>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Public sector summit online. That's the virtual conference. Public Sector Summit is the big get together for Teresa Carlson and her team and Amazon Web services from the public sector, which includes all the government agencies as well as education state governments here in United States and also abroad for other governments and countries. So we're gonna do an analysis of Teresa's keynote and also summarize the event as well. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. I'm joined with my co host of the Cube, Dave Volante Stew Minimum. We're gonna wrap this up and analyze the keynote summit a really awkward, weird situation going on with the Summit because of the virtual nature of it. This event really prides itself. Stew and Dave. We've all done this event. It's one of our favorites. It's a really good face to face environment, but this time is virtual. And so with the covert 19 that's the backdrop to all this. >>Yeah, so I mean, a couple of things, John. I think first of all, A Z, you've pointed out many times. The future has just been pulled forward. I think the second thing is with this whole work from home in this remote thing obviously was talking about how the cloud is a tailwind. But let's face it. I mean, everybody's business was affected in some way. I think the cloud ultimately gets a tail wind out of this, but but But I think the third thing is security. Public sector is always heavily focused on security, and the security model has really changed overnight to what we've been talking about for years that the moat that we've built the perimeter is no longer where organizations need to be spending money. It's really to secure remote locations. And that literally happened overnight. So things like a security cloud become much, much more important. And obviously endpoint security and other other things that we've talked about in the Cube now for last 100 days. >>Well, Steve, I want to get your thoughts cause you know, we all love space. Do we always want to go the best space events that they're gonna be virtual this year as well? Um, But the big news out of the keynote, which was really surprising to me, is Amazon's continued double down on their efforts around space, cyber security, public and within the public sector. And they're announcing here, and the big news is a new space business segment. So they announced an aerospace group to serve those customers because space to becoming a very important observation component to a lot of the stuff we've seen with ground station we've seen at reinvent public sector. These new kinds of services are coming out. It's the best, the cloud. It's the best of data, and it's the best of these new use cases. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, interesting. John, of course. You know, the federal government has put together Space Forces, the newest arm of the military. It's really even though something it is a punchline. There's even a Netflix show that I believe got the trademark board because they registered for it first. But we've seen Amazon pushing into space. Not only there technology being used. I had the pleasure of attending the Amazon re Marcia last year, which brought together Jeff Bezos's blue origin as well as Amazon AWS in that ecosystem. So AWS has had a number of services, like ground Station that that that are being used to help the cloud technology extend to what's happening base. So it makes a lot of sense for for the govcloud to extend to that type of environment aside you mentioned at this show. One of the things we love always is. You know, there's some great practitioner stories, and I think so many over the years that we've been doing this show and we still got some of them. Theresa had some really good guests in her keynote, talking about transformation and actually, one of the ones that she mentioned but didn't have in the keynote was one that I got to interview. I was the CTO for the state of West Virginia. If you talk about one of those government services that is getting, you know, heavy usage, it's unemployment. So they had to go from Oh my gosh, we normally had people in, you know, physical answering. The phone call centers to wait. I need to have a cloud based contact center. And they literally did that, you know, over the weekend, spun it up and pulled people from other organizations to just say, Hey, you're working from home You know you can't do your normal job Well, we can train your own, we can get it to you securely And that's the kind of thing that the cloud was really built for >>and this new aerospace division day this really highlights a lot of not just the the coolness of space, but on Earth. The benefits of there and one of Amazon's ethos is to do the heavy lifting, Andy Jassy told us on the Cube. You know, it could be more cost effective to use satellites and leverage more of that space perimeter to push down and look at observation. Cal Poly is doing some really interesting work around space. Amazon's worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Labs. They have a lot of partnerships in aerospace and space, and as it all comes together because this is now an augmentation and the cost benefits are there, this is going to create more agility because you don't have to do all that provisioning to get this going spawned. All kinds of new creativity, both an academic and commercial, your thoughts >>Well, you know, I remember the first cloud first came out