um, I never left sales after them, >>so um So you mentioned that you have a finance background? How do you think that background has helped you to become a successful CEO versus, say, a technical background? >>And I think having the finance background is very important because your cash flow management is one of the biggest reasons companies fail. You know, before they can get their next round of funding, they run out of their overhead costs, their monthly overhead costs. The other thing is really to understand how to sell in our ally and total cost of ownership to the decision powers that be at the CFO level and CEO CIO. >>Okay, Um, so you're on the cloud now advisory board to tell us, How did you join And how was that experience? Like, I think >>it grew organically having been a participant to a few of the events with Jocelyn and then helping her. Where can I help? How can I get speakers for you or winners? And over time, just like just came to me and said, You know, you have such a network, Why don't you join our board and help us where we can? Hence we have mailing today, um, as our keynote because of our network. >>And speaking of entrepreneurs, you, um, I just want to mention that you are at this program for Harvard, for entrepreneurs. Can you talk more about that? >>Sure, it's an amazing program. I wish that there were more women who applied and were able to invest the money and time into the program. It's, ah, owners and entrepreneurs who have companies around the world. There's 41 countries represented. Unfortunately, only about 17% of women of 151 participants in class. We meet three times once a year, and we go through three weeks of intensive training to discuss marketing finance how to scale operations. But the best thing you get out of it is 1 30% of it is learning this case studies method and Harvard, the other 30% is really the network and the different industry's. You get to meet. We have film. As you know, we've talked about retail and other industries there that you can self reflect on. How does that involve with technology? Um, and then the other 30 self reflection time. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially CEOs, don't have the time to get away from their business, and it really forces you to not be the operator. Walk away and be able to self reflect on Where do you want to take the business >>today >>and speaking about networking? What's your advice on networking within the industry? What are some tips and tricks >>in my belief? You know, we have social media, but the best way to meet people is through other people. So going to events like this and really having an idea of your goals at the event when you're going there, who's going to help you get to that person? Um, and having a focus, not. I want to meet 100 80 people, and I don't know who they're going to be really being able to say, Who do I want to meet at that event who can help me get there and preparing plan as much triple the time that you're gonna be even at the event? >>Yes, the networking can be really difficult. So as an entrepreneur, what do you think makes a great entrepreneur? >>You know, entrepreneurship is very hard because you really have to touch all facets of a company and find the right people to trust to do certain areas, but then be able to understand all the different parts of the company, right, from supply chain to partnerships to sales and finance. So what, you really have to be diverse and ambidextrous, and that makes it very difficult for some people who are only analytical or only sales e to be able to run a company in scale. >>And what advice do you have for female technologists who maybe feel that so it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated industry? I would >>say to them they're stand out, make your different standout, right? Why make it a negative? The positive is you are female and you stand out so less men get called on by you and you might have a chance to get in the door. But you better have your ideas in line and your resource is and you better be >>kick ass. But use it to your >>advantage that you are different and that they're not used to hearing from women. >>So you've been with carved out for many years now. Where do you hope to see cloud now in the future, I >>would love to see cloud now be more, uh, geographically worldwide as we're doing more work in my non profit for women Rwanda, in Afghanistan as entrepreneurs, Um and I think, you know, we've upped and stepped up so much more with Facebook bringing in investments to us to compared to what we've done before, Um, I think just the awareness and may be doing this on a, um, twice a year basis instead of only once a year to be ableto celebrate these wonderful women. >>Don, thank you so much for being on the Cube. This has been really knowledgeable. Thank you for having me. I'm Sonia Tagaris. Thank you for watching the Cube stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From a little park, California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Here's Sonya to garden. Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud nows, top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is Christine Heckart, CEO of scaler. Christine, welcome to the cube. Thank you. So you're receiving an award today for being one of the top women in cloud. Um, how do you feel about that? >>Oh, it's always terrible to get an award. I mean, it's awesome. I'm very honored to be here. >>Awesome. Um, so give us a little brief overview of your background. >>Oh, 30 years in tech. Um, let's same now. I'm CEO of scaler. So we're a log analytics company. We scale to over a hundred terabytes a day in the cloud at ridiculously affordable prices. And we serve some of the best tech companies in the world. We sell into engineers and developers. >>And so you've been CEO for over a year now. What's that experience been like? What challenges have you faced along the way? >>Uh, exhilarating experience if you've never been at a startup? Um, it's a great place to be. It's a phenomenal team. Challenges are all about how you grow and how you serve customers well on a limited set of resource with unlimited choice sets and opportunities. And that's hard thing to do. >>So you've been an executive for quite a while now. What's the best part about being a CEO? >>The people are the best part. Um, both the employees. We have some incredible employees, very energized about the mission, very dedicated, uh, and then absolutely amazing customers that we serve. These, you know, we serve engineers whereby accompanied by engineers for engineers and engineers innovate to change the world. And our job is to help them innovate with more confidence so they can change the world more quickly. And so you're feeding into all these incredible missions around the world with these incredible people and you're helping them do their job better. And it's just every day is different and every day is fun. >>So what are the, some of the things that have influenced you along the way or some of the people who have influenced you? >>Jeez. Um, you know, I guess I'm influenced mostly by the people who I worked with and who have worked for me. Um, even more so maybe than the people I've worked for, although they've also been fabulous. Um, I just think you learn from, you learn from all the talent around you in the way people think differently about problems and, and how that synergy, um, often creates just magical outcomes. >>So as a CEO, um, what kind of workplace culture are striving to achieve? >>Uh, we have picked just one value and there are other companies that I think are doing the same and the value and we picked us care. And so we really strive to have a culture that encourages people to care about each other and care about the company's mission, uh, care about serving customers well and, and building a very high quality product with great experience, but also care about the environment and care about the community and care about people's lives outside of the day to day work job. Um, so we try to take a really holistic view, but on one key attribute, which is care. >>Well that's, that's awesome. I think everyone wants to go to work and, and just feel like, you know, that they're not bogged down by long hours or that >>we still have long hours. There's no doubt about that, but it's carrying long hours right there. Appreciate it. Yeah. Um, so what advice would you give to women who are considering a career in tech? I love tech. I've been 30 years in tech. I go out of my way to get people into the industry. Um, I do believe in all of its facets. It's the greatest industry in the history of history. I really do believe that it's also a hard place to work. It's a demanding place to work. Um, it's still hard place to work for women. Um, and any, I think kind of minority, uh, it's not as welcoming yet as it could be, but relative to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, we've made enormous progress. I still believe we are making enormous progress and there's work to go, but it's very encouraging. >>That's great. Um, so, um, after being in the industry for a while, have you figured out a work life balance? Is there a secret? Is it a myth? >>Um, I am not the person to ask about work life balance for sure. Uh, most people would probably say I don't have it. Um, I don't look at it as balanced so much as, um, maybe juggling, like you just prioritize what's important in the moment. Um, I do believe in that. One of the great things about tech is usually you can do your job anytime from anywhere. Um, and you know, that has good and bad. So I tend to do my job all times everywhere. But you can do your job all times, everywhere and, and sometimes that's from home. And sometimes that's from other places, you know, anywhere around the world. >>And I'm sure especially as like, you know, moms and stuff like it's, it's great to have that flexibility. Um, and um, so, okay. So as a CEO, what do you think makes you a great leader? >>Um, I think any great leader is a leader who cares about their mission and their employees, uh, as people and not just as workers, um, and their customers as people and their, their holistic careers in their lives, not just as a source of revenue. So that's one of the reasons why we picked that value care is that, you know, it's super important for any leader at any level. What do you think leaders can do to, to make that, make it more welcoming for women in tech to be part of this industry? Um, it's not, this is not a question about women or any, anybody in particular, what people value is being appreciated and being included and being heard. That's it. Like, if you, if, if you can create an environment that is inclusive, where people can be heard and can be valued for what they contribute and their ideas, then I think, you know, it's a great place to work and, and, and that's a hard thing to do. It's white. It's easy to say. It's very hard to do culturally. Um, but I, I really think it's that simple. Well, thank you so much, Christine, for being on the. It's always great to have you here. Thank you for having me again. I'm sending it to Gary. Thanks for watching the cube. Stay tuned for more.

>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Get the Schmidt CEO of Human. Get that. Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So just give us a brief overview of your background and more about Humira. All right, A brief >>overview. Let's see. Um, I'll start off that I've been in the industry for some time now. Um, since ah, 97 which I used to actually work at this campus that we're here today at when it used to be Sun Microsystems. So I started out in technology in product management and marketing. Mainly, um, when java was coming out so early days and really learned a lot about what it takes to take a product or a concept out to market very exciting in those early days and sort of, you know, move towards looking at Industries and Sister focused on financial services into the lot around financial services marketing. Also it son. >>And then I moved >>to Denmark, which is sort of a surprise, But I'm married to a day and we decided we would try something different. So I moved to Denmark, working at a consulting company software consulting company based in Denmark, fairly small and Ah, and was part of sort of building out of the conference and business development business they had over there. And ah, and that was a way for us, for me to understand a completely other side of the business consulting aspects where you really build software for a customer and really understand, you know, sort of the customer solution needs that are required versus when you're working at a large enterprise company kind of are separated away from the customers. And that was there where I met the two founding team members of Humi Oh, Christian and Trust in at Tri Fork into you. Essentially, we've been working together for 10 years, and, uh, we sort of all felt like we could really come out with the world's best logging solution and, ah, this was out of some of the pain we were running into by running other solutions in the market. And so we took a leap into building our own product business. And so we did that in 2016. And so that's really what brought me here into the CEO role. So we have a three person leisure leadership or executive team, our founding team, which is to verily technical folks. So the guys that really built the product and and, uh, and keep it running and take it to the next level every single day. But what was missing was really that commercial kind of leader that was ready to take that role, and that's where I came in. So they were very supportive and and bringing me on board. So that was into 2016 where I started that >>that's awesome. So how do you think having like a business and marketing background versus a technical background has helped you become a successful CEO? Um, I >>think