people talked a lot about while I can do things that I was never able to do before, you know, The New York Times pdf example comes to mind, but but I think what a lot of people forget is you know the point to a while. A lot of these mission critical applications Oracle databases aren't moving to the cloud. But this example that you're giving and aerospace and ground station. It's all about being able to do new things that you weren't able to do before and deliver them as a service. And so, to me, it shows a great example of tam expansion, and it also shows things that you never could do before. It's not just taking traditional enterprise APs and sticking them in the cloud. Yeah, that happens. But is re imagining what you can do with computing with this massive distributed network. And you know, I O. T. Is clearly coming into into play here. I would consider this a kind of I o t like, you know, application. And so I think there are many, many more to come. But this is a great example of something that you could really never even conceive in enterprise Tech before >>you, Dave the line on that you talked about i o t talk a lot about edge computing. Well, if you talk about going into space, that's a new frontier of the edge that we need to talk about >>the world. Glad it's round. So technically no edge if you're in space so again not to get nuance here and nerdy. But okay, let's get into the event. I want to hold on the analysis of the keynote because I think this really society impact public service, public sector, things to talk about. But let's do a quick review of kind of what's happened. We'll get to the event. But let's just review the guests that we interviewed on the Cube because we have the cube virtual. We're here in our studios. You guys were in yours. We get the quarantine cruise. We're still doing our job to get the stories out there. We talked to Teresa Carlson, Shannon Kellogg, Ken Eisner, Sandy Carter, Dr Papa Casey Coleman from Salesforce, Dr Shell Gentleman from the Paragon Institute, which is doing the fairground islands of researcher on space and weather data. Um, Joshua Spence math you can use with the Alliance for Digital Innovation Around some of this new innovation, we leave the Children's National Research Institute. So a lot of great guests on the cube dot net Check it out, guys. I had trouble getting into the event that using this in Toronto platform and it was just so hard to navigate. They've been doing it before. Um, there's some key notes on there. I thought that was a disappointment for me. I couldn't get to some of the sessions I wanted to, um, but overall, I thought the content was strong. Um, the online platform just kind of wasn't there for me. What's your reaction? >>Well, I mean, it's like a Z. That's the state of the art today. And so it's essentially a webinar like platforms, and that's what everybody's saying. A lot of people are frustrated with it. I know I as a user. Activity clicks to find stuff, but it is what it is. But I think the industry is can do better. >>Yeah, and just to comment. I'll make on it, John. One of things I always love about the Amazon show. It's not just what AWS is doing, But, you know, you walk the hallways and you walk the actual So in the virtual world, I walk the expo floor and its okay, Here's a couple of presentations links in an email address if you want to follow up, I felt even the A previous AWS online at a little bit more there. And I'm sure Amazon's listening, talking to all their partners and building out more there cause that's definitely a huge opportunity to enable both networking as well. As you know, having the ecosystem be able to participate more fully in the event >>and full disclosure. We're building our own platform. We have the platforms. We care about this guys. I think that on these virtual events that the discovery is critical having the available to find the sessions, find the people so it feels more like an event. I think you know, we hope that these solutions can get better. We're gonna try and do our best. Um, so, um well, keep plugging away, guys. I want to get your thoughts. They have you been doing a lot of breaking analysis on this do and your interviews as well in the technology side around the impact of Covert 19 with Teresa Carlson and her keynote. Her number one message that I heard was Covad 19 Crisis has caused a imperative for all agencies to move faster, and Amazon is kind of I won't say put things to the side because they got their business at scale. Have really been honing in on having deliverables for crisis solutions. Solving the problems and getting out to Steve mentioned the call centers is one of the key interviews. This is that they're job. They have to do this cove. It impacts the public services of the public sector that she's that they service. So what's your reaction? Because we've been covering on the commercial side. What's your thoughts of Teresa and Amazon's story today? >>Yeah, well, she said, You know, the agencies started making cloud migrations that they're at record pace that they'd never seen before. Having said that, you know it's hard, but Amazon doesn't break out its its revenue in public sector. But in the data, I look at the breaking analysis CTR data. I mean, it definitely suggests a couple of things. Things one is I mean, everybody in the enterprise was affected in some way by Kobe is they said before, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a little bit of a pause and aws public sector