it's really, really hard if you don't have different profiles on your founding team to be able to run a successful tech business. So there's technology that you could have the world's greatest technology like an example would be my you know, my co founders were building an amazing product, but until they came into the room, they hadn't thought about going out and trying to get a customer to use it. And essentially, that is one of the issues there is that you can sit and build something and build the best product out there. But if you're not getting feedback really, really early in the design and the concepts of product development, then customers our search of it's not built in. And so a lot of the thought process around him. EOS We like to say customers are in our DNA. We build >>our product >>for people to use 6 to 8 hours a day, and they're in it every day. And so it keeps this feeling of a customer feedback loop. And even if you're technical, it's really exciting. You know that you build something that somebody uses every day. It looks at every day, and so that's the kind of energy that we've tried to, you know, instill. Or maybe I've tried to instill in Humi Oh, that you know, our customers really matter, and I think that's one of the ways that we've been able to move, Let's say really, really fast in building the right features the right functionality, um, and the right things for people are using it on the on the on, the on the other and essentially >>so okay. And, um so you're here to receive an award for being one of the top female entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. So congratulations and And how does it feel to win this award? Super >>exciting. I mean, I'm glad that there are organizations like Cloud now that are doing amazing things for women and and also, you know, making examples of folks that are doing interesting roles in our industry, especially around B two B software. I think that's a real area where there's not many CIOs or leaders in our space where there should be. And, uh, and I think part of it is actually kind of highlighting that. But, you know, the other side is sort of an event like this today is bringing together a lot of other profiles that are women or diverse profiles together to sort of, you know, talk about this problem and acknowledge and also take, let's say, more of an active stance around, you know, making this place not so scary. I mean, I think I remember one of my early events and I was raising our series A when I walked into a VC event where there were no other female CIOs out there. There's 100 CIOs and I was the only one. And I think one of the hard parts is I walked in there and, you know, it felt a bit uncomfortable, But there were some. There were two amazing VC partners at the company that I first started talking to, and that just really used the sort of like, you know, I guess. Uncomfortable, itty. So I think the main focus at things like today or, you know, the people that are here today. So I think we can help each other. And I think that's something that you know. That's something that I'd like to see more of, that we actively sort of create environments and communities for that to happen, and cloud now is one of them. >>So I think a lot of women have had that experience where they're the only woman in the room, you know, and it's just really hard to like. Figure out your path from there. So as the company as Julio, how do you What's your strategy for inclusion? >>Um, so, like I like to call it active inclusion. I think part of this is like having a diverse workforce, which is, you know, obviously including women and different backgrounds. Other things. But >>one of >>the big things we think about at Hume Eo is we really like to, let's say, celebrate people's differences so like that you're able to be yourself and almost eccentric is a good thing. And be able to feel safe in that environment to feel safe, that you can express your opinions, feel comfortable and safe when you're, you know, coming with a opposite viewpoint. Because the diversity of thought is really what we're trying to include in our company. So it means bringing together folks that don't look like each other where exactly, the same clothes and do the exact same hobbies and come from the same countries like we have. Ah, very, you know, global workforce. So we have folks, you know in Denmark of an office in Denmark. We have an office in the UK, and we have folks all over the U. S. We have a lot of backgrounds that have come from different cultures, and I think there's a beauty to that. There's a beauty to actually combining a lot of ways to solve problems. Everyone from a different culture has different ways of solving those. And so I think part of this is all around making that. Okay, right. So, you know, active inclusion is a way to to sort of put it into terms. So So we're definitely looking for people, Actively, that would like to join something like >>this. So I love that. Um, So if you were personally, if you were to have your own board of directors, like, who would they be? Um, it's not really >>the who. It's almost like the profiles or the people. I mean, we already have a personal board like I call it. I mean, it's something that I actively started doing. Um, once I once I started with a company board, I realized, you know, I probably need my own personal board, my own sort of support infrastructure That includes folks like my family, my sisters and my mom. It also includes you know, some younger junior folks that are actually much younger >>than me. >>But I learned so much from so um, to one of my good friend Cindy, who's who is brilliant at describing technology concepts. And and I think just some of the conversations I've had with her just opened my eyes to something that I hadn't seen before. And I think that's the area where I like to say the personal board isn't exactly you know people. It's it's profile. So along the way, as you grow, you're looking for new types of profiles. Let's say you want to learn about a new concept or a new technology or, you know, get better at running or something. So it's part of bringing those profiles in tow, learn about it and then back to this board concept. It's It's not as though it's a linked in network or it's actually sort of a group of people that you sort of rely on. And then it's a It's a two way street. So essentially, you know, there could be things that the other person could gain from knowing me, and ideally, that those were the best relationships in a personal board. So so I encourage alive women to do this because it builds a support infrastructure that is not related to your job. It's not your manager. It's not your co worker. You kind of feel some level of freedom having those discussions because those people aren't looking at your company. They're looking at helping you. So So that's That's sort of the concepts around >>the personal board idea and anything as women like having a sport system is so necessary, especially in this, like male dominated industry. Well, I think it's back >>to that whole feeling like you're the one person in the room, right? Right, so you're not the one person in the room, and I think we need to change that. And I think that's like some you know, all of our kind of roles that for all the women intact. I mean, it's sort of like something that we could help each other with right, and and if we don't do it actively, I mean, you know the numbers and we know you know the percentages of these things. If we want to change that, it does require some active interest on on our part to make that happen. And I think those are the areas where I see, like, the support infrastructures, the events like this really kind of engaging, um, us to be aware and doing something about the >>problem. Thank you so much for being on the key of love having you here. Thanks for >>having me. I really appreciate it. >>I'm Sonia to Garry. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the chief operating officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award and joining him one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who is a assistant developer with the United States, Small Business Administration, and of course the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu? >> Hey Stu; Thank you. >> All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, but maybe just give us a sketch if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. >> Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, Four Points is a value added technology reseller focused on the federal government and we've been working with federal customer since 2002. We're a service disabled veteran owned small business, and we've been in a Amazon partner since 2012. >> Wonderful; Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020, if you could tell us a little bit about your role in your organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. >> Sure; so I worked for the chief information officer and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. >> Wonderful; Joel, maybe a connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which I understand was predated the COVID incidents. >> Sure; we've been with SBA for several years now. And SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity, from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or use third party contractors for. So, Four Points came in as a true value added reseller of cloud to SBA providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professionals services. >> All right; so Ryan bring us in a little bit, the project that we're talking about here, what was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flush out a little bit, what you're doing there? >> Yeah, so most recently Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community oriented lenders to submit Paycheck Protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like big banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock and Four Points was there for us. We got new accounts set up. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but has done an incredible amount of work and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points. So we're really excited about that. >> Yeah, If I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money move through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. >> Yeah, that's so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today. And so we're very comfortable with AWS service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that, it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, dynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did. We never even actually saw a performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective as the program manager. >> well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime. Those are really the promise the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of teeing out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together, and, the various pieces underneath. >> Yes Stu, it's interesting. Four Points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200+ services that AWS has. They also have a direct access to billing and usage information that lets them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone. And they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using of variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live very, very robust, really large environment. >> Yeah, right, and I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with the serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud native technology. You know, the concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, you know, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written and now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need, means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, sba.gov is now serving a a hundred or a thousand times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, but we're doing a hundred or a thousand times more work. That's a win, that's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. >> Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SBA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SBA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think there were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well also. >> Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain instant size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native, like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances, so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year. So they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expire. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out and they have enabled us to do things like, be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up to all because it's been such a key thing over this last year. >> Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years, is that the role between developers and that, that finance piece. So, Ryan, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? is it Four Points? You know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at Reinvent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how, how does that communication and decision making happen? >> That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how Four Points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like Four Points instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider is that Four Points provides us a service where every quarter they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion, and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, "Hey, this is what we think" has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have, when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them, because they're the vendor >> From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give to your peers out there, and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things, either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations. >> So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration, that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like Four Points, and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that a third party entity that can come in and, call bowl and also call Yahtzee. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project. And it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is, we going to change how we do business project, and we going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. >> All right; and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about Four Points and congratulations again, the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. >> Great, thanks Stu, we're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud. And it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such, such payoff for the whole country. >> All right, Well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates, such an important project this year. Thanks so much. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks >> Stay with us for more covered from the AWS Public Sector Partner awards. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program". I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California doing the remote interviews, during this pandemic we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners and here to feature the most Innovative Connect Deployment. We have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations Joel Marchildon, Accenture Canada, managing director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada chief transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you and nice to be here >> So obviously, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing you got a business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. Its been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Teresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is starving and deserving of the award? >> Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that was stood up fairly quickly, over the course of about four days and really in support of benefit that the Government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, its a fully functioning featured contact center solution. Includes an IVR. And, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. >> Yeah, we're happy to actually, we were obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jobs are being lost, our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenge was quickly how do we actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada emergency response benefit that we had to support clients directly and so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a firestorm, to say, well, what could you do? And how could you help. And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, and Accenture won. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days, what for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody a real; a human being, as well as to be able to efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, was pretty fundamental for us. So the the people in the groups that we're talking through here we're speaking to millions of people, who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and of high quality personally as a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >> And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, its a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right. So like other things, you can kind of plan for things, hypothetical, you got scenarios. But this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. Its not like, well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think. This is real results, fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud, can I stand up something quick, and you did it with a partner, okay. This is like not, like normal. Its like, its like unheard of, right. Four days, with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here. Take us through through what happened. >> So I think I can start. As you can imagine the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly, for about two weeks. We had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody has seen before the level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine its a Warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs, there is no support, there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So, and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there. And there is straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed is unheard of on all fronts. When it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context, the clients that were desperate to reach us, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day. We're not talking a few thousand here, ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in overtaken by volumes, call centers, because we had our regular ones still operating. Over a million calls were coming in the day. With the capacity to answer 10s of thousands and so the reality is that the Call Centers that we put up here, very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same. That these types of solutions and technology and their scalability, their agility, their speed of deployment, is frankly something we want we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do them during normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us a while I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center, enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case we went from years, to literally days. >> Well, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? The waterfall meetings getting everyone arguing kind of gets in the way and the old software model, I want to come back to the transformation Benoit a minute, Because I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel, because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently, this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is, "We're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, a consulting firm, taking our times trying to get a pound of flesh from the client." This is an example of my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted, because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do sync up and execute take us through what happened on your side. >> Yeah, I mean, so its an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution out the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on, how we go through approvals, etc, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team and I think that we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to it. To help Canada in a time of need. So I think we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right, and we were down to hours and a lot of instances. So it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean to Benoit's point I think this is really going to hopefully change the way... It illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, etc. For solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things beat the market scalability, but just as the benefit itself has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is, its simple to use technologically. I mean, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents, by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think, from that perspective, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we know that we knew were going to come. >> Benoit this is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know its under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and then help people get on with their day. But transformation is about having people closest to the problem, execute. And also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. Amazon came in and said, "Hey, you want to stand something up?" You wired it together the solution quickly, you have close to it. Looking back now its almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before, as you said, and then you had to bring people in, who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook to share your thoughts on this because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time, and it actually is playing out in real time. >> Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that its a playbook. Its I would say its an ideal and dream playbook to bid like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly but also correctly, because you can't pull all these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly I think, as Canadians we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change, I was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some higher level of energy was thrown in quickly, mobilize everybody all at once. Nobody was said he is sitting around saying, I wonder if we have changed management covered off, this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best pay your plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous driving change, exception, acceptance, and adoption, is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward. And we now found the way and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning, we had 10 year plans for our big transformations, because some of our programs are the most important in the country in many ways. We support people about 8 million Canadians a month, depending on the benefits payments that we deliver. And they're the most marginal needing and requires our support from seniors, to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself, and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have its just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us a way that we had never forecast, and I have to say I had to throw up my 10 year plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 to nine to eight year plans going forward. And so its exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then, obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. >> What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable, but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have. And take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that's needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge. And this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC. Its, pass, shoot, score really fast. So this is the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary in solving problems? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we were able to show in what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens, that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly, is what's becoming more important, obviously, security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well. But its ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6, within four days, is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE, and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Acquia and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP. And I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway. If you're not going to do anything till you got the final end product out there, then its going to be late. So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >> Benoit, talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, on foundational things and then services. Its the cloud model. >> Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwartz, which I believe you are quite familiar with. And, I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the Government of Canada, right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting. And I'm sure its possible in some other places, and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon. I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile the building blocks sprints and MVPs. I mean, they're enough fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest Harriers and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective, service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult. Arduous you make change over years, not months, not days, for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working, its a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We know in working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. (all laughing) (indistinct) partners. We're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program and its going to be iterative, it is going to be designed built, it will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because the government is... We may have changed a lot, but the government is not necessarily caught on to most of these approaches. But the reality is that, that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization once they've tasted that. If you let them down, well, they'll remember and frankly, they do remember now because they want more of this. And its going to be hard. But its a better hard, better challenge, than the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, would it work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus, and then we drive everyone to that solution. >> Shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new wave, you're oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of this just look could feel its success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice synergy. This is a key! Joe, take us home here on the Accenture. The award winner, you guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a it was a complete team effort and continues to be. Its not a bunch of eccentric technologists in the background doing this. The commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve it from Benoit team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So its been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been well said, I think one thing that's done is its created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Benoit team. >> Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect Deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the Hockey-Reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. Its pass, shoot, score every time and its contagious. (Benoit laughs) Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the election. Take care! >> Thanks. >> Take care. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's Coverage "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards" show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Awards for their partners. Really interesting, we get to talk to people around the globe, we talked to the vendors, the award winners as well as their customers who have some interesting projects. So happy to welcome to the program coming to us from Argentina. I have Leo Bracco. He is the Latin American Executive Director for CloudHesive and joining him, his customer Carolina Tchintian. She is the Director of the Political Institution Program at CIPPEC. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, so Leo, first of all, let's start with you if we could. So CloudHesive first of all, congratulations, you were the Nonprofit Sector award winner for cybersecurity solutions. Of course, anybody that knows public sector, there's the government agencies, there's nonprofits there's education. The cybersecurity of course, went from the top priority to the top, top priority here in 2020. So if you could just give us a snapshot of CloudHesive for our customer. >> Well, CloudHesive is a US based company, started six years ago in 2014. And we decide a couple of years ago to move to Latin America and to start working with Latin America customers. Our offices are in Argentina right now. And one of the focus that we have in the solutions that we give to our customers is security. We work on services to help companies to reduce the cost, increase productivity, and what should the security posture? So we've been working a long time ago to many NPOs, and seeing how they can leverage the solutions and how they can give secure, how to be secure in the world. In the internet. >> All right, Carolina, if you could tell us a little bit about the CIPPEC and maybe then key us up as the project that you're working on. >> Okay, thank you. So CIPPEC is a nonprofit think tank, nonprofit organization, independent organization that aims to deliver better public policies in different areas. In economic development, in social protection and state and government. My particular program, the political institutions program goal is, or the mission is basically to promote evidence based decisions to improve democratic processes and to guarantee civil and political rights across all the countries. So we on issues such as improving election administrations, legislative work, representation, and that's our area of work. >> Wonderful. Sounds like a phenomenal project. Leo, if you could help us understand where did CloudHesive get involved in this project? Was there an existing relationship already, or was it for a specific rollout? that tell us about, obviously the security angles are a big piece? >> No, we didn't have a previous engagement with them. They come to us with a very short time to elections and they need a secure solution. So we first have to analyze the actual solution, how it works, acknowledging well the current infra that they have. Then we have to understand the challenge that they're facing. They have a very public site, they need to go public and they need to be very secure. And the last, we have to develop a fast migration strategy. We knew that AWS was the perfect fit for the need. So we just had to align a good strategy with the customer need. And all these it has been done in less than 72 hours. That was our deadline to elections. >> Wow, talk about fast. Okay, Carolina, help us understand a little bit. Had your organization, had you been using a Cloud before? Seventy-two hours is definitely an aggressive timeline. So help us understand a little bit as to what went into making your decision and obviously, 72 hours super short timeframe. >> Super, super short. Yeah, that was a big challenge. So let me tell you more about what we do and the context. So Argentina holds elections, national elections every two years. In each election year CIPPEC tries to generate and systematize analysis of provincial and national elections with the goal of informing key actors in the electoral processes. This is and decision makers, political parties, media, and general population. So as our first experience in 2017, with informed voter project, we had this collaboration with the National Electoral Authorities in which we created a landing page in our website where you could find as the voter, all of the information you need to go and cast your vote throughout the entire election process. Meaning from the campaign stage, election administration details, polling places, electoral offer, participation et cetera. So that was a landing page hosted in our website. And in 2017, we managed to have a button in every eligible voter in Argentina Facebook feed. So you could go click there and go to our website, right. And have all of the information summarize in a very simple way, straightforward way. So what happened in the 2017 election day is that the button was so successful that the landing page made our server to collapse in the first hours of the election day. So we learned a huge lesson there, which was that we had to be prepared in 2019, if we wanted to repeat this experience. And that is how we get to CloudHesive. >> Wonderful, Leo, if you could, help us understand a little bit architecturally what's going on there, what was CoHesive doing, what AWS services were leveraged? >> Perfect. Well we need great reliability, performance, scalability of course and the main thing security. We have no doubt about the Cloud and all the differentials of AWS. Our main question was about how do we align the right services to give the best solution to the customer? So we did kind of strategy with S3, CloudFront, and we, at the same time being monitorizing everything with CloudTrail and securing the public's access to all of these information. That give us a perfect fit for the solution, a very easy solution and very of course scalable, but more than anything, we could improve the customer experience in very small amount of time. So this is a very simple solution, that fits perfect for the customer. >> Wonderful. Carolina, if you could, tell us how did things go? What lessons have you learned? Anything along the way that you would give feedback to your peers or other organizations that were looking to do something similar? >> Yeah, well, the 2017 experience was a very tough experience for us because we've been preparing for election day during the 2016 and 2017. And the infrastructure was the limit we had in that point. So we couldn't afford ... We have a commitment with informing voters and informing key actors on election process. And these key actors are expecting that information on election day, before, and after. The lesson there is, we cannot be limited by the infrastructure. Assuming that in 2019, that the landing page would receive a similar amount or a huge amount of traffic volume visits on the election day, basically, we knew that traditional hosting service couldn't fulfill those needs so we had to go beyond traditional and the partner was critical to help us to the migration, to the Cloud. >> Yeah, Leo, maybe you could speak a little bit to that, the scalability, and of course, nonprofit's very sensitive to costs involved in these solutions. Help us understand that those underpinnings of leveraging, AWS specifically in CloudHesive. How this meets their needs and still is financially, makes sense. >> Perfect. When you have this kind of solutions, of course, your first concern is, okay, how do I make a scalable solution that fits on the, just on this moment that they need the behavior for so many infrastructure involved. And then at the other day, they need no infra at all, but you have another two big things that you have to focus on. One, is the security, you need to monitor all the behaviors of the content and pay attention to any external menace. You have one 24-hour day, so you need to be very responsibility and high sensitive information that the customer has on the set of data there. It's good to say that we have no security incidents, and no security breach during the most public stage of the operation, so that there was very good for us. The next thing is from the delivery perspective. You have a potential pick of people over the side to usually manage the content delivery network to answer all the requirements. You must be able to share the content in CloudFront, and so you have, and you can achieve your goals, right? And what I can say, it's about numbers, we achieve more than 99.5 efficiency hit rate you over the CDN, that's over CloudFront. And we kept server CPU such below 10% all the time. So this was a major success for us. Like we have no trouble, we use things at the most. And most of anything, the customer has the security, everything look from our perspective. (mumbles) >> Leo, what follow up if I could, if you look at 2020 being able to scale and respond to the changes in workload and be able to stay secure when bad actors, many people are working at home, but doesn't mean the bad actors aren't out there. We've actually seen an increase in security attacks. So just, do you have any commentary overall about what's happening more recently in what you see in your space? >> Yeah, well, we're very focused right now and while security is being each time bigger, right? One of the biggest menace in security is our own team, because we have to keep our teams auto align to the process and understanding the security as a first step doing things from the network perspective. Then we have a very good experience over this last two years, with all the security tools that AWS is seeking to the market. So we now have CloudTrail. We can do many things with WAF we're working towers of new good security solutions. And so I think this will be the future. We have to focus ourself in these two pillars. The first pillar is, okay, what we can do on our own network and the other pillar's, all the tools that AWS is giving us so we can manage security from a new perspective. >> Carolina, last question that I have for you is, look forward a little bit, if you will, are there things that you'll be looking to do in future election cycles or anything else from this project that you could expect going forward? >> Yeah, definitely. We're going to repeat this experience in 2021. Trying to think of the success was the 2019 election cycle. And in this particular informed voter project, we might want to keep doing this for the next election cycles, not only 2023 now, but for the future. >> All right then, Leo, last piece for you, first of all, congratulations, again, winning Best Cyber Security Solution for Nonprofit. Just talk a little bit if you would, about your partnership with AWS and specifically, the requirements and what you see in the nonprofit segment. >> Well, we see that the nonprofit are growing large too, they will need very good scalable solutions. We see that all the focus that we have in on security is the next need because we have been working on these towers to the future. The solutions kept growing each time. The networks are growing each time. And the traffic is growing. The focus on the security will be one of the appendix of our work in the future. And I think that's the biggest issue that we are going to have. Having good engineers, good hard work and manage the challenge and consolidate all the solution as a need. Right now, we're working on many projects with different NGO's and we're working towers that they have the solution that fits them. And of course, we try to keep, in all the public sector, we try to keep the cost at a range level that we can afford that our customers can afford. That's I think, a big problem that we're having. >> Well, Carolina, congratulations on the progress with your project. Thank you so much for joining us. And Leo, thank you again for joining us and congratulations to you and the CloudHesive team for winning the award. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage, theCUBE, at the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome to a special production of theCUBE. We're talking to the Amazon web services public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and we're digging in on education. It's one of the sectors, of course, public sector looks at nonprofits, it looks at the government sectors and the education, and of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program, we have two guests. First of all, representing the award winning-company, Mohammad Haque. He is the co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with eLumin. And joining is one of his customers, Damian Doyle, who is the associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, or UMBC, as it's known. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us here. >> All right, first of all, Mohammad, congratulations. As I said in my intro, such an important topic. I have two children that are dealing with remote learning. I have lots of friends that work in higher education and new in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS public sector award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition. And of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit, you know, you are the co=founder, so we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background, and tell us about what differentiates eLumin. >> Sure. eLumin, we provide managed products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology resources, course content, course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use whatever device they have wherever they are, and have access to those applications that are required for completing that course coursework. They can be in, at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop, on the side of a mountain in the middle East, wherever they may be, but leveling that playing field so that they can access and have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're, what our goal is, is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >> Fantastic. Damian, if we could turn to you, then. At UMBC, maybe if you could give our audience a thumbnail of the university, and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about e-learning, but maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre-COVID and what you were faced and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >> Sure. Be happy to. So we're, UMBC is a midsize public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate, and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the STEM disciplines. And so pre-COVID, very based in collaborative environments, active learning, but hands-on, so a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that, and we leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in, whether it's in engineering, biology, any of those kinds of programs. As you said, the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scattershot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're going to have access to and the abilities and connectivity they're going to have. So this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >> Excellent. Mohammad, were you working with UMBC before the current move to go remote? Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >> I believe actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damian and his team reached out to eLumin looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs, but with the change and not having access to those labs anymore, needed a remote learning solution, a remote access solution for being able to access those high compute, high graphics processing, memory-intensive applications through the cloud and taking into account the fact that students won't have the highest end computer laptop. They'll probably be working on a Chromebook or a lower-end machine, but need that compute power. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, schools were shutting down, essentially, physically shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. >> Yeah, Damian, I'd like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit the timeframes? How fast did you go from, oh my gosh, we need this, we need proposals, we need to roll this out, and we need to have students and teachers back up and running? >> Well, I think the one thing from our side, we had already known of eLumin and we had been looking at that pre-COVID. We knew we needed product that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they needed. So once we identified that, the thing that was amazing to me is we moved from our existing system over to production eLumin in, I think it was about two and a half weeks sort of start to finish, and to get all the images, to get all the technology running, tested, and everything up and running in two and a half weeks for a full solution for a campus is, was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw as going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time, rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >> Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could, Damian, a little bit help us understand how much were you using a cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that in the, I guess if we say post-COVID world, you will probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say? >> Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud-based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of a virtual computing solution in the cloud, but it wasn't that extensive, and a lot of our individual programs, chemical engineering, geography, and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of schedule times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Coming out of this, we fully expect if we're going an extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of COVID, they're not going to want to go back to that model where they're asking, they have to get permission and go in in limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now on. >> Yeah, this is, I mean, they've gotten a taste, essentially, and so they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >> Yeah, Mohammad, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there. Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great. If in the future, you still want to leverage this solution, but you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of a how AWS architecturally supports what you're doing, and just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment and however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that too. >> Right, I mean, so with AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed, but we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of student scheduling. So if we've got a course that we know that is running from >> 10: 00 AM to 11:00 AM, prior to that course starting, we'll scale the environment up so that it's available for those students if it's more of a in course lab session and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. Physical environment, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for student usage, off hours, overnight, take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running all the time. >> And this is one of the biggest differentiators. So many times in higher ed, we struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very different from corporations and other verticals. With the eLumin solution and the capabilities in AWS, we're really having this tailor to our students' schedules, to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us, but it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of pushback from the academic side, because it is really tailored to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing and acceptance standpoint. >> Yeah, Damian, I'm curious, once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educator side, as well as the student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use things. That sounds great, but do you have to change office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that? I'm just trying to understand the ripple effect of what you're doing. >> No, it's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we, with students, if there's a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively, they're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is reached out to all of our faculty that we're training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and tried to work with them to understand what this solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taken an approach of rather than sit everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab, they're moving some of this to more asynchronous so that the students can sort of work at their own pace and sort of rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking of this, but the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing we're always trying to do. >> Excellent. Mohammad, I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what's been happening. Obviously I'm sure you've been quite busy in responding to things. What's been the impact on your business? How has AWS been as a partner to be able to support the needs of what you're doing? >> Well, as you can imagine, things have just really blown up in terms of demand and being able to, again, through the power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment. As we spoke about earlier, this deployment was two and a half weeks from start to finish, being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been critical in moving things forward. >> Excellent. Damian, back to you on this. Obviously if you had had more time to be able to plan this out, there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give as you've moved through this rapid acceleration of the move to remote? >> Certainly, I think we would've certainly done some things differently, but we had been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of COVID, so for us, it wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish, and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you deploy and how you think through that. For us, we deployed one way because we could do it very quickly, and then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents, do you like this method, or do you like some of the other possibilities, and see which user experience they liked more, and then we're able to work with eLumin, and they've been able to be very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would've done that testing ahead of time, but that's a very minor thing. These are really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier, not fundamental differences in what we're providing. >> Yeah, Damian, one last question, if I could. Sorry, Mohammad. Just, I'm curious from the financial standpoint how much you felt that you understood what costs would be and some of the levers as to what you were using and the impact there. We've seen great maturation over the last handful of years as to transparency and understanding how cloud actually is built. But just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece of things, seeing that it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. >> It wasn't, that's very true, but we also knew that it was essential. So what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We'd move to this, we'd have to see what adoption was. But being able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammad and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize, we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect, but on the weekends, it was in the evenings. Nobody's logging on Saturday or Sunday morning, but boy, at eight p.m., there's a good bit of usage. So we could tailor and do some of that off-hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable, and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we had to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the, if you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it out. >> Excellent. And Mohammad, I want to let you kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously it's a technology space you've been in and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned, advice you would give to other companies, other universities and educational facilities out there. >> Right, and this is, again, speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of the, one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. As Damian was saying, we went back, kind of analyzed what we were seeing, and after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted based off of that, according to that, taking in feedback from faculty members on how they were using the system and tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly. You're not, you don't have to be committed to every single bit there, and being able to change it on the fly is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us, Damian, thank you for joining and moving forward, sharing your story, wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammad, big congratulations on winning. Super important category, especially here in 2020. Congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector. It's their partner awards program. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE program. We are here with the Amazon Web Services public sector, partner awards program. It's a celebration of AWS, public sectors, partners and their end user customers, where there's been innovation. And we're pleased to have on the show here, the award winner for the most innovative AI, and ML artificial intelligence and machine learning solution. Axial3D is the newest partner and the end user is Belfast hospital. We got Roger Johnson, the CEO of Axial3D, and Dr. Tim Brown consulted transplant surgeon, at Belfast hospital, who has been doing amazing things, not only on the as an innovative partner, but really during COVID, making things happen, by solving the problem of the surgical gap and the number of surgeries that you're doing. Really high performance saving lives, congratulations. First of all, congratulations Roger and Dr.Tim Brown, thanks for joining me. >> We're pleasure. >> Okay, let's get into it. First of all, Dr. Tim Brown, I really want to commend you on the amazing work, that you're doing. Before we get, into some of the partnership awards conversations. You have been at the front lines solving a lot of problems around the gap, between the number of surgeries, that could take place with COVID. Tell that story real quick. I really think it's super important. Take a minute to explain. >> Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And it's been an incredible roller coaster, for the last three months. And pretty much all of the transplant programs, across the world who have been affected, by COVID have shut down. But with some pretty innovative and real leadership and team working advances, we've managed to open a program up again and in Belfast, we have about 50 deceased donor transplants a year. Over the last three months, we've just done 90 kidney transplants and pretty much we've cleared, the whole waiting list in Northern Ireland pretty much, for people waiting for a kidney transplant in this time. And it's been a remarkable few weeks. But really is a testament to the critical care community, the people that work in intensive care, as to how much they support organ donation. And of course, our donors who have given so selflessly, at such a tragic time for them. So I'd like to pay tribute to all of our donors, and to the amazing amount of people, who have been involved in the teamwork and Belfast at this time. >> That's super amazing. Can you just I just want to pause for a minute just capture, the number of orders of magnitude, you said it was six to 10 a year and you did nine zero, 90? >> Yeah, so we have done two years work in six weeks, all in the middle of the night as well. So it's been it's been a hard work, so you can see the screen (mumbles). I'm trying to catch up with a minute. But it's been really, really satisfying, and an incredible outcome for our patients. The legacy of this program, is going to last at Belfast for 40 years. >> Brown I want to say congratulations, I'll give you my CUBE award for not changing the world, but saving the world, one person at a time. 90 interviews in six weeks. That's amazing. That's like clearing the waiting list. You're really changing lives there, congratulations. >> That's great, thank you very much. >> Roger, what a great partner and customer you have here. Talk about this award that you guys have, talk about the company. What is this all about? Why you guys in this position? Why are you winning? >> So I think our motivation for our company, is driven by our partners such as Tim, what they're doing transforms care, and even in these horrific situation are scenarios, we have the moment with COVID think you're hearing the start of an amazing story. Our job is to give surgeons like Tim, the best possible insight that he can have going into his surgeries. For the last 20 years, surgeons have relied largely on 2D imaging, so CT and MRI scans for being able to plan their surgeries, when in fact modern technology, should apply them much greater insight, before they actually perform their surgery. So we've created a technology, that platforms on AWS that allows us, to turn those traditional, hard to understand 2D images, into micromillimeter precise models of the patient's exact anatomy. The value hopefully to amazing colleagues like Tim, is that instead of trying to interpret what a 2D image CT or MRI scan might mean, he can actually see for the first time before, he opens the patient up exactly what he's going, to find when he starts the surgery, So he can really start planning, and complete that planning before, the surgery actually takes place. So hopefully, that allows a number of benefits result, whether that be shorter operations time, less surgical equipment needing to be brought, into the surgery, hopefully faster surgeries means less risk of infection, for patients means shorter time, means better outcomes the healthcare system but most importantly the patient. >> Awesome, Dr. Brown, I want to get your take on this. Can you describe the impact on your side because, you know, the future of work, which is everyone's been talking about, in the tech industry for many years. Now with COVID we were just talking about the successes, you're having and changing lives and saving lives. The notion of work workplace, workforces, work loads, work flows are all changing. Certainly the workplace people aren't as on site as they used to be. The workforce has to be protected. How does the AI and how does the Axial3D help you, in your workflows? Are you getting more done? Can you can you give specifics, around the impact to your job? >> Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey to date. And we're still learning our way. It's a journey. And we're trying to work out exactly where this lies. And the fact that COVID has not come along, which has changed our working practices means that, we have to look for different solutions. And this I think, is a very handy solution, to where it's come into my practice over the last three years has been, in terms of complex renal surgery and oncological surgery, where we have for example, a tumor in a kidney where we think my goodness, we're I have to take this kidney out and throw it in the bin because it's very badly diseased. So the index case that we were involved with, was involving a chap who wanted, to donate his kidney to his daughter. But when we worked him up, we find a tumor in his kidney, which ordinarily would have to be discarded. And but thanks to the imaging that Axial was able, to produce for us, we were able to plan well choose well cut well, and as a result, we took the kidney if we were able to plan, a removal of the tumor from the kidney itself, we were able to repair the kidney and then transplant into his daughter. So with the technology that was available, we were able to save two lives in one particular case. And it's really grown from there. And we've now been involved, in five or six different real complex cases, where the imaging has changed the outcomes for patients, who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to achieve them, as they comes, I think, the AI interface and the AI solution that we've, we've developed in our partnership with Axial. As I said, it's a journey, and we're still finding our way. But the two insights that I've really got are. The first is that what we want to do is reduce variability. And not just in our, in our observers from the way that we interpret imaging. Traditionally, as Roger said, we look at 2D images, we're now able to sit and look at this imaging in a three dimensional space on our desk. Rather than trying to reconstruct these things in our head. We can look at them and discuss the different images, with our colleagues in real time. As well as that, which I think is probably the most important thing, is that we're not able to engage our patients, in a partnership, before we've had a bit of an unfair advantage, that we're able to interpret these images. Because we've been trying to get 30 years of getting used, to doing this as professionals, and but the patients are presented, with some incredibly difficult decisions, to make by their own health. And with very little understanding, but my I can hand them a model of their own disease, they're able to understand. And that gives my patient the autonomy, to make the decisions about their own bodies back again, I think that's a hugely powerful, powerful tool for these guys to have, but potential decisions that they have, to make that will affect them for the rest of their lives. >> So the problem you were solving was one, of the technical problems, so you're trying to figure out manually get more insight, into the imaging and to the customer, or the patient in this case, customer the patient can make a better decision. Those are two problem statements. That seemed to be the big ones. Did I miss anything? >> Absolutely, no, he got one, yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, so Axial3D. You guys have a great solution. How did you get here? Tell us about your story. What's the big trajectory for you guys, in terms of this value proposition just seems to be amazing. And again highlights the advantages, how technology really solves a problem, but the outcome on the patient side is pretty phenomenal. >> So the chance for us is there, or the moment that we have made the leap we have made, is to be able to automatically turn these 2D images into 3D models. So we take each of the slices off of a MRI, or CT scan, using AWS machine learning, we construct 3D, micromillimeter precise representation of an anatomy. That's only possible, first of all, we train the algorithms that we created on the Amazon platform, using over a million pre labeled CT scans. So our system automatically detects a pixel level. What is bone, what is ligament, what is an artery or blood vessel? And with the training that we're able to perform, we've been able to with these million images, we've been able to, in effect train our system, to automatically detect the different parts of them, through this micro precise level, that hasn't been previously possible. And this technology, or the ability to create 3D models has existed for maybe 10, or 15 years. But it's needed experts like Tim to during effect, manually code, the 2D image at a pixel level and codify it so some software to turn that into 3D image, typically to either an RS of an expert like Tim to do, and the problem is Tim could only do one at a time. We estimate there are about three million, of these complex surgeries each year in the world, that need benefit greatly from this Enhanced Imaging. And we couldn't get three million months, he's selected that. So we have this process. Now on AWS platform, we have these models in parallel. And each model will take maybe a few minutes, to turn from the CT into the 3D representation. So through the power of the Amazon public cloud, we've been able to provide this powerful machine learning, automated solution that can actually scale, to the demand that we hope to see in the world. >> Dr. Tim Brown talked about the impact because I mean, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS always talks about this, when I interview him, he says, you know, we're here to help do the heavy lifting. This sounds like some pretty heavy lifting. What was just talked about? I mean, the manual work involved, you essentially have collective intelligence and supercomputer power with AWS. What's your take on this as this evolves? Why isn't everyone doing this? >> Yeah, well, I don't know why everyone is doing it. That's the key question it really is. From my perspective, there is no heavy lifting at all. And what I do is I push a couple of buttons, I input a bit of data and I send it off. And from my perspective, it is about as easy as it gets, it's probably as easy as sending an email, which we do hundreds of times a day. And so from my perspective, I'm delighted to say that there's no heavy lifting at all. I get a patient's data, I send the data through to Axial who will then fool me and say, listen, Tim, what is it exactly that you want? There's a great personal service from Axial, and a couple of days later, there's a delivery of a beautiful life size, 3D representation model, which I can then take to plan and treat a patient with. So the heavy lifting really has all been done. As Roger alluded to, in the past, it was hugely time consuming at work, that required a huge amount of training. But now basically, that's been replaced with pushing the button and these supercomputers taken all of my heavy lifting away. And I think this is one of the true representations, of high technology really, really advances, real world solutions. And my patients are the benefactors from this. >> Roger, Dr. Brown lay out the architecture, because first of all, pretend I want to take this every single friend, that I have here in California and around the world. I want to just deploy this what's the architecture and what's needed on the deployment side, say to Belfast as you deploy this, what's kind of involved, can you just take us through high level, I'm actually cloud scale is amazing. No doubt about it. We just talked about that but, what's involved in the architecture side, am I standing up on EC2 is there SageMaker involved me? What's the architecture and then deployment, What does that look like? >> Sure, so can you slide slight step back, one of the challenges when we as the med tech community try and introduce innovation into healthcare into hospitals, the hospitals IT infrastructure network definition, is often pretty locked down. So we're trying to bring new software and load it and install it into the hospital data system is a huge, often lengthy process that has, to jump through lots of hoops, in terms of a key network compliance, lots of different steps along the journey. And that often was for very good reasons, is a significant barrier, to the timely adoption of innovative technologies like ours. What platforming activity on AWS allies, were just another website. As Dr. Tim has said, his own though his only existence, with Axial3D in terms of interface, is dragging and dropping, the CT scan into our website, into our portal exists locally on the AWS instance, in whichever region we are working with, for example, in the US never leaves the US, we use the public cloud version. In US East, we take advantage of many features within AWS. But SageMaker is probably a core of what we do. It's not innovation that AWS introduced, you know, several years ago, that is the lightest to produce this, this machine learning trained set of algorithms, that allow us to give this disruption. >> And it sounds like the more you use it, the more get smarter is that as well. >> Absolutely, so our journey as Tim said, we're in a journey not only in terms of the technology, and you're very perceptive in terms of, yes, the more we train it, the more we train it, on specific anatomy types or pathology types or trauma types, the better our system gets, at recognizing the specific characteristics of those. But more importantly, this is about journey pipe. Having made this disruption we make the change and transformation of new standards of care pathways, Nazi innovation that we just enable. It's amazing surgical teams like Tim's, that make transformation. >> Dr. Brown now on your side you're sitting there I got a big problem trying to solve these problems. I got patients one but one better outcomes, they want to live. I don't want to throw away kidneys. I don't have to you just solve that problem. Now when they bring that over, what was it like over on your side of the house as a practitioner deploying it? You got two jobs going on. You're kind of doing IT integration on one