business and then it's picking up again now, as we sort of exit this isolation economy. I think the second thing I would say is that AWS Public sector, based on the data that I see, is significantly outpacing the growth of AWS. Overall number one number two. It's also keeping pace with the growth of Microsoft Azure. Now we know that AWS, on balance is much bigger than Microsoft Azure and Infrastructures of Service. But we also know that Microsoft Azure is growing faster. That doesn't seem to be the case in public sector. It seems like the public sector business is is really right there from in terms of growth. So it really is a shining star inside of AWS. >>Still, speed is a startup game, and agility has been a dev ops ethos. You couldn't see more obvious example in public sector where speed is critical. What's your reaction to your interviews and your conversations and your observations? A keynote? >>Yeah, I mean something We've all been saying in the technology industry is Just imagine if this had happened under 15 years ago, where we would be So where in a couple of the interviews you mentioned, I've talked to some of the non profits and researchers working on covert 19. So the cloud really has been in the spotlight. Can I react? Bask scale. Can I share information fast while still maintaining the proper regulations that are needed in the security so that, you know, the cloud has been reacting fast when you talk about the financial resource is, it's really nice to see Amazon in some of these instances has been donating compute occasional resource is and the like, so that you know, critical universities that are looking at this when researchers get what they need and not have to worry about budgets, other agencies, if you talk about contact centers, are often they will get emergency funding where they have a way to be able to get that to scale, since they weren't necessarily planning for these expenses. So you know what we've been seeing is that Cloud really has had the stress test with everything that's been going on here, and it's reacting, so it's good to see that you know, the promise of cloud is meeting that scale for the most part, Amazon doing a really good job here and you know, their customers just, you know, feel The partnership with Amazon is what I've heard loud and clear. >>Well, Dave, one of these I want to get your reaction on because Amazon you can almost see what's going on with them. They don't want to do their own horn because they're the winners on the pandemic. They are doing financially well, their services. All the things that they do scale their their their position, too. Take advantage. Business wise of of the remote workers and the customers and agencies. They don't have the problems at scale that the customers have. So a lot of things going on here. These applications that have been in the i t world of public sector are old, outdated, antiquated, certainly summer modernize more than others. But clearly 80% of them need to be modernized. So when a pandemic hits like this, it becomes critical infrastructure. Because look at the look of the things unemployment checks, massive amount of filings going on. You got critical service from education remote workforces. >>these are >>all exposed. It's not just critical. Infrastructure is plumbing. It's The applications are critical. Legit problems need to be solved now. This is forcing an institutional mindset that's been there for years of, like, slow two. Gotta move fast. I mean, this is really your thoughts. >>Yeah. And well, well, with liquidity that the Fed put into the into the market, people had, You know, it's interesting when you look at, say, for instance, take a traditional infrastructure provider like an HP era Dell. Very clearly, their on Prem business deteriorated in the last 100 days. But you know HP Q and, well, HBO, you had some some supply chain problem. But Dell big uptick in this laptop business like Amazon doesn't have that problem. In fact, CEOs have told me I couldn't get a server into my data center was too much of a hassle to get too much time. It didn't have the people. So I just spun up instances on AWS at the same time. You know, Amazon's VD I business who has workspaces business, you know, no doubt, you know, saw an uptick from this. So it's got that broad portfolio, and I think you know, people ask. Okay, what remains permanent? Uh, and I just don't see this This productivity boom that we're now finally getting from work from home pivoting back Teoh, go into the office and it calls into question Stu, when If nobody is in the corporate office, you know the VP ends, you know, the Internet becomes the new private network. >>It's to start ups moving fast. The change has been in the past two months has been, like, two years. Huge challenges. >>Yeah, John, it's an interesting point. So, you know, when cloud first started, it was about developers. It was about smaller companies that the ones that were born in the cloud on The real opportunity we've been seeing in the last few months is, you know, large organizations. You talk about public sector, there's non profits. There's government agencies. They're not the ones that you necessarily think of as moving fast. A David just pointing out Also, many of these changes that we're putting into place are going to be with us for a while. So not only remote work, but you talk about telehealth and telemedicine. These type of things, you know, have been on our doorstep for many years, but this has been a forcing function toe. Have it be there. And while we will likely go back to kind of a hybrid world, I think we have accelerated what's going on. So you know, there is the silver lining in what's going on because, you know, Number one, we're not through this pandemic. And number two, you know, there's nothing saying that we might have another pandemic in the future. So if the technology can enable us to be more flexible, more distributed a xai I've heard online. People talk a lot. It's no longer work from home but really work from anywhere. So that's a promise we've had for a long time. And in every technology and vertical. There's a little bit of a reimagining on cloud, absolutely an enabler for thinking differently. >>John, I wonder if I could comment on that and maybe ask you a question. That's okay. I know your host. You don't mind. So, first of all, I think if you think about a framework for coming back, it's too said, You know, we're still not out of this thing yet, but if you look at three things how digital is an organization. How what's the feasibility of them actually doing physical distancing? And how essential is that business from a digital standpoint you have cloud. How digital are you? The government obviously, is a critical business. And so I think, you know, AWS, public Sector and other firms like that are in pretty good shape. And then there's just a lot of businesses that aren't essential that aren't digital, and those are gonna really, you know, see a deterioration. But you've been you've been interviewing a lot of people, John, in this event you've been watching for years. What's your take on AWS Public sector? >>Well, I'll give an answer that also wants to do away because he and I both talk to some of the guests and interview them. Had some conversations in the community is prep. But my take away looking at Amazon over the past, say, five or six years, um, a massive acceleration we saw coming in that match the commercial market on the enterprise side. So this almost blending of it's not just public sector anymore. It looks a lot like commercial cause, the the needs and the services and the APS have to be more agile. So you saw the same kind of questions in the same kind of crazy. It wasn't just a separate division or a separate industry sector. It has the same patterns as commercial. But I think to me my big takeaways, that Theresa Carlson hit this early on with Amazon, and that is they can do a lot of the heavy lifting things like fed ramp, which can cost a $1,000,000 for a company to go through. You going with Amazon? You onboard them? You're instantly. There's a fast track for you. It's less expensive, significantly less expensive. And next thing you know, you're selling to the government. If you're a start up or commercial business, that's a gold mine. I'm going with Amazon every time. Um, and the >>other >>thing is, is that the government has shifted. So now you have Covad 19 impact. That puts a huge premium on people who are already been setting up for digital transformation and or have been doing it. So those agencies and those stakeholders will be doing very, very well. And you know that Congress has got trillions of dollars day. We've covered this on the Cube. How much of that coverage is actually going for modernization of I T systems? Nothing. And, you know, one of things. Amazon saying. And rightfully so. Shannon Kellogg was pointing out. Congress needs to put some money aside for their own agencies because the citizens us, the taxpayers, we got to get the services. You got veterans, you've got unemployment. You've got these critical services that need to be turned on quicker. There's no money for that. So huge blind spot on the whole recovery bill. And then finally, I think that there's a huge entrepreneurial thinking that's going to be a public private partnership. Cal Poly, Other NASA JPL You're starting to see new applications, and this came out of my interviews on some of the ones I talked to. They're thinking differently, the doing things that have never been done before. And they're doing it in a clever, innovative way, and they're reinventing and delivering new things that are better. So everything's about okay. Modernize the old and make it better, and then think about something new and completely different and make it game changing. So to me, those were dynamics that are going on than seeing emerge, and it's coming out of the interviews. Loud and clear. Oh, my God, I never would have thought about that. You can only do that with Cloud Computing. A super computer in the Cloud Analytics at scale, Ocean Data from sale Drone using satellite over the top observation data. Oh, my God. Brilliant. Never possible before. So these are the new things that put the old guard in the Beltway bandits that check because they can't make up the old excuses. So I think Amazon and Microsoft, more than anyone else, can drive change fast. So whoever gets there first, well, we'll take most of the shares. So it's a huge shift and it's happening very fast more than ever before this year with Covert 19 and again, that's the the analysis. And Amazon is just trying to like, Okay, don't talk about us is we don't want to like we're over overtaking the world because outside and then look opportunistic. But the reality is we have the best solution. So >>what? They complain they don't want to be perceived as ambulance station. But to your point, the new work loads and new applications and the traditional enterprise