hand and you're a surgeon on the other trying to make things happen. You know, what I see this is not a lot of it here. What's the deployment look like? >> Deployment to me is I don't know why ever as doing it, it's such a straightforward, easy situation. And it's, it's remarkable, really. It's such a good solution. I think, part of any sort of change management program, and this, again, is change management. It's challenging the way we think about things. That's challenging people's comfort zones. And anytime we need to change, we've got this anatomy of change. You've got innovators, we've got early adopters, we've got late adopters. And I think what we're going to see over the next five to 10 years is people recognizing that this technology, is a game changer, possibly being driven by their patients who say, I want a 3D model. And I want to see what this actually looks like. Because basically, that black and white picture you're showing me, doesn't make any sense to me. And I think there's going to be the two drivers is that the first is that we want to have consistency of care and the lack of variation in our care across all services. But as well as that the patience, I think, are going to drive this as well. So once once we get the innovators and the early adopters of this technology on board, then we'll see a tipping point. And that's, that's when it becomes an acceptable and normal thing for people, to do when they come into hospital. There'll be shown printout of their 3D printed model of their of their pathology, and that will be used to inform their decision making, for the treatment processes. And that's a true collaboration between doctor or surgeon and the patient. And that's, that's where we need to be in 21st century it's got to be a collaborative decision making process. And you talked about patient journeys, and, this is a really integral part. This is the roadmap of your journey to a large extent. So I think this I can see this, that's being rolled out worldwide, being driven by patients by correction and variability of health care provision. >> Its a great example, of an innovative award winner for the most innovative use of artificial intelligence and machine learning 3D images saving lives. Congratulations, Tim, Roger, it's phenomenal. Final question as we end this out. What's the scar tissue, pun intended? Well, what did you learn? What are some of the things that you could share with folks, as people look at this and say, this is an example of cloud scale and technology for good? What lessons have you learned? What can you share for folks, take a minute to explain each. But Roger, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, sure. So I think a number of lessons for us on this journey. As Tim says, this is a we're at the start of a journey, of understanding the power of what 3D imaging can bring to providing a consistent or less variable care, but also, as Tim also alluded to, in terms of the patient understanding, I think that patient understanding, is one of the huge leap forwards, that we didn't set out initially thinking, we're going to be able to help educate and better inform patients. But that was one of the derive benefits suddenly became apparent. So that was a great lesson. I think that incredible levels of adoption, that we're starting to see across the US across Europe. Because it's so easy to adopt, compared to traditional IT methods. Surgeons just register for a website, and they can start transacting and getting service from us, as opposed to having to have these huge IT programs. So I think we're now starting to really scratch the surface and start seeing the benefits of this isn't an administrative system. It's not the HR system. It's not a finance system, or maybe healthcare was comfortable in using public cloud. This is core hardcore clinical service, clinical diagnosis, clinical education, and the Amazon cloud is enabling that, just wouldn't be possible with this technology, (mumbles) the lessons we're learning are just (mumbles). >> Dr. Tim Brown and take us home and the segment, with your take, lessons learned and advice to others. >> I think the lesson learned are that doctors and healthcare providers are all extremely wary of change of new innovations. Because they feel that already, they're overburdened, and probably my colleagues in the States and across Europe feel like, we're a bit overburdened by all the things that we have to do. And this may potentially have been a more difficult or odds to your workload and actually fact, this makes your workload a lot easier and convincing people and getting people to understand that, this really does make your life a lot easier. It actually removes all the scar tissue it removes the difficulties that have been put in place by organizations. And once people realize that, that's what there is no heavy lifting. And this will make a huge difference to your practice and your patients understanding of your practice. And once that, once up, people really realize that, then the tipping point will be achieved. I'm looking forward to that date because this is going to be the new normal in the next five to 10 years. >> While the performance that you're putting up the numbers of 90 transplants successfully over six weeks, dwarfs the full year last year, really kind of shows the outcome is a game changer. And again, congratulations on your success. Roger, thank thank you for coming on. Congratulations on being the award winner, a diverse partner for the most innovative AI and machine learning solutions. Thanks for taking the time for part of this AWS partner awards program. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector partner awards, program put on by the CUBE and AWS public sector partners. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> All right, welcome back to "the Cube's" coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of COVID-19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of "the Cube" and we have here the award winners for the best EDU solution from NorthBay Solutions, Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and the University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton, PhD and Data Privacy Officer of University of Pittsburgh IT. Thanks for coming on gentlemen, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys had got the award for? And talk about how it all came about. >> Yeah, thank you for asking and it's been a pleasure working with Chad and the entire UPitt team. So as we entered this whole COVID situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual, that budgets were very tight, but nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. So we devised a solution which we called jam sessions, AWS jam sessions, and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things, but we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused two week engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad and UPitt team, it was around a data lake and they had been, and Chad will certainly speak to this in much more detail, but the whole notion here was how does a customer get started? How does, a customer prove the efficacy of AWS, prove that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form, in this case, a data lake solution and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint rep prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework, and ideally by the time we're done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work, learn by doing, if you will, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing, and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case would be the implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >> Chad, talk about the relationship with NorthBay Solutions. Obviously you're a customer, you guys are partnering on this, so it's kind of you're partnering, but also they're helping you. Talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >> Yeah, so I would say the challenge that I think a lot of people in my role are faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that I really don't want to invest any further in. So I know the cloud's in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So we had zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said "Because of our inexperience, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn." So what I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our skilling up. You know, what gaps do we have? And AWS has just so many different components that we also needed help just zeroing in on for our need, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to NorthBay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. We made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was of course, to meet our deliverables, but also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how it got started and then I think it was very successful engagement after that. >> Talk about the jam sessions, because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace with rapid innovation, now more than ever with virtual workforces at home, given the situation. You know, rapid agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session? What was the approach? Jim you laid a little bit about it out, but Chad, what's your take on the jam sessions? How does it all work? >> I mean, it was great, because of large teams that NorthBay brought and the variety of skills they brought, and then they just had a playbook that worked. They broke us up into different groups, from the people who'd be making the data pipeline, to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. So that part worked really well, and yes, this rapid iterative development. Like right now with our current kind of process and our current tool, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts, to our data scientists, because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer and I don't want to be giving that answer, so what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we select the right tools so that we can say, "We'll be two weeks from start to finish" and you'll be able to make those data available. So the engagement with NorthBay, the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that once you have the skills and you have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about for us. >> Jim, I'll get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud, when you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, They're pretty savvy, right? They know limitations, but when you get the cloud, it's like if a car versus a horse, right? Got to go from point A to point B, but again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together and what were the key learnings? >> Yeah, so John, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people on the U-PIT side that wanted to really learn and had a thirst for learning. And then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in an actual use case that we're trying to jointly implement. A couple of things that we've learned that are really important. One is although we have structure and we have a syllabi and we have sort of a pattern of execution, we can never lose sight of the fact that every customer is different. Every team member is different. And in fact, Chad, in this case had team members, some had more skills on AWS than others. So we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of used our general formula for the two weeks. Week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of AWS, the solution we're building and then week two is really meant to sort of mold the clay together and really take this solution that we're trying to execute around and tailor it to the customer so that we're addressing the specific needs, both from their team member perspective and the institution's perspective in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending the day with a recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge and then when we're addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done, so if there is anxiety, or folks feel like they're falling behind, we want to make sure we knew that, we wanted to address that quickly, either that evening, or the next morning, recalibrate and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that, and Chad and entire U-Pit team did a phenomenal job with this, was really preparation. So we have a set of preliminary set of activities that we work with our customers to sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And since we're doing this virtually, we don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical construct of organizing rooms and chairs and tables and all that. We're doing all that virtually. So Chad and the team were tremendous in getting all the preparatory work done Thinking about what's involved in a data lake, it's the data and security and access and things our team needed to work with their team and the prescription and the formula that we use is really three critical things. One is our team members have to be adept at educating on a virtual whiteboard, in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side development. That's the whole goal and we want team members to build trust and relationships side by side. And then thirdly, and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring, so that as Chad's team members were executing, we could guide them as we go. And really those three ingredients were really key. >> Chad, talk about the data lake and the outcome as you guys went through this. What was the results of the data Lake? How did it all turn out? >> Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we were looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one, prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema mart model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business, but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. So there was a second component of it that I said, I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools, so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say "Hey, by investing in this, here's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it." So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging AWS comprehend was key. And the idea here was there are, unfortunately, it's not as relevant today with COVID, but there are events happening all around campus and how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar. Well, with a price of natural language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major, so that we can then bubble these up to a student "Hey, do you know of all these thousands of events here are the 10 you might be most interested in." We can't do that right now, but using these tools, using the skills that that NorthBay helped us develop by working side by side will help us get there. >> A beautiful thing is with these jam sessions, once you get some success, you go for the next one. This sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this is really kind of what I like about the story is you guys did the jam session, first of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, as you guys looked at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project, right? You can get people together, you go to the cloud, get more agile, get the proof points, show it, double down on it, playbook, check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you? Any expectations that were met, or things that were new that came out of this? 