folks they want to pay the cow path is really what they want to dio. And we're just now seeing a whole new set of applications and workloads emerging. What about the team you guys have been interviewing? A lot of people we've interviewed tons of people at AWS reinvent over the years. We know about Andy Jassy at all. You know, his his lieutenants, about the team in public sector. How do they compare, you know, relative to what we know about AWS and maybe even some of the competition. Where do you Where do you grade them? >>I give Amazon and, um, much stronger grade than Microsoft. Microsoft still has an old DNA. Um, you got something to tell them is bring some fresh brand there. I see the Jedi competition a lot of mud slinging there, and I think Microsoft clearly got in fear solution. So the whole stall tactic has worked, and we pointed out two years ago the number one goal of Jet I was for Amazon not to win. And Microsoft looks like they're gonna catch up, and we'll probably get that contract. And I don't think you're probably gonna win that out, right? I don't think Amazon is gonna win that back. We'll see. But still doesn't matter. Is gonna go multi cloud anyway. Um, Teresa Carlson has always had the right vision. The team is exceptional. Um, they're superb experience and their ecosystem partners Air second and NASA GPL Cal Poly. The list goes on and on, and they're attracting new talent. So you look at the benchmark new talent and unlimited capability again, they're providing the kinds of services. So if we wanted to sell the Cube virtual platform Dave, say the government to do do events, we did get fed ramp. We get all this approval process because Amazon customer, you can just skate right in and move up faster versus the slog of these certifications that everyone knows in every venture capitalists are. Investor knows it takes a lot of time. So to me, the team is awesome. I think that the best in the industry and they've got to balance the policy. I think that's gonna be a real big challenge. And it's complex with Amazon, you know, they own the post. You got the political climate and they're winning, right? They're doing well. And so they have an incentive to to be in there and shape policy. And I think the digital natives we are here. And I think it's a silent revolution going on where the young generation is like, Look at government served me better. And how can I get involved? So I think you're going to see new APS coming. We're gonna see a really, you know, integration of new blood coming into the public sector, young talent and new applications that might take >>you mentioned the political climate, of course. Pre Cove. It'll you heard this? All that we call it the Tech lash, right, The backlash into big tech. You wonder if that is going to now subside somewhat, but still is the point You're making it. Where would we be without without technology generally and big tech stepping up? Of course, now that you know who knows, right, Biden looks like he's, you know, in the catbird seat. But there's a lot of time left talking about Liz more on being the Treasury secretary. You know what she'll do? The big tech, but But nonetheless I think I think really it is time to look at big tech and look at the Tech for good, and you give them some points for that. Still, what do you think? >>Yeah, first of all, Dave, you know, in general, it felt like that tech lash has gone down a little bit when I look online. Facebook, of course, is still front and center about what they're doing and how they're reacting to the current state of what's happening around the country. Amazon, on the other hand, you know, a done mentioned, you know, they're absolutely winning in this, but there hasn't been, you know, too much push back if you talk culturally. There's a big difference between Amazon and AWS. There are some concerns around what Amazon is doing in their distribution facilities and the like. And, you know, there's been lots of spotlights set on that, um, but overall, there are questions. Should AWS and Amazon that they split. There's an interesting debate on that, Dave, you and I have had many conversations about that over the past couple of years, and it feels like it is coming more to a head on. And if it happens from a regulation standpoint, or would Amazon do it for business reason because, you know, one of Microsoft and Google's biggest attacks are, well, you don't want to put your infrastructure on AWS because Amazon, the parent company, is going to go after your business. I do want to pull in just one thread that John you and Dave were both talking about while today you know, Amazon's doing a good job of not trying todo ambulance case. What is different today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It used to be that I t would do something and they didn't want to talk to their peers because that was their differentiation. But Amazon has done a good job of explaining that you don't want to have that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So now when an agency or a company find something that they really like from Amazon talking all their peers about it because they're like, Oh, you're using this Have you tried plugging in this other service or use this other piece of the ecosystem? So there is that flywheel effect from the cloud from customers. And of course, we've talked a lot about the flywheel of data, and one of the big takeaways from this show has been the ability for cloud to help unlock and get beyond