'Cause this is something that is everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this, or deal with current COVID as it evolves? And then when I come out of it, I want to have a growth strategy, I want to have a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, it's a good question and I was a little concerned about it at first, because when we had first begun conversations with NorthBay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. Then of course COVID happened. Our campus is closed, nobody's permitted to be there and so we had to just pivot to a hundred percent virtual. I have to say, I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress. It didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that NorthBay had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it and Jim can certainly talk to that, But those morning stand-ups for each group that's working, the end of day report outs, right? Those were the things I was joining in on I wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication, the transparency that was provided was key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule they already had set up at North Bay, We didn't have any problems having it a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do virtual engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >> You know, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on this, 'cause I think this is a huge point that's not just represented here and illustrated with the example of the success of the EDU solution you guys got the award for, but in a way COVID exposes all the people that have been relying on waterfall based processes. You've got to be in a room and argue things out, or have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time and when you have a virtual space and an agile process, yeah you make some adjustments, but if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully virtually. >> Yeah, it's certainly, you know, the key is always preparation and our team did a phenomenal job at making sure that we could deliver equal to, or better than, virtual experience than we could an on-site experience, but John you're absolutely right. What it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're in a physical room together, but you can't take for granted virtually. Even interpersonal relationships and how those are built and the trust that's built. As much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did really phenomenal AWS work, foundationally it all comes down to trust and as Chad said, transparency. And it's often hard to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that and we spent time with Chad and other team members, understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and the experiential journey, a little bit about them personally. So I think the reality in the in the short and near term is that everything's going to be virtual. NorthBay delivers much of their large scale projects virtually now. We have a whole methodology around that and it's proven actually it's made us better at what we do quite frankly. >> Yeah it definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity in the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and this certainly has been around, the benefits of there, but still you have the mentality of "we have to do it ourselves", "not invented here", "It's a managed service", "It's security". There's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really looked for it. But the reality is is that there are benefits. For the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons with COVID and other reasons, What's your advice to them? Why cloud? What's the bet? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad, as people sitting there going "okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going" What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >> So I would say, and Jim knows this, we at Pitt have a big vision for data, a whole universe of data where just everything is made available and I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right? That's going to evolve over time, so if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver, or I'm going to invest too much money for the value I'm getting. By moving to the cloud, what that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. And then, of course, all the questions about, scalability and extensibility, right? We can just keep growing and if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just stop and we're no longer spending on that particular area and we can direct that money to a different component of the cloud. So just not being locked in to a huge expensive product is really key, I think. >> Jim, your thoughts on why cloud and why now? Obviously it's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayer sitting on the fence? >> Yeah, it's a really important question, John and I think Chad had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is agility. Whether that's agility with respect to if you're in a competitive market place, Agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment we all know we're in, particularly in the IT world. Agility from a cost perspective. So agility is a theme that comes through and through over and over and over again, and as Chad rightfully said, most companies and most organizations they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing, or what the demands are going to be on their services, so agility is really, is really key. And the second one is, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out before you can start and really our mantra in the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing. Pick a use case, pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be and just start the process. You'll learn as you go and not everything is the right fit for cloud. There were some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be be appropriate, but by and large, if you start by doing and in fact, through jam session, learn by doing, you'll start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to them, where they can leverage the best bang for the buck, if you will. And ultimately deliver on the value that IT is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, speed of cost reduction, speed of future rollout. You know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data, right? He and the team are sitting there trying to figure how to give it to them quickly. So speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days. >> Yeah and Chad also mentioned scale too, cause he's trying to scale up as key and again, getting the cloud muscles going for the teams and culture is critical because matching that incentives, I think the alignment is critical point. So congratulations gentlemen on a great award, best EDU solution. Chad, while I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts, but your industry expert PhD hat on, because one of the things we've been reporting on is in the EDU space, higher ed and other areas, with people having different education policies, the new reality is with virtualized students and faculty, alumni and community, the expectations and the data flows are different, right? So you had stuff that people used, systems, legacy systems, kind of as a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again, create that alignment of what can we do development wise, because I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure this kind of thinking going on around "Okay, as we go forward, how do we find out what classes to attend if they're not onsite?" This is another jam session. So I see more and more things happening, pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >> My take, so when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring break to be virtual for our students, like a lot of universities did. And you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that and you find all the weaknesses. And we had finished the engagement, I think, with NorthBay by that point, or were in it and seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, might end up the way I envisioned the future state, I can now point to these specific things and give specific examples about how we would have been able to more effectively respond when these new demands on data came up, when new data flows were being created very quickly and able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. So that was really key and this whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging and at Pitt we're really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and all the technology that's involved in that. And, you know, I've already got, I've had more unique data requests come to my desk since COVID than in the previous five years, you know? >> New patterns, new opportunities to write software and it's great to see you guys focused on that hierarchy of needs. I really appreciate it. I want to just share with you a funny story, not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in a higher ed university out here in California and it wasn't official business, was just more riffing on the future and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had like an abstraction layer that had leveraged Canvas, Zoom and Discord?" All the kids are on Discord if they're gamers. So you go "Okay, why discord? It's a hang space." People, it's connective tissue. "Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos?" You know, Canvas doesn't support certain things and Canvas is the software that most universities use, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on, but that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. Are you guys having that kind of feeling too? I mean, how do you see this new ideation, rapid prototype? I only think it's going to get faster and accelerated. >> As Chad said, his requests are we're multiplying, I'm sure and people aren't, you know, folks are not willing to wait. We're in a hurry up, 'hurry up, I want it now' mentality these days with both college attendees as well as those of us who are trying to deliver on that promise. And I think John, I think you're absolutely right and I think that whether it be the fail fast mantra, or whether it be can we make even make this work, right? Does it have legs? Is it is even viable? And is it even cost-effective? I can tell you that we do a lot of work in Ed tech, we do a lot of work in other industries as well And what the the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with as a result of COVID, is they've all had to try to innovate. So we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, today, yesterday, not six months from now. So I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that can be sustained, or tolerated any longer and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, "Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How can we go work together side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most robust, but we need it tomorrow." And that's really the spirit of the whole notion of jam session. >> And new expectations means new solutions. Chad, we'll give you the final word. Going forward, you're on this wave right now, you got new things coming at you you're getting that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >> I'm optimistic. It really is, it's an exciting time to be in this role, the progress we've made in the calendar year 2020, despite the challenges we've been faced with, with COVID and budget issues, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my belief that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >> Awesome! Best EDU solution award for AWS public sector. Congratulations to NorthBay Solutions. Jim Keller, president, and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights and again, the wave is here, new expectations, new solutions, clouds there, and you guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session, thanks. >> Thank you, John. Chad, pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. >> See you soon. >> This is "the Cube" coverage of AWS public sector partner awards. I'm John Furrier, host of "the Cube". Thanks for watching. (bright music)