those information silos for things like over 19 and beyond. >>Hey, John, if the government makes a ws spin out or Amazon spin out AWS, does that mean Microsoft and Google have to spin out their cloud businesses to? And, uh, you think that you think the Chinese government make Alibaba spin out its cloud business? >>Well, you know the thing about the Chinese and Facebook, I compare them together because this is where the tech lash problem comes in. The Chinese stolen local property, United States. That's well documented use as competitive advantage. Facebook stole all the notional property out of the humans in the world and broke democracy, Right? So the difference between those bad tech actors, um, is an Amazon and others is 11 enabling technology and one isn't Facebook really doesn't really enable anything. If you think about it, enables hate. It enables some friends to talk some emotional reactions, but the real societal benefit of historically if you look at society, things that we're enabling do well in free free societies. Closed systems don't work. So you got the country of China who's orchestrating all their actors to be state driven, have a competitive advantage that's subsidised. United States will never do that. I think it's a shame to break up any of the tech companies. So I'm against the tech lash breakup. I think we should get behind our American companies and do it in an open, transparent way. Think Amazon's clearly doing that? I think that's why Amazon's quiet is because they're not taking advantage of the system that do things faster and cheaper gets that's there. Ethos thinks benefits the consumer with If you think about it that way, and some will debate that, but in general Amazon's and enabling technology with cloud. So the benefits of the cloud for them to enable our far greater than the people taking advantage of it. So if I'm on agency trying to deliver unemployment checks, I'm benefiting the citizens at scale. Amazon takes a small portion of that fee, so when you have enabling technologies, that's how to me, The right capitalism model works Silicon Valley In the tech companies, they don't think this way. They think for profit, go big or go home and this has been an institutional thing with tech companies. They would have a policy team, and that's all they did. They didn't really do anything t impact society because it wasn't that big. Now, with networked economies, you're looking at something completely different to connected system. You can't handle dissidents differently is it's complex? The point is, the diverse team Facebook and Amazon is one's an enabling technology. AWS Facebook is just a walled garden portal. So you know, I mean, some tech is good, some text bad, and a lot of people just don't know the difference what we do. I would say that Amazon is not evil Amazon Web services particular because they enable people to do things. And I think the benefits far outweigh the criticisms. So >>anybody use AWS. Anybody can go in there and swipe the credit card and spin up compute storage AI database so they could sell the problems. >>The problems, whether it's covert problems on solving the unemployment checks going out, are serving veterans or getting people getting delivering services. Some entrepreneurs develop an app for that, right? So you know there's benefits, right? So this you know, there's not not Amazon saying Do it this way. They're saying, Here's this resource, do something creative and build something solve a problem. And that was the key message of the keynote. >>People get concerned about absolute power, you know, it's understandable. But if you know you start abusing absolute power, really, I've always believed the government should come in, >>but >>you know, the evidence of that is is pretty few and far between, so we'll see how this thing plays out. I mean, it's a very interesting dynamic. I point about why should. I don't understand why AWS, you know, gets all the microscopic discussion. But I've never heard anybody say that Microsoft should spend on Azure. I've never heard that. >>Well, the big secret is Azure is actually one of Amazon's biggest customers. That's another breaking analysis look into that we'll keep on making noted that Dave's do Thanks for coming to do great interviews. Love your conversations. Final words to I'll give you What's the big thing you took away from your conversations with your guests for this cube? Virtual coverage of public sector virtual summit >>so biggest take away from the users is being able to react to, you know, just ridiculously fast. You know it. Talk about something where you know I get a quote on Thursday on Friday and make a decision, and on Monday, on up and running this unparalleled that I wouldn't be able to do before. And if you talk about the response things like over nine, I mean enabling technology to be able to cut across organizations across countries and across domains. John, as you pointed out, that public private dynamic helping to make sure that you can react and get things done >>Awesome. We'll leave it there. Stew. Dave. Thanks for spending time to analyze the keynote. Also summarize the event. This is a does public sector virtual summit online Couldn't be face to face. Of course. We bring the Cube virtual coverage as well as content and our platform for people to consume. Go the cube dot net check it out and keep engaging. Hit us up on Twitter if any questions hit us up. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah