>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're winding down. Day two, a forward five UI Path customer conference. This is the fourth time the Cube has been at a forward. Dave Nicholson, Dave Ante. Maureen Fleming is here. This is a program Vice President idc. She's got the data fresh survey data. We'd love to have the analyst on. And Kevin CRO is back on the cube. He's a partner for intelligent automation and digital. Upscaling is the operative word. Kevin, good to see you again, pwc. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on you guys. Yep. All right. We, we love idc. We love the data. You guys are all about it. So you've just completed a recent study. Tell us all about it. Who'd you survey? What was the objective? What'd you learn? >>Yeah, what we wanted to do was try to learn more about people who are adopting robotic process automation. So mainly large, you know, larger to midsize, enter midsize, large enterprises. And we wanted to figure out how many of them had a citizen developer program. And then we wanted to compare the difference between people who do not have that program and people who do, and what the difference is in terms of how, what kind of reach they have inside the enterprise, and also the different ways that, that they valued it. So the difference, so we asked the same questions of the, of these people without them knowing that we were actually looking for a citizen developer. And then we compared the results of that to see is it more valuable to have citizen developer and enterprise, or is it more valuable to have enterprise only? So what was the impact >>Global survey? >>It was North America. >>North America. Was it, was it we any kind of slice and dice in terms of industry or targets or you, >>We, we kept it across industry, cross industry. We're finding that RPA is adopting cross >>Industry way. Was it, was it UI path specific or more Any tech, Any automation, >>Any rpa. >>Okay. And top two or three findings. >>So one thing was, first off, the rapid growth rate in citizen, citizen developer programs grew 47% over a two year period. And so now for people who've adopted rpa, it's the majority there. They're, you know, it's a pervasive trend to >>See you're taking over, >>You know, right now the conclusion from that, and some other studies that I did that have similar conclusions is that we have to start learning to live with this idea that business users can learn how to develop. They are developing their driving value. And so now we just need to figure out how to build these sorts of programs accurately. And the other, the really key finding of it was that, that there was much more significant reach for people that were doing citizen developer plus enterprise automation, more reach, more processes touched, more employees impacted by it. And then on top of it, the, they rated the value, the people who had the combination rated the programs at a higher value across different measures. So effectively the, the combination is working out better than standalone top down automation. >>So Kevin, from what, what's your takeaway here? What does this mean to you and your customers? >>So I guess a, a couple things and just anecdotally, you know, building on what Marine found in the, in the survey, the concept of citizen development is a real concept and it's something that organizations are applying and trying to figure out how to apply at scale. The reason why they're doing it is twofold. One, early automation efforts struggled to get scale and they struggled to deliver value from a scale perspective. There were two major problems. The ability to identify the right opportunities and the ability to tackle a wide range of, from the little to the very large, often teams focus on the very large, but don't focus on the little, the little is important. The second part is thinking about how you create a better culture of innovation and actually drive identifying opportunities for the, the more, I'll call it technology professionals to focus on. And so, you know, there's been, you know, based on that big drive to say, okay, not how do we replace automation professionals with business users, you know, the random accountant, the random operations analyst. It's more around how do you actually engage them in innovation. And that in, in that engagement may involve actual hands on building of bots and technologies like UiPath or it might just involve generating ideas to get further engaged. >>So 47% growth. What's the catalyst for that kind of growth? Where's that come from? >>I scarcity? So, well there are a couple things. One is, you know, we all know about developer scarcity and it's strive to automate. You know, if you have an automation strategy in place, you wanna do this quickly and aggressively. But if you've got a shortage of, of people, you know, developers don't have enough, they're turning over. Then you go to, you go and figure out, well this is low code. And so why can't we train our business users who are the subject matter experts to do automation for themselves or their teams? So sort of think about this as the long tail, the things that that top down like enterprise, I think UiPath is calling it enterprise automation versus people automation. So, you know, so there's just different things that they work on as well. And there's also, you know, fearlessness on the part of a lot of people on the business side, they're not afraid of technology, they're not afraid of getting trained. >>And the other piece to me that made, like, I've covered this topic for a long time, and what I found originally when people started talking about citizen developers is that they, they were calling me and having inquiry about why these programs were failing. And when we would decompose the failure was because the ma their managers didn't give them any, they didn't put 'em in trading but wouldn't get, give 'em time to develop. And so they just could not, you know, they just were running into problems. And so with things that, things like PWC and what they're doing, they're sort of saying, here's the, here are the features of a program that matter, including being given time to develop and do that as part of your job. So >>Maureen, is there a minimum level size of organization that you find taking advantage of this? I mean, you know, where's the sweet spot for the value delivered from this kind of automation? >>Do you have an idea? Right. So we, we tended in some of the surveys, we tended to do like thousand employees up. So we were screening for that. But I also met with the, our, our analysts who covered smb, small midsize. She said that they've had that for a long time because they don't have these clear distinctions between IT and business. So then the question is, who are adopters of rpa, for example? And you know that that's still a little bit at, at, you know, the enterprise level, but, but citizen developer at it, it, it is SB is just a given concept. So, >>But is it, is there, is there an economy of scale that kicks in at a certain point? Have we been able to figure that out? I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of business process automation being such a competitive advantage that there becomes almost a divide because of smaller organization. Yes, they could go out and they can buy, they have access to the same software packages, but you have to build all of those processes. Yes. You have to develop those processes over time. So is there any sense for a divide possibly happening or what the, >>It's a really good question because they, you know, in a way people have to understand what a business process is, you know, and they need to understand what the technology can do. And so from that perspective, people who have thought leaders inside their organization and maybe have a chance to get out and look at broader topics might be more inclined to try this out and also identify directly as a problem. SMB also tends to try to buy package solutions. And you see larger enterprises say, well, you know, what we do is unique and so we should just sort of use horizontal technology and apply it at will where it's needed. And so for me that's kind of why we organize toward higher, you know, higher si, larger sizes. As it gets simplified, it's gonna go down into the SMB market though. >>So Kevin, when it comes to you guys, your client engagements, upscaling keeps, keep coming back to that word low code. Is it fundamental component of upscaling? Is it, is it, I don't say synonymous, but is it a prerequisite to have low code capabilities to scale? >>You know, from our perspective, I think the two biggest challenges with making this work, one is learning and development. How do you actually teach the skills in a way that allows people to apply them very quickly and give them the time to actually function right to the finding about managers not necessarily being supportive. And so you have to figure out, you know, what, you know, how do you actually create that right environment and give people the right tools? It's an area that we invested really heavily in from the PWC side with the, with the launch of our pro edge platform and really thinking about how to solve that. But then the problem that you're ultimately getting at once you solve the people equation is how do you get scale and how do you move quicker? And so the, you know, the, the, the, the biggest challenge is not should you let a, a business user build a bot. It's, you know, how do we actually build many bots, generate many ideas for the professional developers and actually create an ecosystem to move faster. Every client that we work with, it's all about, you know, how we're not moving fast enough. A COE cannot, you know, by itself automate an entire organization. And so, you know, the, you know, the, the this theme of scale really becomes, you know, the critical aspect of this >>Is the former other words, the the teaching and individual how to build a bot. Is that trivial or, or is that really not the big gate is what you're saying? It's, >>We don't think it's a big gate. I think the, you know, to the original question, I think the, the, the low code space is a ripe spot for this, you know, upskilling construct because you're not, you're not, you're, you're gauging with employees who don't have an undergraduate degree in computer science who are not IT professionals. And so giving someone, you know, a book on job and saying, go build an application's, probably not gonna be very productive. But with, with tools in the, in the low code space, be it RPA or be it other forms of lower code technology, you get people opportunity where they need to learn some technical concepts. You need to understand how the technology works and how basic programming techniques work, but you don't need to understand everything. And again, going back to the, the simple versus the complex, the goal here is not to turn people into professional developers. The goal is to get them engaged and, and create, you know, make them part of that company's digital transformation. >>But from what you just described, that's, to me it's basic logic skills. I mean you don't have to be, like I say, a assembly language programmer. Yeah. But you gotta understand and you gotta know the business process, right? I mean you have to be a domain expert. Yeah. >>But that, but that's the, that's the biggest advantage of this. You're engaging the people closest to the business process, right? You look at how most big IT projects failed was the same reason a lot of early automation efforts failed. You're creating, you know, a function that essentially lives in an ivory tower that's focused on, you know, where can I go out and find opportunities and automate. But you're not, those aren't the people that run the process day to day. Yeah, okay. You, you put it, you make those people that run the process day to day accountable, you're gonna get a different outcome >>And they'll lean in and get excited. Exactly. >>So where, where, where is that transition? I know it's easy to say, oh, you know, it's logic and people can do it, but what about having a bot whisperer in your, in your organization who's who, who literally says, you know, Maureen, I'm gonna come and sit with you on Friday and you're going to explain your frustrations to me and I'm gonna sit right next to you and I'm gonna code this bot for you and we're gonna test it and you're gonna tell me if it does what you want it to do. And Maureen doesn't need to understand how to move the widgets around and do anything. >>It's, you know, it's a great question cuz I think it's changing the nature of how you accelerate these efforts, right? I think you know, the, and if I go into early RPA days, the initial kind of thought process was let's just get a factory in here and build as many bots as possible. A lot of our client engagement today isn't always around our bot development services. It's around can you bring in coaches? Can you hold office hours? Exactly. We have an office hour construct, which I've never really had in my consulting career where we put, you know, I mean this obviously post covid when when people are in their offices, we put someone in a room and people can come by and get help. And I think having that, that coaching and mentoring construct is very helpful. What we've also seen, and I think it's a really critical success factor for clients to make this work, is thinking about how they pick a subset of their population and making them, you know, digital accelerators, digital champions, pick your word, not it professionals, peers who will actually get realtime dedicated. Right. And maybe a full time or a halftime job where that's exactly what they do. >>Maureen, we're out of time, but my last question for you is, when you do a survey like this, you know you have open ended sometimes and you analyze a survey, you take a bath in the data, write it up. There's always something that you wish you'd asked, which is great cuz then you could do it on the next one. What, was there anything in there that you wish you'd asked that you're gonna ask in the next one? Are you gonna explore in the next survey? >>Yeah. One of the things that I asked, one thing that I was glad I asked was, I, I, we, we spent time finding what were considered business side product champions or RPA champions and then we ask 'em what they did, how often they did, how much time they spent. But what I want, what I really, really wanna ask of my next survey, and I will, I've got a planned, is to find out how, how what percentage of population is involved with, with big a citizen developer and what activities are common and what are less common and you know, what their challenges are. So we'll be looking at a different kind of audience with this next >>Survey. Well, we'd love to have you back to talk about that. Just invite, Thank you very much. Come queue. Really appreciate it Kevin. Good to see you again. >>Good to see you. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're here wrapping up day two of UI path forward. Five live from the Venetian, all Las Vegas. Super right back.

(bright music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021, we're in person for a real event. I'm John Furrier, your host. We have two sets here on the floor, also a hybrid event online as well for Amazon, also on theCUBE Zone, go to cubereinvent.com and check out all theCUBE footage there. Maureen Lonergan, VP of Training and Certification AWS CUBE alumni, Maureen, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Nice to see you. >> So I remember, years ago, at re:Invent when you came on first time on theCUBE, this was when cloud was just getting going, I don't want to say just getting going, it was going, but it was just like training was going, now you're swimming in needs. You got the big milestone for, what's that? 27 million people, what's that number? >> 29 million training free, yeah. >> 29 million is the target for training, we hear the certifications are up, the pandemic has got everyone geared up for training. Give us the update, what's happening? >> Yeah, so we're doing a lot of interesting things. Obviously, the pandemic changed the world for everyone, but it's been a really good opportunity for us to pivot the business and move things to virtual and digital. And, in 2020, we did make that commitment to train 29 million people for free by 2025. And, you know, we've trained 6 million so far, so we're making great progress on that goal. We've largely done that through a couple of different programs. So we just a month ago launched our Skill Builder platform that provides 500 free training courses in 16 languages, across 200 countries. We also launched the AWS Skill Center in Seattle, which is learner acquisition and bringing in people from the community to learn about cloud. And, we also launched a course on Amazon Books. So, we were really excited about-- >> So you guys, again, this is free training. >> All free training. >> Free training. >> Everything I just mentioned is free. >> What's the most important things, skills are people learning right now? >> I think it's still this, you know, it's the same thing, it's solution architecture, security for sure, DevOps, developer, but we're also seeing a huge interest in business, the business roles, really understanding what cloud is and how it can, you know, help them with their business. >> How about organizations? 'Cause they have skill issues too, I know you guys are going all in on training, which is great, and by the way, congratulations on the mission. I know you're getting close to the numbers. I think there was an announcement, we're getting an update as you guys, have you hit the numbers yet? 29 million? >> The 29 million, yeah. So 6 million we've done so far, yeah. >> So you're on your way. What about organizations? How do they get involved? Because they're trying the same thing. Are you partnering with people? >> Yeah, so we partner with, well, for customers, they're looking for the same thing that we are. We also have a program for underserved and unemployed communities where we go in and do a kind of non-tech to tech training. And we're offering that program in 90 locations this year and really trying to address the early pipeline. >> What are some of the most important things that you're working on for AWS, for training and certification right now? >> The biggest thing that we're doing is just trying to make everything as free and accessible as we can and moving as much as we can to digital, making it where we've really focused this year on experiential learning, so labs and getting engaged with the customer and keeping them because obviously, we release services every day, you know? And it's important that we just work with organizations to have a learning, curious culture. >> Is there any way people can get involved, or you guys have any open programs? What can we do to help on theCUBE? Do you guys have new, cool digital ways to get the word out? What's going on? >> Yes, so, I mean, it depends on what you mean, we always are partnering with collaborating organizations, especially for programs like re/Start, so organizations within communities that are trying to get their community skilled up. So we work with a bunch of different partnerships. And I think, for me, it's really just about, we really think we're very, very focused on building diverse builders. And so, we want to make sure that we're getting the message out that cloud's accessible to anybody. And, by providing free training, we hope that that will attract a new set of learners and start to close the gap on their training pipeline. >> So, have you guys got the Gen Z nailed down yet? 'Cause they're hungry for content, they're on the Discord servers, they're on Twitch. >> Yeah, we actually were training to Twitch this year, because you have to meet the learner where they are, right? And I think, you know, traditional instructor-led training just doesn't work for some people. And so, we have content out on Twitch, we're working on some really cool interactive gaming stuff. And so, we really have pivoted. >> So there's a Discord server called "Ace of Diamonds" that's turning out to be quite the business vibe for the young kids. A lot of young kids from 13 to 17 years old in that kind of learning mode and they want to talk about cloud. Like to them, they're geeking out on NVIDIA GPUs, they want to hear about the graviton, they're nerds. >> Yeah, we actually have a very cool program called "Get IT", and it's very focused on girls in tech and we go into schools and run competitions and do hackathons and they present, and it's a really great way to get, you know, girls interested in tech in a big way. >> Cal Poly hosted a robotics competition, that was pretty interesting, the women's division was phenomenal. There's divisions now, I mean, robotics is like a varsity sport now. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. >> I mean, this just shows you where the interest level is. Okay, so obviously, there's a young demographic and you've got the re-skilling on the higher end of the demographic of age wise that maybe have come from IT. So you've got the IT folks and/or people that had some business training or whatever, and then you have the young, what's the programs that are working the best that you see to getting those folks, the older folks, in retraining? >> For the younger ones, or? >> John: Older ones, not younger ones, older ones. >> I think what we're trying to do is work with organizations to make training accessible and comfortable. We always say it, you know, we want companies to build an environment where they can experiment and learn. So we're working with large organizations to try and transform them and make them cloud fluent and move people from traditional skills onto cloud skills. And, we're having great success with customers in doing that. But I think providing a really comfortable environment and a place and space for them to learn and building communities within that organization is important. >> What did you learn during the pandemic in your evolution? 'Cause you guys were doing like mid-flight of training, I know you've been rolling, you've been working really hard over the years, I know that for a fact. Pandemic hits, it's now virtual, digital is now a priority. What are some of the new things that have been spawned onto you from digital that are working? >> Yeah, I mean, we learned how to, you know, we're building out labs and we learned to cut content into smaller pieces so people could consume them. I think the biggest thing that we learned is that we just need to, that people were hungry to learn. Everyone was at home and we actually saw a tremendous increase in people taking training, especially digital training. And then, we also pivoted all of our certifications to virtual very rapidly so that people could then validate their skills. I think in light of the pandemic, you know, the great resignation is real, right? And people are assessing where they are. And so, we'd like to acquire people that are interested in that. >> And those jobs that are available with certification are very high paying jobs. >> Yes they are, yeah. >> So you walk through a certification, you're looking at some pretty good salary levels and you could be living anywhere. >> I met a guy last night at an event and he was in finance and he moved from a job making 30,000 to six figures and he did all through self-learning and he came to an event, was super excited about that. >> That's the top story right there, we've got to leave it at that. I know you got to go, I know you've got a hard deadline. Thank you for spending the time to come on theCUBE and sharing this important information around the certification, your goal for free training, it's free. >> Maureen: Free. >> If you want to get a raise, get cloud certification, pro tip. >> Please. >> That's a pro tip right there. Thanks for coming on, Maureen, great to see you. >> Appreciate it. Maureen Lonergan, great work she's doing in Amazon getting free content, you don't have to pay for it, it's free. Just like theCUBE content here, bringing you free insights. I'm John Furrier, worldwide leader in tech coverage at theCUBE, here in person in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin exciting conversation coming up next. We have Maureen Lonergan with us, the director of worldwide training and certification from AWS and Jared gains customer support analysts for IDB. S welcome to both of you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Thank you. I appreciate being here. >>Likewise. So, you know, we're going to be talking about training and certification programs and skilling. And right now couldn't be more of an important time to talk about that. You know, the global health and economic crisis continues to loom over our heads, but cloud computing and the industry is continuing to grow. So there's demand for these skills. Maureen, I want to start with you to just kick us off with an overview of what the AWS restart program is. And then we'll hear from Jared about his experience. >> And so I thought I'd start off by saying, you know, today, uh, Accenture released, um, a study, uh, that said that connecting individuals to opportunities to learn. Um, we can create pathways and jobs with more opportunity, higher wages, accelerated growth and less vulnerability and sudden disruptions like COVID. Um, in fact, today we announced our commitment to help 29 million people grow their technical skills with free cloud computing and training. >>Uh, by 2025, one of those programs is, is restart and, uh, restart is, uh, uh, skills development and, and job training program that prepares learners, uh, for careers in the cloud. Um, we want to build local talent by providing AWS cloud skills and job opportunities to unemployed. You know, we work with nonprofits in the local communities and government organizations to deliver a learning experience, uh, and provide a pathway to earning an AWS certification and support the participants, um, as they launch their career career jobs by providing them training and, and matching them with company, uh, you know, giving them the opportunity to interview with companies. Um, and, and Jared's one of our graduates of that program. So, >> excellent. Look, Jared, welcome to the program. Talk to us about, you know, your background, what led you to join the AWS restart program? And when was that? >>Um, so I started the program in may and before COVID I was working in fitness. I was on my way to open my own studio and then COVID happened and kind of swept the rug from under my feet. So trying to recreate a career out of almost nothing. Now, since everything was in quarantine, I was referred to preschoolers, which was a program that hosted the restart program, where I learned Python skills, Linux administration skills, the architecture and infrastructure of AWS. It gave me a lot of tools to kind of grow a career in the cloud. >>And, and so you were in fitness before, did you have any tech training, any tech background experience >>Outside of the few online tools that I used? Uh, I always tell people the most tech experience I had was upgrading my iPhone. >>Wow. So this is a program Maureen, that anybody can enter. You talked about the number of 29 million. So, so Jared, I can imagine when you found this program, as you said in the beginning with fitness studios still shut down, who knows what could have happened, amazing opportunities that it provided you talk to us about. If we think back it's only been what eight or so months where you are now, you mentioned some of the certifications that you have a talk to us about how that's landed you and your current career. >>So during the program, I was matched up with the company and able to interview with them. And I was able to land a role as a customer support analyst, where I troubleshoot software support issues. >>So, so you go way beyond no upgrading your iPhone. I bet your friends are all going to be coming to you for fix those, this isn't working, right. You're going to have to be that tech support for all your >>It guy. Now >>You are. That's awesome. So talk to me about some of the things that you would recommend Jared to your peers and folks, especially if you're saying, you know, all, all I was good at before tech wise, just upgrading my phone. That really, I think dispels a lot of the, the concerns that folks might have. I don't have a tech background. I don't have a tech degree, your proof, you don't need one and you know, Python now, I don't even know that. >>Um, so what I always like to tell everyone is empty your cup and disarm the ego. Um, you know, starting something new when you're pivoting into a new career, it's going to require some changes. It's going to have a lot of challenges. So when you come to it with an open mind and are willing to kind of grind it out, um, it it's worth it in the end. So the results speak for themselves. >>Well, you have the right mindset. I think that is huge. It was a big advantage that you probably had going in, but that's such great advice for anyone. I think maybe one of the, I call them COVID catalysts. And this is one of them, some of the things that are coming out of this worrying that, that Jared and his peers are really being able to up-skill re-skill learn new skills, but to Jared's point, you got to have that open mind. So Marina, talk to me a little bit more, you mentioned 29 million folks being impacted with this. I'm sure there are a lot of folks like Jared who had no tech background and are now opening up because of the pandemic, uh, careers and opportunities that they never would've thought of. Yeah. I mean, research one of several programs that we'll be training 29 million people for free, but, um, I think for a restart in particular, it really is. >>And Jared's a great example of this is, is having a desire to dig in. You know, we had a conversation the other day and he was saying what an incredible opportunity. And, and if you have an open mind and to learn and be curious, kind of mentality, you w you can be successful in this program. And he's a great example of that. And, you know, this program has never been more important than, than during these times. And, and Jared's actually a graduate of the first virtual program because we actually deliver this, you know, in countries all over the world. Um, but we had to pivot quickly much like all of our other programs into a virtual environment. So, you know, even with those challenges, working remotely with the, you know, he has cohort, um, he was still able to get through the training and get, um, you know, get, get a certification and then hired by an employer. >>So it's, it's just, it's a credit to him and all the hard work he put into it. Exactly. And I can tell he's a disciplined guy, and that's one of the things that I think all of us have struggled with during the last nine months is having that discipline and motivation. It's everything is just completely it's, it's the upside down from stranger things. Right? Your talk to me a little bit about kind of specifically some of the things that when you think of the word restart, and you think of maybe where you were a year ago, this has really been an actual restart for you. Yeah. I'm sure fitness will get back hope to what it was a, you have now even more opportunities as a result of this crisis. >>Yeah. So I was able to really grow and become something more than myself because, because COVID in quarantine presented so many challenges and you kind of had to adapt quickly. It allowed me to recognize a lot of the transferable skills that I had other places and brought them and bringing them into the program. So that restart name fits perfect for the opportunity. And it gives people, you can literally become competitive in a new industry. Um, you know, within a few short months, >>I think wasn't doing it. Oh, go ahead, Maureen. I was just gonna say one of the other interesting things is that he has a son at home that he's homeschooling. So not only did COVID impact his business, but his family and his, um, you know, having to learn and, uh, and, and home, you know, online school help to online school, his son is also a credit, his, his character and his drive. Oh, absolutely. I can't imagine how challenging that is to do not just one do a regular job that you've been doing for a long time. We'll also having kids at home that you're having to help, but you are in the middle of a, a pretty big shift, the online talk to me about, I imagine maybe you were even inspiring to your son or vice versa in terms of having the dedication to show up online because there's nobody, you know, making sure that you're actually in a physical location. Right. Jared, >>Um, yeah, so there, you know, there, there, there was some advantages and disadvantages to learning in a virtual. Um, but having my son there, you know, we kinda pulled on each other and push each other, like, Hey, like, are you on break? What are you doing? Like, why are you working in and I'm not working. So, uh, we was able to kind of motivate and inspire each other to really make things happen. Um, and then with being in a virtual environment and then coming from a fitness background, I'll say like, I really didn't miss getting up at 5:00 AM for, you know, early sessions. Um, so, you know, there, there were some things that I really enjoyed from it. >>There's definitely a pros and cons. Yeah. I'm not getting up at 5:00 AM. So, yeah. So then in terms of like not getting up at >> 5: 00 AM Jerry, are you able to kind of create your own curriculum and complete it at your own? >>So there was a curriculum provided by the program. Um, as I always say, you need to do that plus more, getting away with the bare minimum. Isn't just enough. So in addition to the curriculum, I would take extra hours and really dive deeper into it to make sure that I had a firm grasp on it. >>So, Maureen, I can't imagine what this would have been like without programs like this. I think the name is, I think we all want a research. I think you're looking for the calendar to children in a couple of weeks to have a restart, but talk to me about some of the other opportunities and some of the big transformations like Jared's that you're helping people achieve. Well, I think, you know, we at AWS, we really believe in, in providing as much access to education and we have pivoted our entire curriculum to virtual, either virtual instructor led training or digital training. We have a digital platform, um, with 500 free courses on it. So really anybody can learn, you know, I talked a little bit about this earlier in the week, you know, my dad was asking me what, you know, what's cloud, what does that mean? >>And I introduced him to the cloud practitioner. So I think, you know, it's, it's anyone from, you know, my 78 year old father to two young kids really trying to, um, w you know, introduced STEM, you know, STEM into STEM programs, AWS cloud, and how it, how it, um, you know, and have them play around with it. So it's, it's, uh, there's a lot of amazing things. We've also, you know, we provide our curriculum into universities through our Academy and educate programs as well. So we just, we want to reach out to anybody that we can, we want to provide training to anybody that wants it. Um, and, and we do that through delivering it ourselves and through partnerships. And I love that. You just talked about such, such breadth of folks like Jared, to folks like your dad, wanting to understand something differently. I think that my mom learns about the cloud because she watches the queue, but I love that there's now the opportunity to reach even more people and help them transform, which right now, I can't imagine a better opportunity. Jared, what's your one piece of advice for folks, maybe in your situation who are going, we're locked down again. I don't know what's going to happen next year. We can't count on this vaccine to be this, this one day, June 1st, everything's going to open back up. What do you recommend that they do to not be afraid to take on something completely different? >>I would say stay fluid, um, be ready for anything that can come your way, uh, when you're able to change and move directions, uh, the force doesn't stop. It just goes, just goes more directed somewhere else. So when you're in control of that, um, there was the whole set going to be amazing. >>Jared, congratulations. I, I find you very inspirational. I'm sure your son does as well. Who knows? Maybe he'll be a esteem kid one of these days, but that's congratulations on having a discipline in a time that nobody ever could have predicted it, that we would be living in. And Maureen, I want to ask the last question to you following on to the question for Jared. What do you recommend to folks who are going, I don't know, should I look into this? It's, I'm scared of it, or I don't have this experience. What do you say? Yeah. I don't think people should be scared about it. I think Jared said to set it well, you know, you just have to have a desire to learn and, and a curiosity, and, and when we help you get there, right, we provide the program. So if you have an interesting cloud, whether it's through our restart program or any of our digital offerings, you know, take the digital offerings are probably the easiest way to go in and, you know, be curious yourself and take cloud practitioner. >>It's, it's online and it's available for free. And then you can start to see how you can build your skills. And if you're interested in restart, by all means, you know, go ahead and apply for the program. Um, we're looking for builders for the future. I love that the amount of opportunities are endless with this. So we'll say to folks be like, Jared. Yes, the health crisis is looming, but cloud is booming and there's opportunity for you. So be like Jared, Jared, and Maureen. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a great conversation. Thanks Lisa. Thanks Sharon. >>Thank you. It was a pleasure. >>All right, guys. Thank you so much for my desk. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. >>Okay.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the Cubes Coverage Cube Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 which is also virtual. We're not in person this year. We're doing the remote interviews. But of course, getting all the stories, of course, reinvented, full of partnerships full of news. And we've got a great segment here with Salesforce and AWS. Eileen Schneider Win, who is the senior vice president of strategic partnerships, and Maureen Lundergan, director of worldwide training and certification address. Maureen Eileen. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. And nice keynote. What's up with the partnership? Give us a quick over your lien. What's what's the Salesforce? A day was partnership. Take a minute to explain it. >>Sure, thank you. I think I'll start out by talking about how sales were thinks about strategic partnerships. So for us, it's really it starts with the customer and being where they want us to be. And we've been so fortunate to be in this relationship with AWS for over five years now. It really started out as an infrastructure based partnership as we were seeing customers start their digital transformation journeys and moved to the cloud. But what has been really exciting as we've spent more time working together and working with our customers, we have now started to move into emotion of really bringing some differentiated solutions between the number one CRM and the most broadly adopted cloud platform to market for customers, uh, in areas like productivity, security and training and certification which will talk more about in a bit Onda. Specifically, some of those solutions are service Cloud Voice Product, which we launched this summer, announced last fall, a dream force as well as our private connect product which creates great security between the AWS platform and Salesforce. >>What? Some of the impact area is actually the two clouds you mentioned CRM and Amazon. We're seeing data obviously being a part of the equation ai machine learning. Um, what's been the impact I lean to your customer specifically >>Yeah, so specifically I'd call out to areas what one is really that foundation of security. Specifically, as government regulations and data security has become more critical, we've really been able to partner together there and and that's been crucial for certain customers in certain regions as well a certain industries like government. Uh, in addition, I would call out again that service cloud voice partnership, a zoo. We see the world moving more digital. This really allows customers to go quickly and, uh, turn on. There are solutions from anywhere at any time. >>You know, I love that any time, anywhere kind of philosophy. Now more than ever. With the pandemic collaborations required more than ever, and some people are used to it. You know, I've seen more technical developers have used to working at home, but not everyone else. The workforce still needs to get the job done. So this idea of collaboration, what is the impact in for your customers and how are you guys helping them? Because I think this is a big theme of this year That's gonna not only carry over, even when the pandemics over this idea of anywhere is all about collaboration. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the exciting thing about the partnership is we've been talking digital transformation with customers for years, but I think what we saw at the beginning of this year, as we were all thrown home and forced Thio, you know, fire up our jobs from our bedrooms or our garages. It really came down to our ability to work quickly and turn on our solutions. It's and these unprecedented times, while we're going through this now, everything we're building really is the future. So it's not just the tools and technology, it's also the processes and how work is getting done that's really come into play. But again, I'll anchor back to that service blood voice solution. So for us, call centers were completely disrupted. You think of call centers and you know, pre 2020 everyone sitting in a room together, agent side by side managers, having the ability to pop over and assist with a call or managing escalation. Now that's been completely disrupted. And it's been very exciting for us to work with our customers, to reimagine what that looks like again both from a technology perspective but also from a process perspective. And along with that, you had to reimagine how employees are learning these solutions and being trained. So we're very grateful for the partnership with AWS, and we're doing some really amazing things together. >>You know this is one of my favorite things about the enablement of Cloud. But in Salesforce has been a pioneer. As you pointed out, this connectedness feature has always been there. Now more than ever, it's highlighted with call centers, not the call center more. It's the connected center. People are connecting. And I think, Maureen, I think last time you're in the Cube. A few years ago, we were talking about virtual training online, and that was pre pet pandemic. Now you're seeing surge of online training not only because people's jobs are changing and being displaced or even shut down. New roles are emerging, right? So the virtual space Virtual world digital world, there's everyone's getting more digital faster now. How has the cove in 19 changed the landscape for training and skills demand? From your perspective, I >>mean at AWS, we've been working on our virtual capabilities for a while, so we had a digital platform out. We had a great partnership, have a great partnership with Salesforce and putting content on trailhead. We had to pivot very rapidly to virtual instructor led training and also our certifications right. We were lucky that our vendors partnered with us rapidly to pivot certification toe proctor environment. And this actually has helped to expand our ability to deliver the both training and certification in locations that we may not have been able to do before. And we have seen while it slowed. Initially, we have seen such an uptake and training over the last, um, 6 to 8 months. It's been incredible. We've been working with our customers. We've been working with our partnerships like Salesforce. We've been pushing more content out. I think customers and partners air really looking for how toe upscale their employees, uh, in a in a way, that is easy for them. And so it's actually been a great surprise to see the adoption of all of our curriculum over the last couple months. >>Well, congratulations knows a lot more work to do. It's gonna get more engaging, more virtual, more rich media. But this idea of connecting lean I wanna get back to the your your thoughts earlier, um, mentioned trailhead. Maury mentioned trailhead. You guys were doing some work with the virtual training there. What? Can you tell us more about that? And how that's going so far? >>Sounds great. So trailhead is our free online learning platform. And it really started because we have a commitment to democratizing anyone's ability to enter our industry s so you could go there and both online or with our trail head go app and experience what we call trails, which our paths for learning again on different areas of knowledge and skills and technology. And late last year, we announced an incredible partnership with AWS, where we're bringing the AWS learning content and certification to trailhead. And this is really again driven by our customers to are asking us to do our part in bringing mawr of these skilled resource is into the ecosystem. But something I also wanna highlight is I feel like this moment that we're in right now has also forced everyone to reimagine how they're doing learning even businesses, how they're training their employees and again having this free platform. And the partnership with AWS has really helped us go very quickly and create a lot of impact with customers. >>I just want to say I love the trailhead metaphor because, you know, learnings nonlinear. It's asynchronous. You've got digital. So you want to take a shortcut? You gotta know the maps And I think that's, you know, people wanna learn versus the linear, you know, tracks on. And I think that's how people have been learning online. And AWS has got a data driven strategy. Marine, I want to get your take on this because as you bring content on the trailhead, can you talk about how that works? And how you working with Railhead? >>Yeah. I mean, we started conversations a couple of years ago, and I think the interesting thing is that Salesforce and AWS have a very similar philosophy about bringing education to anybody who wants it. You'll hear me talk a lot about that in my leadership talk at reinvent, but, um, we really believe that we wanna provide content where learners learn and salesforce and trailhead have this amazing captured audience. And, um, you know, we're really looking at exploring. How do we bring education to people that might not otherwise have access to it? On DSO, we started with really foundational level content, a ws Cloud, Practitioner Essentials and AWS Cloud for technical professionals. And the interesting thing is, both of those courses have been consumed. ITT's not enough to just put it out there you want people to complete the trails and we've seen such an amazing uptake on the courses with, like 85% completion rate on one of the trails and 95% completion rate on the other one. And to keep customers engage is really a credit toe. How trailhead is designed. >>You know, it's interesting. The certification people don't lose sight of the fact that that's kind of the in the end state. Then you start a new trail. I mean, this >>is >>the this is really what it's all about. Can you just share some observations that you've seen for people that are coming into this now to say, Hey, okay, what do I expect? And what are some of the outcomes? >>Yeah, I mean, first, what we're seeing is our customers are being very clear that they need more of these skills. So we're also seeing the need for Salesforce administrators out in our ecosystem. And I think with everything going on this year, it's also an opportunity for people who are looking to pivot. Their careers were moving to tech and again, this free learning platform and the content that we're bringing has been really powerful and again for us. The need for salesforce administrators and cloud practitioners out in our ecosystem are in more demand than ever. >>Maureen. From your perspective on AWS, you see a lot of the new new jobs cybersecurity, Brazilian openings. Where do you see the most needs on for training and certification? Can you highlight some of the areas that are emerging and trending, if you will? >>I would say it's interesting because what we're seeing is is both ends of the spectrum. People that are really trying to just really understand who cloud is, whether it's, ah, business leader within an organization, a finance person, a marketing person. So cloud practitioner, you know, we're seeing huge adoption and consumption on both our platform in on Salesforce. But also some other areas are security and machine learning machine learning. We have five learning paths on our digital platform. We've also extended that content out to other platforms and the consumption rate is significant. And so, you know, I think we're seeing, uh, customers consume that. But the other thing that we're doing is we're really focused on looking at who doesn't have access to education and making sure that's available. So I think the large adoption of Cloud Practitioner in Practitioner is is largely due to the other things that we're doing with programs like Restart our academic programs >>to close it out, Alina want to get your thoughts and final thoughts on the relationship and how people can find more information about this partnership and what it means. Take, take it home. >>Thank you for asking. So just like everything else we've been talking about today, we've had to reimagine how we're showing up at this event together and very exciting thing that my team has created is the AWS Virtual Park. And anyone can access that at salesforce dot com slash aws. So please go check it out. You can experience our products here from our experts and experience its innovation on your own. >>Great insight. Thanks for coming on and participating. Really appreciate Salesforce and AWS two big winning leading clouds working together Trail had great great offering. Thanks for coming on sharing the news. Appreciate >>it. Thank you. >>It's the Cube virtual covering. It was reinvent virtual. Of course. Check out all the information here All three weeks. Walter Wall coverage. I'm John Fury with the Cube. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, one of the most historic pieces of ground really in the history of computer science. We're excited to be here for a special event. It's the Innovators Master Class put on by the Conference Board. Relatively small event, great content. We've been here all morning and we're excited to have our next guest, she's Maureen Rinkunas. She's the Innovations System Designer, Specialty Products Division for DowDuPont. Maureen, great to see you. >> It's great to be here. >> So you're, you're giving a panel in a little bit about really how do big companies work with little companies to basically be more innnovative, so what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, what are some of the lessons that you've learned, 'cause you've had a very varied experience, you've been in academia, you've been in industry, you've been kind of big company and little company. >> Yes, and I think, you know, you learn a lot from being able to look outside of your sphere. And so that's what I'm really excited about on this panel, we're going to be talking with startups and VCs and it's not surprising, people are really keeping an eye on what's happening in Silicon Valley but I think for large corporations, we have to go beyond that. We have to say, let's not just be observers, let's be active participants in the ecosystem. And so I think that by engaging with some of the startups and businesses on this panel, we're really going to get some pragmatic advice on how to do that in the best way possible. >> Yeah, you had some great statements, I've been doing some research on you, about some tricks to innovation and one of the great ones was, new hires as change agents. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit because I think, you know, unfortunately new hires, especially at a big company, they don't have status, they don't have title, you know, they don't necessary have formal authority but there's a real opportunity for companies to take advantage of this fresh new outlook to help look at things in a slightly different way. >> Yeah, it's actually been great to be here at the conference for an event because I've talked with a lot of organizations that are bringing in this fresh view and especially in innovation centers where the proportion of people coming from outside the organization is sometimes as high as 80 percent of the team at that facility and so it's really great to have people who aren't carrying the baggage of how we always have done things. >> Right right. >> And they can push the limits a little bit which is sometimes what we need to, to really break out of our routines and I think as well, you know, bringing people in who have experience in startups, people who, perhaps, are coming from the venture world also offers that opportunity for people who have experienced working in that really fast-paced environment, they are very impatient, which is a good thing and I think really push teams to move faster. So it's great to be able to bring that, an element, into your team. >> Right. There was a great presentation earlier today about DevOps and, you know, agile software development and it's easy in software, you know, you can have a two week spread and get something out new. In the chemical world, right, there's lots of different axes of innovation but you guys, kind of by rule, have to move slower. These are much bigger investments in factory and plant, you know, there's ecological implications to all these things. So when you look at the innovation challenges and opportunities at a big company like DowDuPont, what are some of the easier paths to go down that you can, you can help to drive some of that innovative thought process and products? >> Well I think, you know, certainly we don't want to take any shortcuts with safety, and so you're absolutely right, that in some ways we can't move as quick as launching a new app to market, but we really do need to challenge ourselves to think about how we move as quickly as possible. One way to do that is to look at outside innnovations and so, I've just recently was working with a team and they had mapped out their development pipeline, they thought, oh this is 3 to 5 years in the making, and then we were able to connect them with a startup who cut about 4 years out of that and so, they are actually really excited, they're going to be partnering with that startup and moving forward with a customer in a very short timeframe. So, I think there are ways to make that window a much shorter timeline. >> Right. And then what about just the culture clash? I mean, just this example specifically, you've got people that had probably a very comfortable, maybe they thought it was aggressive, timeline that went out for 4 or 5 years, then you bring up this crazy aggressive startup who are doing things much quicker. Was it simply process? Was it a new technology innovation? Was it just a different kind of spin of the lens that they were able to reframe their problem differently? And then how do you get those two groups of people to work together effectively? >> Well you know, I think in the corporate space, there's a lot of this, well we don't care because it wasn't invented here, syndrome. We're very fortunate that at a leadership level at DuPont, there has been very much this perspective that we need to get beyond that, we need to collaborate with our customers, we need to move externally, and so, you know, that helps, having someone who champions looking outside for alternatives, but I think, too, it's helpful to have those change agents within, people who are really brave, people who aren't afraid to push back, often these are the people who are coming outside with the legacy, they're not worried about getting fired and they're pushing for what they know is right and that's moving fast and hopefully making some positive change. >> Right, and not breaking too many things, right? >> (laughs) >> We've kind of got away from the move fast and break things. So final question, you know, we're here at this Innovation Master Class, what are you looking to get out of this type of event? Have you been here before and you know, what types of things do you take away of kind of this small, intimate little affair? >> Yeah so this is my second time here and you know, after seeing what we've learned this morning and reflecting on what I learned last year, I think you always take things away that are really actionable, you know, the folks that come to these events are in the field, they are getting things done, and so you really have an opportunity to learn from people who have tested things, they've learned from those experiments, sometimes they've failed and we can learn from those failures too and so that's what I really appreciate about having this opportunity to be here. >> Well Maureen, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on your panel this afternoon. I can't wait to, can't wait to watch. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, she's Maureen, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We are at the Innovation Master Class put on by the Conference Board at Xerox PARC. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Maureen Fan. She is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studio, which is the industry's leading VR animation studio, so, welcome Maureen. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> It's excited to talk to you, because you just won an Emmy. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You just won an Emmy for "Invasion", so, tell us a little bit about invasion. >> It was our first piece ever and it was just an experiment to see if we could even create VR and it's a story about these adorable little bunnies and you are actually a bunny too, you look down, you have a furry, little bunny body and these aliens that come to try to take over the Earth, with their advanced technology and you and your bunny friend end up saving the entire Earth and it's starring Ethan Hawk and it just came out last year. And we're really excited, because it became the number one top downloaded VR experience across all the headsets and it's getting turned into a Hollywood Feature Film. >> Very cool, very cool >> Thank you. >> And you have another film coming out too and this is "Rainbow Crow" >> Yes. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about "Rainbow". >> So, "Rainbow Crow" is based off of a Native American legend about how the crow used to have beautiful rainbow feathers and a beautiful singing voice and it's John Legend, in our piece and how he decides to sacrifice himself, by flying into the sun to bring warmth and fire back to the Earth and in the process, loses all his beautiful feathers, becomes black and burnt and his voice becomes like the crow's voice, but it's about how beauty is within and there's also, huge themes about diversity and how if you learn to accept yourself and your differences, that's when you can accept others and that's why we specifically cast minorities and women, so, we have John Legend, Constance Wu, from "Fresh off the Boat" as a skunk character, Diego Luna, from "Rogue One", for the moth character, as well as Randy Edmunds, as a Native American elder, narrator, and we have a whole bunch of other stars to announce, soon-- >> Well we cannot wait to hear. That's already an amazing line-up. >> Thank you. >> So, when you're thinking about "Rainbow Crow" and particularly, because it's VR, which is relatively new, still experimental, I mean, the messages of diversity, does it lend itself to VR, better than, say, a standard animation film? >> Absolutely, because if you think about stories that you just watch passively, the reason why we need stories and humanity, in general is to experience characters and stories beyond those we can experience in our real lives and we think, "Oh, how would I feel if I was in the "position of that character or what would I do?" but in VR, because you are actually playing a character in a role, you actually have to decide at that point, "what would I do?" so, it's not just a experience that I just see, it's one where I'm actively experiencing it, so, I create a memory and remember afterwards and there's all these research studies at Stanford by Jeremy Bailenson, who is head of the Stanford VR lab, that shows if you are made a homeless person, inside a VR experience and you have to go through a day in the life of a homeless person or you would look in the mirror and see that you are a black woman, that you, when you get out of the headset, you act completely differently. You have so much more empathy for these people than you would normally and so, it gets you to care about these characters, in a way that you don't normally and in VR, because you're doing it in a real-time game engine, these characters can act and react to what you do, so you can turn that empathy into action and actually act upon your caring, which we call compassion, so, it really changes you in a way, that normal, traditional story-telling doesn't, so, I think that having voices and characters that are different, in front of the screen, and also, behind the screen are really important to create role models and different perspectives for all the people out in the world. >> And these are movies that are targeted at kids, children, but do you see a future in which, where there is more targeted at adults, for VR? >> Absolutely. The funny thing is, in the beginning, the VR distributors didn't think that people would want our VR animation, because they're like, "Oh, it's just going to be these hardcore boys "that just love to play games. "Are they going to want this animation?" and VR is targeted towards adults, that's why they were surprised and we were surprised when "Invasion" became the number one downloaded VR experience. It shows that the audience for our content is from little kids to grandmas and everyone in between and that's probably why it became the top downloaded experience, is because it's universally appealing and has themes that are appealing to just, every single generation, so, absolutely, but for VR to become mainstream, there needs to be more universally appealing content. Right now, the content tends to be for games, like parkour games, as well as documentaries, which are two amazing pieces of content for this medium, but for it to become mainstream, we need more universally appealing content and I'm excited about, right now, it's a new industry. This is when minorities and women in particular, can enter the space and help shape the voices and the direction of the industry. >> That is exactly where I wanted to go next. So, let's talk a little bit about Baobab Studio. It's not that old and VR is not that old and so, why are there more opportunities, would you say, for women, and minorities? >> Well, if you look at traditional animation in the traditional entertainment fields that's a very mature industry and to break into that industry, you have to either have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage, but VR, there's technological disruption, which means nobody has an advantage at all, means it's a level playing field and everybody can come in and start something, so, this is a perfect opportunity, when there's low barriers to entry of coming in, for women and minorities, anyone who wants their voice heard, to start companies or to make experiences and we can set the groundwork, because there's no one telling us what we can and can't do, because no one actually knows what we can and can't do yet. >> Right, right, but yet you are still of a female, asian figurehead of a studio, that will hopefully, someday be a major studio. You're working on it, but do you find that people take you as seriously in Hollywood? I mean, what are you coming up against? >> Well, it's really interesting, because I heard for even fundraising is one of the hardest parts of starting a company and there was a Stanford Research Study that showed that if you took a deck, a pitch deck for a company and you had a male voice-over versus a female voice-over the male voice-over was, I don't remember what, it was like 50% more likely to get funded than the woman with the same exact pitch deck, so I knew from that and they also show that if you are married and wear a ring you're taken more seriously, or if you're less attractive, also, you're taken more seriously and my hypothesis and some of the hypotheses out there, is it takes away the whole entire female attraction thing, like what does it mean to be an attractive female, so, I had to go into the meetings, knowing this. I even considered wearing a ring. I considered wearing a paper bag over my head. >> A bag over you head. Exactly, exactly. >> But at the same time I felt that I need to be myself and the best thing to, there's a correlation between the perceived leadership and confidence, that I needed to just go in there and be confident in myself so, I knew that, that could work against me, but I just needed to be myself, but I had to make sure that I was really confident and really believed in what I said and honestly, besides being confident and aggressive, I also, felt comfortable, because a lot of the people I talked to, I knew from my network and I had many of my male friends and female friends who knew these VC's, do the initial introduction, so I felt more comfortable going in, for them already knowing that I had somebody else saying that I was awesome. >> Yeah, and you've had many mentors and sponsors along the way too. >> Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most important things, for my career from the very beginning. When I graduated from business school, I actually emailed my mentors and said, "Here are the things I care about for finding a job." I didn't have to go find any jobs. They actually found all these jobs. for me, set up informational interviews, for me and I just went in and did it, all the informational interviews, got the offers and just choose one of them that I wanted to be in but, even for starting my company, my co-founder, Eric Darnell was a write and director of all four "Madagascar" films and I got introduced to him, through my mentor, Glen Entis who is the co-founder of PDI Dreamworks Animation and he was my mentor through Zynga and then, Gen Entis introduced me to Alvy Ray Smith, who is the co-founder of Pixar, who also became our advisor, Alvy Ray Smith, then introduced us to Glen Keane, who is the animator for "Little Mermaid", "Alaadin". >> The power of networks. >> It was all through the network and through my mentors that I found, a lot of the opportunities that I have and they also helped my through my personal life and how to navigate being entrepreneur and I rely on them so much. >> So, beyond finding the right mentor and sponsor what else would you give, your parting words to the young Maureen fans out there? >> I think there's a tendency for society to pressure you to conform, to money, fame, beauty and you don't need to listen to that and you don't need to be bucketed. I designed my own major at Stanford and with an eBay, I took four different roles. I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit and you can be who you are and create a category onto yourself and so, don't feel pressured to listen to what society is telling you. The other thing, is if you are faced with pushed back for being promoted and you feel like it's maybe because you're a woman, we have a tendency as women to start blaming ourselves and thinking there's something wrong with us, versus research shows men are most likely to blame the system, don't let it affect you and bring you down, because you need to actually be confident and believe in yourself in order to rise above. >> Great. Great advice. Maureen, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> And best of luck to you. >> Thank you, so much. >> Hope you win another Emmy. >> Thank you. >> Come back and talk to us again. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from Grace Hopper, just after this. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Jenni Troutman is here, Director of Products and Services, and Training and Certification at AWS, and Heather Ruden, Director of Education Programs, Training and Certification. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and for the International Women's Day special program. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> So, I'll just get it out of the way. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I've been shouting at the top of my lungs, "It's free. Get cloud training and you'll have a six figure job." Pretty much. I'm over amplifying. But this is really a big opportunity in the industry, education and the skills gap, and the skill velocities that's changing. New roles are coming on around cloud native, cloud native operators, cybersecurity. There's so much excitement going on around the industry, and all these open positions, and they need new talent. So you can't get a degree for some of these things. So, nope, it doesn't matter what school you went to, everyone's kind of level. This is a really big deal. So, Heather, share with us your thoughts as well on this topic. Jenni, you too. Like, where are you guys at? 'Cause this is a big opportunity for women and anyone to level up in the industry. >> Absolutely. So I'll jump in and then I'll hand it over to Jenni. We're your dream team here. We can talk about both sides of this. So I run a set of programs here at AWS that are really intended to help build the next generation of cloud builders. And we do that with a variety of programs, whether it is targeting young learners from kind of 12 and up. We have AWS GetIT that is designed to get women ambassadors or women mentors in front of girls 12 to 14 and get them curious about a career in STEM. We also have a program that is all digital online. It's available in 11 languages. It's got hundreds of courses. That's called AWS Educate that is designed to do exactly what you just talked about, expose the opportunities and start building cloud skills for learners at age 13 and up. They can go online and register with an email and start learning. We want them to understand not only what the opportunity is for them, but the ways that they can help influence and bring more diversity and more inclusion and into the cloud technology space, and just keep building all those amazing builders that we need here for our customers and partners. And those are the programs that I manage, but Jenni also has an amazing program, a set of programs. And so I'll hand it over to her as you get into the professional side of this things. >> So Jenni, you're on the product side. You've got the keys to the kingdom on all the materials and shaping it. What's your view on this? 'Cause this is a huge opportunity and it's always changing. What's the latest and greatest? >> It is a massive opportunity and to give you a sense, there was a study in '21 where IT executives said that talent availability is the biggest challenge to emerging tech adoption. 64% of IT executives said that up from only 4% the year before. So the challenge is growing really fast, which for everyone that's ready to go out there and learn and try something new is a massive opportunity. And that's really why I'm here. We provide all kinds of learning experiences for people across different cloud technologies to be able to not only gain the knowledge around cloud, but also the confidence to be able to build in the cloud. And so we look across different learner levels, different roles, different opportunities, and we provide those experiences where people can actually get hands-on in a totally risk-free environment and practice building in the cloud so they can go and be ready to get their certifications, their AWS certifications, give them the credentials to be able to show an employer they can do it, and then go out and get these jobs. It's really exciting. And we go kind of end to end from the very beginning. What is cloud? I want to know what it is all the way through to I can prove that I can build in the cloud and I'm ready for a job. >> So Jenni, you nailed that confidence word. I think I want to double click on that. And Heather, you talked about you're the dream team. You guys, you're the go to market, you bring this to the marketplace. Jenni, you get the products. This is the key, but to me the the international women days angle is, is that what I hear over and over again is that, "It's too technical. I'm not qualified." It can be scary. We had a guest on who has two double E degrees in robotics and aerospace and she's hard charging. She almost lost her confidence twice she said in her career. But she was hard charging. It can get scary, but also the ability to level up fast is just as good. So if you can break through that confidence and keep the curiosity and be a builder, talk about that dynamic 'cause you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the industry, how do you handle that? 'Cause I think that's a big thing that comes up over and over again. And confidence is not just women, it's men too. But women can always, that comes up as a theme. >> It is. It is a big challenge. I mean, I've struggled with it personally and I mentor a lot of women and that is the number one challenge that is holding women back from really being able to advance is the confidence to step out there and show what they can do. And what I love about some of the products we've put out recently is we have AWS Skill Builder. You can go online, you can get all kinds of free core training and if you want to go deeper, you can go deeper. And there's a lot of different options on there. But what it does is not only gives you that based knowledge, but you can actually go in. We have something called AWS Labs. You can go in and you can actually practice on the AWS console with the services that people are using in their jobs every day without any risk of doing something that is going to blow up in your face. You're not going to suddenly get this big AWS bill. You're not going to break something that's out there running. You just go in. It's your own little environment that gets wiped when you're done and you can practice. And there's lots of different ways to learn as well. So if you go in there and you're watching a video and to your point you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is too technical. I can't understand it. I don't know what I'm going to go do." You can go another route. There's something called AWS Cloud Quest. It's a game. You go in and it's like you're gaming and it walks you through. You're actually in a virtual world. You're walking through and it's telling you, "Hey, go build this and if you need help, here's hints and here's tips." And it continues to build on itself. So you're learning and you're applying practical skills and it's at your own pace. You don't have to watch somebody else talking that is going at a pace that maybe accelerates beyond what you're ready. You can do it at your own pace, you can redo it, you can try it again until you feel confident that you know it and you're really ready to move on to the next thing. Personally, I find that hugely valuable. I go in and do these myself and I sit there and I have a lot of engineers on my team, very smart people. And I have my own imposter syndrome. I get nervous to go talk to them. Like, are they going to think I'm totally lost? And so I go in and I learn some of this myself by experiment. And then I feel like, okay, now I can go ask them some intelligent questions and they're not going to be like, "Oh gosh, my leader is totally unaware of what we're doing." And so I think that we all struggle with confidence. I think everybody does, but I see it especially in women as I mentor them. And that's what I encourage them to do is go and on your own time, practice a bit, get a little bit of experience and once you feel like you can throw a couple words out there that you know what they mean and suddenly other people look at you like, "Oh, she knows what she's talking about." And you can kind of get past that feeling. >> Well Jenni, you nailed it. Heather, she just mentioned she's in the job and she's going and she's still leveling up. That's the end when you're in, but it's also the barriers to entry are lowering. You guys are doing a good job of getting people in, but also growing fast too. So there's two dynamics at play here. How do people do this? What's the playbook? Because I think that's really key, easy to get in. And then once you're in, you can level up fast at your own pace to ride the wave. And then there's new stuff coming. I mean, every re:Invent there's 5,000 announcements. So it's like zillion new things and AI taught now. >> re:Invent is a perfect example of that ongoing imposter syndrome or confidence check for all of us. I think something that that Jenni said too is we really try and meet learners where they are and make sure that we have the support, whether it's accessibility requirements or we have the content that is built for the age that we're talking to, or we have a workforce development program called re/Start that is for people that have very little tech experience and really want to talk about a career in cloud, but they need a little bit more handholding. They need a combination of instructor-led and digital. But then we have AWS educators, I mentioned. If you want to be more self-directed, all of these tools are intended to work well together and to be complimentary and to take you on a journey as a learner. And the more skills you have, the more you increase your knowledge, the more you can take on more. But meeting folks where they are with a variety of programs, tools, languages, and accessibility really helps ensure that we can do that for learners throughout the world. >> That's awesome. Let's get into it. Let's get into the roadmaps of people and their personas. And you guys can share the programs that you have and where people could fit in. 'Cause this comes up a lot when I talk to folks. There's the young person who's I'm a gamer or whatever, I want to get a job. I'm in high school or an elementary or I want to tinker around or I'm in college or I'm learning, I'm an entry level kind of entry. Then you have the re-skilling. I'm going to change my careers, I'm kind of bored, I want to do something compelling. How do I get into the cloud game? And then the advanced re-skill is I want to get into cyber and AI and then there's other. Could you break down? Did I get that right or did I miss anything? And then what's available for those kind of lanes? So those persona lanes? >> Well, let's see, I could start with maybe the high schooler stuff and then we can bring Jenni in as well. I would say a great place to start for anyone is aws.amazon.com/training. That's going to give them the full suite of options that they could take on. If you're in high school, you can go onto AWS Educate. All you need is an email. And if you're 13 years and older, you can start exploring the types of jobs that are available in the cloud and you could start taking some introductory classes. You can do some of those labs in a safe environment that Jenni mentioned. That's a great place to start. If you are in an environment where you have an educator that is willing to go on this with you, this journey with you, we have this AWS GetIT program that is, again, educator-led. So it's an afterschool or it's an a program where we match mentors and students up with cloud professionals and they do some real-time experimentation. They build an app, they work on things together, and do a presentation at the end. The other thing I would say too is that if you are in a university, I would double check and see if the AWS Academy curriculum is already in your university. And if so, explore some of those classes there. We have instructor-led, educator-ready. course curriculum that we've designed that help people get to those certifications and get closer to those jobs and as well as hopefully then lead people right into skill builder and all the things that Jenni talked about to help them as they start out in a professional environment. >> So is the GetIT, is that an instructor-led that the person has to find someone for? Or is this available for them? >> It is through teachers. It's through educators. We are in, we've reached over 19,000 students. We're available in eight countries. There are ways for educators to lead this, but we want to make sure that we are helping the kids be successful and giving them an educator environment to do that. If they want to do it on their own, then they can absolutely go through AWS Educate or even and to explore where they want to get started. >> So what about someone who's educated in their middle of their career, might want to switch from being a biologist to a cloud cybersecurity guru or a cloud native operator? >> Yeah, so in that case, AWS re/Start is one of the great program for them to explore. We run that program with collaborating organizations in 160 cities in 80 countries throughout the world. That is a multi-week cohort-based program where we do take folks through a very clear path towards certification and job skilling that will help them get into those opportunities. Over 98% of the cohorts, the graduates of those cohorts get an interview and are hopefully on their path to getting a job. So that really has global reach. The partnership with collaborating organizations helps us ensure that we find communities that are often unreached by cloud skills training and we really work to keep a diverse focus on those cohorts and bring those folks into the cloud. >> Okay. Jenni, you've got the Skill Builder action here. What's going on on your side? Because you must have to manage all the change. I mean, AI is hot right now. I'm sure you're cranking away on curriculum and content for SageMaker, large language models, computer vision, cybersecurity. >> We do. There are a lot of options. >> How is your world? Tell us about what people can take out of way from your side. >> Yeah. So a great way to think about it is if they're already out in the workforce or they're entering the workforce, but they are technical, have technical skills is what are the roles that are interesting in the technologies that are interesting. Because the way we put out our training and our certifications is aligned to paths. So if you're look interested in a specific role. If you're interested in architecting a cloud environment or in security as you mentioned, and you want to go deep in security, there are AWS certifications that give you that. If you achieve them, they're very difficult. But if you work to them and achieve them, they give you the credential that you can take to an employer and say, "Look, I can do this job." And they are in very high demand. In fact that's where if you look at some of the publications that have come out, they talk about, what are people making if they have different certifications? What are the most in-demand certifications that are out there? And those are what help people get jobs. And so you identify what is that role or that technology area I want to learn. And then you have multiple options for how you build those skills depending on how you want to learn. And again, that's really our focus, is on providing experiences based on how people learn and making it accessible to them. 'Cause not everybody wants to learn in the same way. And so there is AWS Skill Builder where people can go learn on their own that is really great particularly for people who maybe are already working and have to learn in the evenings, on the weekends. People who like to learn at their own pace, who just want to be hands-on, but are self-starters. And they can get those whole learning plans through there all the way aligned to the certification and then they can go get their certification. There's also classroom training. So a lot of people maybe want to do continuous learning through an online, but want to go really deep with an expert in the room and maybe have a more focused period of time if they can go for a couple days. And so they can do classroom training. We provide a lot of classroom training. We have partners all over the globe who provide classroom training. And so there's that and what we find to be the most powerful is when you couple the two. If you can really get deep, you have an expert, you can ask questions, but first before you go do that, you get some of that foundational that you've kind of learned on your own. And then after you go back and reinforce, you go back online, you try out things that maybe you learned in the classroom, but you didn't quite, you hadn't used it enough yet to quite know how to do it. Now you can go back and actually use it, experiment and play around. And so we really encourage that kind of, figure out what are some areas you're interested in, go learn it and then go get a job and continue to learn because then once you learn that first area, you start to build confidence in it. Suddenly other areas become interesting. 'Cause as you said, cloud is changing fast. And once you learn a space, first of all you have to keep going back to stay up on it as it changes. But you quickly find that there are other areas that are really interesting too. >> I've observed that the training side, it's just like cloud itself, it's very agile. You can get hands-on quickly, you don't need to take a class, and then get in weeks later. You're in it like it's real time. So you're immersed in gamification and all kinds of ways to funnel into the either advanced tracks and certification. So you guys do a great job and I want to give you props for that and a shout out. The question I have for you guys is can you scope the opportunity for these certifications and opportunities for women in particular? What are some of the top jobs pulling down? Scope out the opportunity because I think when people hear that they really fall out of their chair, they go, "Wow, I didn't know I could make $200,000 doing cybersecurity." Well, yeah or maybe more. I just made the number, I don't actually know, but like I know people do make that much in cyber, but there are huge financial opportunities with certifications and education. Can you scope that order of magnitude? Can you share any data? >> Yeah, so in the US they certainly are. Certifications on average aligned to six digit type jobs. And if you go out and do a search, there are research studies out there that are refreshed every year that say what are the top IT industry certifications and how much money do they make? And the reason I don't put a number out there is because it's constantly changing and in fact it keeps going up, >> It's going up, not going down. >> But I would encourage people to do that quick search. What are the top IT industry certifications. Again, based on the country you're in, it makes a difference. But if you're US, there's a lot of data out there for the US and then there is some for other countries as well around how much on average people make. >> Do you list like the higher level certifications, stack rank them in terms of order? Like say, I'm a type A personnel, I want to climb Mount Everest, I want to get the highest level certification. How do I know that? Is it like laddered up or is like how do you guys present that? >> Yeah, so we have different types of certifications. There is a foundational, which we call the cloud practitioner. That one is more about just showing that you know something about cloud. It's not aligned to a specific job role. But then we have what we call associate level certifications, which are aligned to roles. So there's the solutions architect, cloud developer, so developer operations. And so you can tell by the role and associate is kind of that next level. And then the roles often have a professional level, which is even more advanced. And basically that's saying you're kind of an Uber expert at that point. And then there are technology specialties, which are less about a specific role, although some would argue a security technology specialty might align very well to a security role, but they're more about showing the technology. And so typically, it goes foundational, advanced, professional, and then the specialties are more on the side. They're not aligned, but they're deep. They're deep within that area. >> So you can go dig and pick your deep dive and jump into where you're comfortable. Heather, talk about the commitment in terms of dollars. I know Amazon's flaunted some numbers like 30 million or something, people they want to have trained, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. This is key, obviously, more people trained on cloud, more operators, more cloud usage, obviously. I see the business connection. What's the women relationship to the numbers? Or what the experience is? How do you guys see that? Obviously International Women's Day, get the confidence, got the curiosity. You're a builder, you're in. It's that easy. >> It doesn't always feel that way, I'm sure to everybody, but we'd like to think that it is. Amazon and AWS do invest hundreds of millions of dollars in free training every year that is accessible to everyone out there. I think that sometimes the hardest obstacles to get overcome are getting started and we try and make it as easy as possible to get started with the tools that we've talked about already today. We run into plenty of cohorts of women as part of our re/Start program that are really grateful for the opportunity to see something, see a new way of thinking, see a new opportunity for them. We don't necessarily break out our funding by women versus men. We want to make sure that we are open and diverse for everybody to come in and get the training that they need to. But we definitely want to make sure that we are accessible and available to women and all genders outside of the US and inside the US. >> Well, I know the number's a lot lower than they should be and that's obviously why we're promoting this heavily. There's a lot more interest I see in tech. So digital transformation is gender neutral. I mean, it's like the world eats software and uses software, uses the cloud. So it has to get 50/50 in my opinion. So you guys do a great job. Now that we're done kind of promoting Amazon, which I wanted to do 'cause I think it's super important. Let's talk about you guys. What got you guys involved in tech? What was the inspiration and share some stories about your experiences and advice for folks watching? >> So I've always been in traditionally male dominated roles. I actually started in aviation and then moved to tech. And what I found was I got a mentor early on, a woman who was senior to me and who was kind of who I saw as the smartest person out there. She was incredibly smart, she was incredibly kind, and she was always lifting women up. And I kind of latched onto her and followed her around and she was such an amazing mentor. She brought me from throughout tech, from company to company, job to job, was always positioning me in front of other people as the go-to person. And I realized, "Wow, I want to be like her." And so that's been my focus as well in tech is you can be deeply technical in tech or you can be not deeply technical and be in tech and you can be successful both ways, but the way you're going to be most successful is if you find other people, build them up and help put them out in front. And so I personally love to mentor women and to put them in places where they can feel comfortable being out in front of people. And that's really been my career. I have tried to model her approach as much as I can. >> That's a really interesting observation. It's the pattern we've been seeing in all these interviews for the past two years of doing the International Women's Day is that networking, mentoring and sponsorship are one thing. So it's all one thing. It's not just mentoring. It's like people think, "Oh, just mentoring. What does that mean? Advice?" No, it's sponsorship, it's lifting people up, creating a keiretsu, creating networks. Really important. Heather, what's your experience? >> Yeah, I'm sort of the example of somebody who never thought they'd be in tech, but I happened to graduate from college in the Silicon Valley in the early nineties and next thing you know, it's more than a couple years later and I'm deeply in tech and I think it when we were having the conversation about confidence and willingness to learn and try that really spoke to me as well. I think I had to get out of my own way sometimes and just be willing to not be the smartest person in the room and just be willing to ask a lot of questions. And with every opportunity to ask questions, I think somebody, I ended up with good mentors, male and female, that saw the willingness to ask questions and the willingness to be humble in my approach to learning. And that really helped. I'm also very aware that nobody's journey is the same and I need to create an environment on my team and I need to be a role model within AWS and Amazon for allowing people to show up in the way that they're going to be most successful. And sometimes that will mean giving them learning opportunities. Sometimes that will be hooking them up with a mentor. Sometimes that will be giving them the freedom to do what they need for their family or their personal life. And modeling that behavior regardless of gender has always been how I choose to show up and what I ask my leaders to do. And the more we can do that, I've seen the team been able to grow and flourish in that way and support our entire team. >> I love that story. You also have a great leader, Maureen Lonergan, who I've met many conversations with, but also it starts at the top. Andy Jassy who can come across, he's kind of technical, he's dirty, he's a builder mentality. He has first principles and you're bringing up this first principles concept and whether that's passing it forward, what you've learned, having first principles helps in an organization. Can you guys talk about what that's like at your company? 'Cause everyone's different. And sometimes whether, and I sometimes I worry about what I say, but I also have my first principles. So talk about how principles matter in how you guys interface with others and letting people be their authentic self. >> Yeah, I'll jump in Jenni and then you can. The Amazon leadership principles are super important to how we interact with each other and it really does provide a set of guidelines for how we work with each other and how we work for our customers and with our partners. But most of all it gives us a common language and a common set of expectations. And I will be honest, they're not always easy. When you come from an environment that tends to be less open to feedback and less open to direct conversations than you find at Amazon, it could take a while to get used to that, but for me at least, it was extremely empowering to have those tools and those principles as guidance for how to operate and to gain the confidence in using them. I've also been able to participate in hundreds and hundreds of interviews in the time that I've been here as part of an interview team of bar raisers. I think that really helps us understand whether or not folks are going to be successful at AWS and at Amazon and helps them understand if they're going to be able to be successful. >> Bar raising is an Amazon term and it's gender neutral, right Jenni? >> It is gender neutral. >> Bar is a bar, it raises. >> That's right. And it's funny, we say that our culture here is peculiar. And when I started, I had been in consulting for several years, so I worked with a lot of different companies in tech and so I thought I'd seen everything and I came here and I went, "Hmm." I see what they mean by peculiar. It is very different environment. >> In the fullness of time, it'll all work out. >> That's right, that's right. Well and it's funny because when you first started, it's a lot to figure out to how to operate in an environment where people do use a 16 leadership principles. I've worked at a lot of companies with three or four core values and nobody can state those. We could state all 16 leadership principles and we use them in our regular everyday dialogue. That is an awkward thing when you first come to have people saying, "Oh, I'm going to use bias for action in this situation and I'm going to go move fast. And they're actually used in everyday conversations. But after a couple years suddenly you realize, "Oh, I'm doing that." And maybe even sometimes at the dinner table I'm doing that, which can get to be a bit much. But it creates an environment where we can all be different. We can all think differently. We can all have different ways of doing things, but we have a common overall approach to what we're trying to achieve. And that's really, it gives us a good framework for that. >> Jenni, it's great insight. Heather, thank you so much for sharing your stories. We're going to do this not once a year. We're going to continue this Women in Tech program every quarter. We'll check in with you guys and find out what's new. And thank you for what you do. We appreciate that getting the word out and really is an opportunity for everyone with education and cloud and it's only going to get more opportunities at the edge in AI and so much more tech. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. That's the International Women's Day segment here with leaders from AWS. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat musiC)

(soft instrumental music) >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person at a live physical event with real people. Of course, it's a hybrid event. Great stuff online. Check it out on the Amazon site, as well as theCUBE zone. We've got great guests, talking about the cloud vision for getting talent in to the marketplace, in being productive and for society Accenture always great content. Denise Reese, Managing Director of the South Market Unit Lead at Accenture, AABG, which stands for "Accenture Area Business Group" and Gina Gina Fratarcangeli who is also the managing director of Midwest sales leader. Ladies, thanks for coming, I appreciate you coming on and talking about the vision of talent. >> I guess >> Thanks for having us. >> Yes, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, Amazon's got this dangerous goal, to train 29 million people. Maureen Lonergan came on yesterday, who I've known for a long time, doing a great job. It's hard to get the talent in. First of all, it sounds harder than it really is, that's my opinion. You know, you get some training certifications and you're up and running. So, talent's a big thing. What do you guys do? Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, we're having a lot of activity at Accenture trying to get talent in. Across the entire country we're spending a tremendous amount of effort to do that. A couple of critical things we're doing in the Midwest is bringing in and searching for different talent streams that we haven't typically done in the past. For instance, one thing that we're doing is, we set up an apprentice program where we're reaching out into the market to find diverse talent, who aren't coming through the critical normal college path and bringing folks in like that. And we've got 1200 people that we've brought in that way, just in the Midwest. Which has been a phenomenal new talent stream for us. And supporting our inclusion and diversity. One of the other exciting things is what we call "The Mom Project", where we're intentionally working with an organization called the Mom Project, to bring women back into the workplace who may have left while they were taking care of their families and helping them get certified in all the new cloud technology and getting back to work. >> I love how you guys are going after this whole places that not everyone's looking at, because what I love about Cloud is that, it's a level up kind of opportunity where you don't really have to have that pedigree, or that big-big school. Of course, I went to a different school. So, I have a little chip on my shoulder. I didn't go to MIT, wasn't North-east but still good school. But, I mean, you could really level up from anywhere. >> Gina: That's right. >> And the opportunities with Cloud are so great. This is like a huge thing. No I'm surprised no one knows about it. >> Absolutely. I would add to that. So, we've in the South, in Georgia in particular. We've just launched an initiative with the technical college system of Georgia and AWS. So, it's a public-private partnership, where we're actually helping to set the curriculum for those students that are going through programs, through the technical colleges. It's one of the largest parts of the university system of Georgia. And, we're actually helping to frame the curriculum. And, giving folks what they need, to your point. It is an opportunity to level up. It's a great way to get talent in non-traditional spaces. It helps us to achieve our inclusion and diversity roles or goals, rather. But, then it also allows us to really continue to fill that pipeline with folks that we may not have had access to otherwise. >> Is there a best practice that you see developing in the acquisition of talent? Or enticing people to come in? Because that's just economics you know, Maureen was telling me that it was this person she was unemployed, and she got certified and she's making six figures. >> Both: Yeah. >> She's like oh my God, this is great. So, that's the Cloud growth. Is there a way to entice people? Is there a pattern? Is it more economic? Is it more, hey, be part of something. What's the data showing? >> There's definitely a war for talent out there. And so in this space we continuously hear from our clients that they can't hire enough people. So in the past, in the technology space, a lot of clients were hiring their own teams and here they just can't get the skills fast enough. So we're spending a tremendous amount of time being proactive. We started a women in Cloud organization where we're proactively reaching out to the community to bring women in, let them know that we will help them get those certifications and partnering with organizations like Women in Cloud, which is a global organization to create new funnels of talent. >> I think the women angle is great. The mom network coming out of the work for back into the workforce, because things change. Like we were talking about how Amazon just changed over the past five years now that this architectural approach is changing. So that's cool. Also we were involved in the women in data science, out of Stanford University, they have that great symposium. This is power technical women. >> Yes >> And it's got a global following. So the women networks that are developing are phenomenal. So that's not just an Accenture thing, right? That's outside of Accenture. >> I think it's a combination because I think we do a really good job inside of Accenture to create opportunities for women of various ethnicities lived experiences to be able to come together to network internally, but then also to pour some of that talent that they have into the communities where we live and we all do business as well. So I think I'm seeing definitely a two-pronged approach there. >> Let me ask you a question, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of will, Accenture's known as a pretty great firm. So working at Accenture is kind of a big deal. Does that scare people? Because if you could work at a Accenture I mean, that's good pedigree right there. So like, when you're trying to get people coming into the cloud, do they get the Accenture mojo or does it work for them? And can you share your experiences on that? >> I've been here five years and it's been a phenomenal ride for me. I've really enjoyed the fact having a female CEO, I think, and having a CEO who is so committed to diversity on all aspects, right? Her commitment is 50% diversity parody by 2025 at every level of our organization. And that doesn't happen without really intentional efforts at the entry-level and everywhere through the process to ensure that women are not only promoted, but really given the support network among all of our leaders and mentorship to be successful. And it's not just words, it's something that we're really spending a lot of time doing with intention. And that word is out in the space now, as women come in, they're loving it and they're recruiting their other women into the organization and diverse groups as well as what I'm seeing. >> And so I actually just started at Accenture in March. So I've been around eight months. I actually joined from AWS, interestingly enough. And I can tell you from my own experience, the intentionality that Gina spoke to you is it's evident at all levels. I feel like the way that I was courted to the firm was nothing short of amazing. That's another story for another day, but I feel like my being where I am, being hired in as a managing director, as an experienced hire, I think my presence is a testament to the focus that Accenture has on inclusion diversity and the equity component as well. And then also in Atlanta, we are exceptionally fortunate. We have close to 30 black and Latin X managing directors and senior managing directors out of the Atlanta office. So what we're doing there is pretty magical and it's something that I've never experienced in my 25 years. >> It's contagious I hope, the magic is contagious. >> Yeah. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And it's exciting because we're known as a management consulting business, right? So our product is the people >> That's right. >> And so there is intention from day one as to what you want from your career and setting your career plan. So everyone is given those career counselors and the expectation that someone is thinking about your business and your personal business, and what is your role today and what should your role be in two years, and what skills do you need to get there? Which is awesome, it's a lot of fun. >> It's also walking the talk too, right? I mean, Amazon here, they had a 50% women on stage. I don't know if you noticed on the keynote, they was two men and two women, 50%. Of course the United Airlines, it's got to be three. We got to get a 51%,, 'cause technically 51% So it should be three to one, but yeah, like, okay, that was cute notice but that's good. But this is real, I've been a big proponent of software development. Customers are women too that's 51%. So I think this whole representation thing has to be more real and more intentional. And so I want to ask you, how would you share the best practice of making that real from the essential playbook? What could people learn and what mistakes should they avoid? I think people who do want to try with it, but they don't know what to do. >> You know, I think get started, right. Do the work. I feel like since I started in technology, we've been having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and bringing more people into the space. And now it's time for us to just do that. And I feel like Accenture is doing that in spades. I think also again, I've been using this word. I was on a breakout panel yesterday talking about our partnership with AWS and intentionality keeps coming up. But I think also it helps to have a CEO who's creating diversity as an imperative at the most senior levels of the firm and folks are being incentivized as a result. So you've got to put the mechanisms in place to ensure that folks understand that this is not just lip service. >> That's a great point. It's not only just the people, but the mechanisms. And one of the things that I've been saying early on in the top of the interview was Cloud is an instant leveler there, because if you can be so capable so fast. So like when you start thinking about getting people in the market, producing talent, this notion of meritocracy isn't lip service, because if you have the capabilities and the people side lineup, then it truly can be like that. 'Cause your game does the talking, right. >> And we're doing it with intention at every level in the organization so much though, that every people leader, one of their metrics is the diversity. And as we look at the promotions, making sure that that parody is there, but every person who's managing people has diversity as a metric that they're being measured on. And so I think that's really critical as well as having the people who are being the advocates and being the allies and really asking the questions as the teams are getting put together. You know, my job is to review all the deals in the Midwest. And when the teams come forward, I say, "Great where are the women on the team? Who are we putting it?" We're all talking about the diversity. So when we're going to a client meeting, where are the women who are you're taking to that meeting? And if the answer is well, there's not one who's technical yet, the most senior, the most technical, well, great bring her on and use this as a training opportunity. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk and show that to our clients. >> I think that's really good. You guys are senior leaders, one can do that, demonstrate that, but also you're in the field for Accenture. You're in front of your customers. What are you seeing out there and what excites you about being in these industry? >> Yeah, I love the fact that there are so many more women in this space. I love that we're having so many women out there with intention. We've had six female CEOs do women in Cloud panel discussions with us and with our team. So you made the comment early about cloud moving so fast. That's the most exciting thing for me and the fact that it is moving at such a pace that no one client is going to be able to get the skills fast enough. They need companies like Accenture. They need companies like AWS to help them where we're leveraging all the knowledge from our own other clients and bringing that together so we can help them accelerate their development. What about you? >> Absolutely. Now I would echo that as we used to say at AWS plus one to that. But I'm really hopeful because what I'm seeing is the number of folks with my lived experience better at senior executive levels, not only within Accenture and AWS, but in our customers. And I think going back to the point that you were making earlier regarding Cloud being a level up and giving folks opportunity, folks have to be able to see a path, right? It's one thing to just get a certification and tick a box, that's great. But if you don't see a pathway to being able to utilize that in a way that allows you to move up and seeing where we are now, just as a firm, just really, really excites me that every time I get onto a call and I see another strong, amazing woman, I'm like, man, this is amazing. And it's something that... I think it's a phenomenon that I've started to see maybe within the last like five years or so. And probably even within the last two to three years, I've started to see that even more so, so that really excites me. >> Well, first of all, you guys are great. You're contagious, okay? Which is good, a good thing. I love how you brought the whole path thing because path finders was a big part of Adam's Leslie's keynote, and it must be really fun to see people taking the path that you guys are pioneering- >> We're ploughing, we're ploughing >> Yes we are. We're ploughing and you know what else we're doing? We're lifting, as we climb. That is important. I would say that, we don't have all of these amazing opportunities and blessings just to talk about what we have, but if you're not actually bringing somebody else along and giving those opportunities to folks, then it's all for not. >> You got people and the Cloud, to get them people, which is, we're humans and the mechanisms software to bring it together, magic. >> Absolutely >> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thanks for having us. >> Okay this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage from re:Invent 2021 AWS web services. Thanks for watching (soft instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching CUBE's worldwide leader in tech coverage. We're in person on the show floor. It's also a hybrid event, online as well. CUBE coverage online with Amazon re:Invent site. Great content all around, amazing announcements, transformation in all areas are exploding and in innovation, of course, we have innovation here with Sandy Carter, the worldwide public sector vice-president of partners and programs for Amazon Web Services. Sandy, welcome back, CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you and great to see you in person again. It's so exciting. The energy level, oh my God. >> Oh my God. It's so much. Thanks, great keynote. Good to see you again in person. A lot of action, give us the top announcements. What's going on? What are the top 10 AWS announcements? >> Yeah, so we, this year for 2022, as we frame it out, we decided on a 3D strategy, a three-dimensional strategy. So we started with destination then data and then delivery. So if I could do them in that order, does that sound good? >> Yeah. Destination. >> So let's start with destination. So I got this from one of the customers and he said to me, "look, Sandy, I thought it was all going to be about getting to the cloud. But when I got to the cloud, I realized it wasn't about just in the cloud, it was about what you do in the cloud." And so we made some announcements this morning, especially around migration, modernization, and optimization. So for migration, we have the mainframe announcement that Adam made, and then we also echoed it. Cause most of the mainframes today sit in public sector. So this is a managed service, it's working with Micro Focus, one of our partners. And Lockheed Martin one of our partners is one of the first into the mainframe migration, which is a service and services to help customers transform their business with the mainframe. And then as we compliment them, we look at that we also have modernization occurring. So for example, IoT. IDC tells us that IoT and that data has increased four times since COVID because now devices and sensors are tracking a lot of data. So we made an announcement around smart cities and we now have badging for our partners. We have 18 partners solutions now in smart cities. So working backwards from the partners they were talking about given now COVID is kind of in the midst of where it is smart cities and making those cities work better in public transportation and utility, it's just all where it's at. And then the final announcement in that category is containers. So 60% of our customers said that they're going to be using containers. So we announced a Rapid Adoption Assistance program for our partners to be able to help our customers move to containers overall. >> So mainframe migration, I saw that on stage, but Micro Focus, that was a good job. Get that legacy out of the way, move to the cloud. You've got smart cities, which is basically IoT, which brings cloud to the edge. And then containerization for the cloud native, either development or compatibility, interoperability kind of sets that table. That's the destination. >> That's right. That's right. Because all of those things, you know, you've got to get the mainframe to the cloud, but then it's about modernizing, right? Getting rid of all that COBOL code and then, you know, IoT and then making sure that you are ready to go with containers. It's the newest- >> So you've got the 3D, destination, data and delivery. >> That's right. >> Okay. Destination, check. Cloud. Cloud destination. >> Yeah. >> I'm putting dots together in real time. >> Destination cloud. There you go. You've got it. >> I'm still with it after all these interviews. >> Yeah, there you go. >> Data, I'll say killer Swami's onstage today, whole new data, multiple databases. What's the data focus in this area? >> So for our partners, first it's about getting the data to the cloud, which means that we need a way to really migrate it. So we announced an initiative to help get that data to the cloud. We had a set of partners that came on with us early on in this initiative to move that data to the cloud, it's called a Rapid Adoption Assistance, which helps you envision where you want to go with your data. Do you want to put it in a data lake? Do you want data stored as it is? What do you want to visualize? What do you want to do with analytics? So envision that and then get enablement. So all the new announcements, all the new services get enablement and then to pilot it. And then the second announcement in this area is a set of private offers in the marketplace. Our customers told us that they love to go after data, but that there's too many pieces and moving parts. So they need the assessment bundled with the managed service and everything bundled together so it's a solution for them. So those were our two announcements in the data area. >> So take me through the private marketplace thing, because this came up when I was talking with Stephen Orban who's now running the marketplace. What does that mean? So you're saying that this private offer is being enabling the suppliers and in government? >> Yeah. So available in the marketplace, a lot of our government agencies can buy from the marketplace. So if they have a contract, they can come and buy. But instead of having to go and say, okay, here's an assessment to tell me what I should do, now here's the offering, and now here's the managed service, they want it bundled together. So we have a set of offerings that have that bundled together today with the set of our great public sector partners. >> So tons of data action, where's the delivery fit in? >> So delivery. This one is very interesting because our customers are telling us that they no longer want just technology skills, they also need industry skills too. So they're looking for that total package. For example, you know, the state of New Jersey when hurricane Ida hit, category four storm, they wanted someone who obviously could leverage all the data, but they wanted someone who understood disaster response. And so Maxar fits that bill. They have that industry specialty along with the technology specialty. And so for our announcements here, we announced a new competency, which is an industry competency for energy. So think about renewables and sustainability and low carbon. These are the partners that do that. We have 32 different partners who met the needs of that energy competency. So we were able to GA that here today. The other really exciting announcement that we made was for small businesses to get extra training, it's called Think Big for Small Business communities. So we announced last year virtually, Think Big for Small Business. We now have about 200 companies who are part of that program, really getting extra help as diverse companies. Women owned, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned businesses, right? But now what they told us was in addition to the AWS help, what they loved is how we connected them together and we almost just stumbled upon it. I was hosting some meetings and I had Tia from Bellflower, I had Lisa from DLZP together and they got a lot of value just being connected. And we kept hearing that over and over and over again. So now we've programmatized that so it's more scalable than me introducing people to each other. We now have a program to introduce those small business leaders to each other. And then the last one that we announced is our AWS government competency is now the largest competency at AWS. So the government competency, which is pretty powerful. So now we're going to do a focus enhancement for federal. So all of our federal partners with all that opportunity can now take advantage of some private advisory council, some additional training that will go on there, additional go-to market support that they can use to help them. >> Okay. I feel like my brain is going to explode. Those are just the announcements here. There's a lot going. >> Yeah. There's a lot going on. >> I mean it's so much you've got to put them into buckets. Okay. What's the rationale around 3D? Delivery, data... I mean, destination, delivery, data. Destination, meaning cloud. Data, meeting data. And delivery meaning just new ways to get up and running- >> Skills. >> To get this delivery for the services. >> Yep. >> Okay. So is there a pattern emerging? What can you say? Cause remember we talked about this before a year ago, as well as in person at your public sector summit with your partners. Is there a pattern emerging that you're seeing here? Cause lots of the announcements are coming, done with the mainframes. Connect on your watch has been a big explosion. Adam Slansky told me personally, it's on fire. And public sector, we saw a lot of that. >> Well, in fact, you know, if you look at public sector, three factoids that we shared this morning in the keynote. Our public sector partners grew 54% this year, this is after last year we grew 45%. They grew the number of certifications that they had by 40% and the number of new customers by 32%. I mean, those are unreal numbers. Last year we did 28% new customers and we thought that was the cat's meow, now we're at 32%. So our partners are just exploding in this public sector space right now. >> It's almost as if they have an advantage because they dragged their feet for so long. >> It's true. It's true. COVID accelerated their movement to the cloud. >> A lot of slow moving verticals because of the legacy and whether it's regulation or government funding or skills- >> Or mainframes. >> All had to basically move fast, they had no excuses. And then the cloud kind of changes everyone's mindset. How about the culture? I want to ask you about the culture in the public sector, because this is coming up a lot. Again, a lot of your customers that I'm interviewing all talk... and I try to get them to talk about horizontally scalable and machine learning, and they're always, no, it's culture. >> Yeah. It's true. >> Culture is the number one thing. >> It is true. You know, culture eats strategy for lunch. So even if you have a great strategy around the cloud, if you don't have that right culture, you won't win in the marketplace. So we are seeing this a lot. In fact, one of our most popular programs is PTP, Partner Transformation Program. And it lays out a hundred day program on cloud best practices. And guess what's the number one topic? Culture. Culture, governance, technology, all of those things are so important right now. And I think because, you know, a lot of the agencies and governments and countries, they had moved to the cloud now that they're in the cloud, they went through that pain during COVID, now they're seeing all the impact of artificial intelligence and containers and blockchain and all of that, right? It's just crazy. >> That's a great insight. And I'll add to that because I think one of the things I've observed, especially with your partners is the fear of getting eliminated by technology or the fear of having a job change or fear of change in general went away once they started using it because they saw the criticality of the cloud and how it impacted their job, but then what it offered them as new opportunities. In fact, it actually increases more areas to innovate on and do more, whether it's job advancement or cross training or lateral moves, promotion, that's a huge retention piece. >> It really is. And I will tell you that the movement to the cloud enabled people to see it wasn't as scary as they thought it was going to be, and that they could still leverage a lot of the skills that they had and learn new ones. So I think it is. And this is one of the reasons why, I was just talking with Maureen launching that 29 million training program for the cloud, that really touches public sector because there is so many agencies, countries, governments that need to have that training. >> You're talking about Maureen Lonergan, she does the training. She's been working on that for years. >> Yeah. >> That's the only getting better and better. >> Yeah. >> Well Sandy, I've got to ask you, since you have a few minutes left, I want to ask you about your journey. >> Yeah. >> We've interviewed you going back a long time look where we are now. >> I know. It's incredible. >> Look at these two sets going on at CUBE. >> You've been an incredible voice on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you on because you're innovative. You're always moving like a shark. You can't sit still. You're always innovating. Still going on, you had the great women's luncheon from 20 to 200. >> Yeah, we grew. So we started out with 20 people back five years ago and now we had about 200 women and it was incredible because we do different topics. Our topic was around empathy and empathetic leadership. And you know how you can really leverage that today, back with the skills and your people. You know, given that Amazon just announced our new leadership principle about wanting to be the Earth's most employee centric company. It fits right in, empathetic leadership. And we had amazing women at that luncheon that told some great stories about empathy that I think will live in our hearts forever. >> And the other thing I want to point out, we had some of the guests on sitting on theCUBE. We had Linda Jojo from United airlines. >> Oh yeah. >> And a little factoid, yesterday in the keynote, 50% of the speakers were women. >> I know. The first time I did a blog post on it, like we had two amazing women in STEM and we had, you know, the black pilot that was highlighted. So it's showing more diversity. So I was just so excited. Thank you Adam, for doing that because I think that was an amazing, amazing focus here at the conference. >> I wanted to bring up a point. I had a note here to bring up to you. Public sector, you guys doubled the number of partners, large migrations this year. That's a big statoid. You've had 575,000 individuals hold active certifications. Okay. That grew 40% from August 2021, clearly a pandemic impact. A lot of people jumping back in getting their certs, migrating so if they're not... They're in between transitions where they have a tailwind or a headwind, whether you're United Airlines or whether you're Zoom, you got some companies were benefiting from the pandemic and some were retooling. That's something that we talked about actually at the beginning. >> That's right. Absolutely. And I do think that those certifications also demonstrate that customers have raised the bar on what they expect from a partner. It's no longer just like that technology input, it's also that industry side. And so you see the number of certifications going up because customers are demanding higher skill level. And by the way, for the partners we conducted a study with ESG and ESG said that more skilled partners, you drive more margin, profit margin, 42% more profit margin for a higher skilled partner. And we're seeing that really come to fruition with some of these really intense focus on getting more certifications and more training. >> I want to get your thoughts on the healthcare and life science. I just got a note here that tells me that the vertical is one of the fastest growing verticals with 105% year on year growth. Healthcare and life sciences, another important... Again, a lot of legacy, a lot of old silos, forced to expand and innovate with the pandemic growing. >> Yes. You know, government is our largest segment today, our largest competency. Healthcare is our fastest growing segment. So we have a big focus there. And like you said, it's not just around, you know, seeing things stay the same. It's about digital transformation. It's one of the reasons we're also seeing such an increase in our authority to operate program both on the government side and the healthcare side. So we do, you know, FedRAMP and IL5. We had six companies that got IL5, five of them in 2021, which is an amazing achievement. And then, you know, if you think about the healthcare side, our fastest growing compliance is HIPAA and HITRUST. And that ATO program really brings best practices and templates and stronger go to market for those partners too. >> Yeah. I mean, I think it's opportunity recognition and then capture during the pandemic with the cloud. More agility, more speed. >> That's right. >> Sandy, always great to have you on. In the last couple of seconds we have left, summarize the top 10 announcements in a bumper sticker. If you had to kind of put that bumper sticker on the car as it drives away from re:Invent this year, what's on that bumper sticker? What's it say? >> Partners that focus on destination, data and delivery will grow faster and add more value to their customers. >> There it is. The three dimension, DDD. Delivery... Destination, data and delivery. >> There you go. >> Here on theCUBE, bringing you all the data live on the ground here, CUBE studios, two sets wall-to-wall coverage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of ADFS reinvent 2020 it's virtual this year because of the pandemic we can't be in person normally would do in these interviews face to face, but we're here remote. I'm your host, John furrier. We're the cube virtual and we're here with Teresa Carlson, who is the chief and heads up the public sector business, uh, for AWS and also now has industries, which is a lot of the verticals and just continues to, um, have great leadership and continues to do well in the business. I Theresa great to see you for the eighth consecutive cube interview you've been on every year and we thank you for coming on big year this year. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. It's hard to believe it's eight years already. Wow, go ahead. >>Well, first of all, I want to say congratulations. Um, the first year you will run, you never wavered. You always had a North star. Um, you had the Amazonia and kind of way, um, you told us what you were going to do and you did it. The CIA came on board and the dots just connected. So congratulations this year more than ever, um, during your keynote. And re-invent, even though it was virtual, um, again, you're raising the bar on the theme leadership and making use of the data two major themes this year on your keynote because of the pandemic. And just because of the cloud computing benefits are all kind of coming together. You're helping more people than ever doing a more public service with cloud when it needs it. The most. This has been a big story. Share your, your reaction to that. >>Yeah. Well, John, thank you again for having me in your coverage of reinvent. It's been three weeks of, wow. I mean, three weeks we do one hour a day three, uh, that COVID, you know, we're still, we're still not dead, right? The vaccinations are out. People are starting to, I saw on the television yesterday here in the U S the first nurse that was vaccinated. Uh, but for us, I will tell you the data side of this piece during COVID has been huge. I mean, huge. It has been, you know, our customers have always said data is golden for them, right. Uh, but during COVID, we have actually seen the use of data, just go up like crazy and not just the use of it, but, um, I will say it's multiple data lakes that are used hydrating multiple data lakes and using that data to merge. >>So if you think about economic data and health data and putting those data sets together in a way that they have deeper understanding of what's happening within their community, their state, their, their, uh, their country. So we've seen emerging of data, uh, in a big way. If you think about the vaccinations themselves, uh, John, that wouldn't have been possible to move this fast without the use of scalable compute, processing and analytics in a way like no one has ever seen it. And, uh, it's, it's, it's pretty amazing. And I don't think we'll ever go back. And also I'll just say sharing of that data has changed. Researchers are now much more open to sharing that data air cord 19 a research site that we've done has thousands of researchers on it. Now, hundreds of thousands of views on it with people sharing research about COVID and think about that. I mean, research has always been held tightly, and now we're really starting to see them open up and share that data so that we can move much faster. >>I think doing that public service with the data has always been a killer idea. We talked about national parks being kind of open for the people over the years now, super computing and data. You guys do a great job doing that, but the other area that you're getting a lot of press on and, and rightfully so is an area that I know is close to your heart, as well as our mission, which is getting people trained up on cloud computing. And you've done this for years, but this year more importantly, with all the pressure and all the need, you guys have offered, offering a huge training skills training for 29 million people globally. I saw that on the news, I saw you on doing some TV interviews on this. It's been all over the press has been getting a lot of great buzz. Can you tell me more about what that is? >>Yeah. So part of my, when I picked up bear industry business units also picked up our training and certification organization that is ran by Maureen Lonergan. I know you've had Maureen on your show before too, and then I have education, which is run by Kimma Jarris in the U S and max, uh, Peterson internationally. And we are now we've merged so that we have a model that we can teach and train around the world in a much more scalable way that this announcement was about going into 200 Kemp countries and territories training, 29 million people by 2025 free do free skills training and making that available job through multiple different programs and scaling those. So we'll take the programs we have and we'll scale those app much more rapidly. And then now we'll also look for new programs that we need to run in parallel because that's what we do. >>We have to look around corners. Also make sure that we have the right programs and, you know, I've lived, I've lived, you know, they're all amazing, but near and dear to my heart has always been our AWS educate, which we started, uh, for ages 14 and up to at the university and high school level, to be able to start to bring on those cloud skills. Then we added badging and credentialing onto that. And from there, you can go into the air Academy, which you can actually get certifications as a solution architect. Uh, but we've, we've added so many more, uh, our program restart now, which has been really, which is about training. Those who are jobless or an underserved communities and socioeconomic depressed areas. Uh, and I love that program. I told a story about an individual in Boston who had opened a training center, a gym he's a fitness trainer, and he had to close it, uh, because you know, COVID, and he went through our 12 week. >>We restart training program and now has a job with a company there in Boston. And I just love those kind of stories where you know, that you're putting people to work. And I think for us, there's thousands and thousands of jobs around the world, just in any city, if you, if you search on cloud computing jobs open, I just looked in New York when I was on CNBC. I looked in New York and there are 10,000 cloud jobs just there in New York. And I just did a quick search. So there's always jobs, and we've got to make sure that we're skilling them so they can go now fill those jobs. And that will help us close that gap. Uh, John, which we still have a big one, uh, to get all the jobs filled that are out there. >>That's a great mission. And I got to say, it's super important because one is cloud computing. There's openings for this kind of new, the new paradigm, which is now mainstream and playing out on, in real time, as, as Andy was talking about, but also the global it markets being reshaped by cloud computing. So you have the intersection of those two, which is a new skill. You can't just take it and make a cloud. You've got to bring it together. So it's a great opportunity for someone to come into the industry and level up pretty quickly. You don't have to have the 20 years of experience to do this. It's you can come in instantly level up, have a great job. >>You know, it's the one thing John, I hear all the time around the world before from like when I would go and speak with university chancellors and presidents and just professors, they would say, Hey, you know, AWS, we need you to do the micro-credentialing along the way. And this was pre COVID when they said, we need to get your students want to work while they're in school. Well now more than ever, it's important. And we also, John Luke, just in September, over 800,000 women left the workplace. That is a trend that we do not want and we can not sustain. And so doing, you know, doing programs like this virtually that you can do self paced environments, intensive environments. We want to make, we want to make these programs fit for whatever the individual needs. So it's not just a one size fits all. We want to make sure that the programs that we're providing will fit the needs of the individuals doing the training. And I, I particularly am, uh, I want to push this with their, you know, inclusion and diversity of the individuals that we need to get into the workplace, but it is pretty alarming when you see that many women leaving the workplace, you know, when a choice is being made right now, we're seeing women take the brunt of that. And we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to work virtually train themselves and get those new jobs that are out in tech. >>Well, that's one of the questions I had for you. I'll just jump to that. Now I'll get back to some of the other ones, but the customers that pivot to remote work and learning, uh, it's changing. And, you know, I was, um, riffing on an interview. Um, I think it was with one of your public sector customers, the future of work. And if you just think about the word work workforce, workplace workload work flows, the notion of work is now impacted. And you mentioned the diversity piece. This is an opportunity. So how should people think about this, uh, relearning? So we don't lose people and we actually get a net positive inbound migration to the workforce. >>You know, the flexibility I had, I did a fireside chat with Andrew Nooney. Um, he was the former CEO of PepsiCo and chairman, and is now on our Amazon board, uh, for re-invent. And she talked about, you know, being your authentic self, uh, curiosity, but one of her big points is women in the workplace. Uh, and she's gonna publish a new book soon, and it's going to be really focused on kind of equity policy, uh, areas of need that we have to focus on to make sure that we have at women being able to tackle both the home issues and being able to work and taking advantage of that plus 50%. And I would say the virtual opportunity is really fantastic, especially for, um, all levels of socioeconomic individuals, because you can work part-time full-time, you can work virtually. And I do believe while we all want to get back into the workplace. >>I think for me, I'm a social animal. I'd love to be there sitting beside you, John, you know, I think for a lot of us, we are, we kind of yearn to be back in the office, but there's also a lot that working from home, um, is, is much more achievable for them, right? Especially with childcare if school day, if it's a short day, because the schools and allowing flexibility with work is going to be really important and COVID has taught us that that is possible. My team did not miss a beat during COVID. I tell ya, it's like unbelievable. Our business, uh, has, has really kinda been on fire because public sector. And if you look at the other industries, I've picked up financial services, uh, energy and telecommunications and training and certification. These are all that had to keep going. Uh, governments were moving faster than ever. >>So our team was really busy. Um, I've had individuals asked me, well, how did you manage the downtowns? Like we didn't have any downtime. Like literally day one, we were like 24 seven and the teams were working with it pretty much every government around the world because COVID moved so quickly and all virtually. And I will have to say, John, I was really skeptical in the beginning about how is this? How, how are we going to do this? Um, but the teams really, we figured out how to operate. You know, you had to, it's a new muscle. You kind of have to build that virtual work muscle and figure out how you manage your day, how you fit things in. And then there's the point that people think you're always available because you are at home, right? So you can never, that you can't possibly not be available because you know, you're, you are sitting at home. And then there's the many times where people's cats walk across and kind of with their tail on their face. And that dog child were at REMS in with the diaper. And you know, it's all, you, you have to have grace and humor about all this. Sometimes T like you can't take everything so seriously. And perhaps we've learned that, um, work and life can blend a little bit more, right? That you can, you can have that when a lot of people, when they talk about work-life balance, now we have work-life harmony. >>You know, you and I have talked about this before. If you can tap whoever taps, the diversity of talent will always let me win the game and not just, um, diversity in terms of gender or background role. I mean, if you can tap the virtual space, you're a winner because there's talent out there that can be aggregated in, and there's no stigma associated with anything. So, you know, this is, I think Andy kinda, uh, expressed that to me. And, and he heard it in his keynote where he said, Hey, people are a square, but you can get more participation. I think that is a real positive, um, upside. And I love the perspective of this new muscle. I totally agree. You need to, you need to have that >>Square. I mean, we've, we've actually chatted. I don't know if we'll ever go back to having big rooms with people in it, because you have a voice, you have a face. And I do believe, especially for women, uh, John, who can not always speak up, it's an opportunity for them to have their own space. They ha they can have their own voice. All individuals cause centers. They have great ideas, but they don't always value them. So having, you know, when you, each person has their own square, you can actually kind of see, well, who's, who's has an opinion. Who's spoken up. Who, who do I want to call on here and ask them if they have an opinion? So I like the idea of everybody having their own space when you're having a meeting. If you have to be virtual, because you get lost in translation, especially if you have that large leader in the room and everybody else's around them, then sometimes they only kind of adhere to their voice. This is an opportunity for others to really have that pool. >>I was just, I saw a joke on Twitter from a friend that said, Hey, I run all the meetings now because I can mute people. So if someone starts talking, you're muted bye-bye. So again, this is a whole new muscle great stuff. Well, since you've, since you brought up your role, I know you have a new expanded role. Could you take a minute to explain what that is? Because I'm still not clear. I know you've been doing an amazing job. I've written about, uh, your initial successes, and now you continue to do well with public sector and believe me, I've exploding. I see it. We're reporting on it. Public service is changing with digital transformation, but these other things, what are you working on? What are the new areas? Yeah, so I >>Just passed my 10th year. I'm starting my 11th year and it's been like amazing building this public sector business. I, I, and our government customers. Wow. The innovation and education during COVID has been pretty off the charts, which I don't think I'll slow down. And then a few months ago I was asked to take on our, uh, our training and certification org and our evangelist in solution architecture org, along with the industry business units of, uh, finance, telecommunications, and energy. And then, uh, John, if you remembering June, I announced our aerospace and satellite industry business unit. So, uh, these are the ones that we have right now are very regulated. A lot of them are, you know, very closely aligned to regulated industry. Um, you know, there could be others that are not as regulated, but the ones right now, if you think about aerospace, satellite, financial services, telecommunications in, in, in energy. >>So they, for me, um, they're very, it can tell a lot of the work I've been doing in building public sector, because when I go into a country today, when my teams go in, we generally always have to work with these groups. So if you think about telecommunications, we have to go in and make sure that we're working on our networking, our connectivity, and we negotiate and work with those telco providers. Same with the energy companies, both large ones and small ones. We go in and we work to build a power purchasing agreements, you know, solar power, uh, renewable energy to power our data centers and make sure that we're giving back to the grid. So we have that partnership. And then in the financial sector, I've had our, uh, I've had all of our regulators anyway, like FINRA fed reserve. Um, I R S treasury. >>So I've already, I've always had all the regulators. So now working with the, uh, you know, the additional, the banking, the investment sector, capital markets, it's very, it's, it seems so natural if that makes sense. And now diving into the upstream and downstream stream of supply chain for both that energy and telco and what a fantastic time now for telcos with 5g. I mean, I've been saying for two or three years that I thought this would be a huge opportunity for telecommunications companies to actually look for new, uh, work streams for their customers. And I mean, edge, you know, now our connect or call centers that they can do and take advantage of that. So I'm actually really excited. Uh, John seeing seven of new opportunities and, you know, renewable the new energy, uh, startups that are out there, the things I'm seeing, power, solar, nuclear, um, and then seeing a lot of the larger energy companies take on these projects. It's a lot of fun. And, um, I'm very excited now to continue to meet those customers. I got to meet a lot during re-invent. I love their energy. Yeah. I love kind of learning about what they're looking to solve. And, and I'm also just looking forward to helping them, um, with the connections that we've already been doing in government. I think it's a really nice combination of working together. Now. >>I, I see it as, um, what you've done with public sector was take a partnership approach to an old standing industry, changed them quickly, get the transformation, build the relationships, get the successes and establish that transformation and this needed versus the organically developing, you know, stuff. That's going to be the cloud startups and whatnot. Those are going to use Amazon, but you're a transformational leader. >>John, if I could just save for a minute, if you think about re-invention, you're at re-invent and a lot of these are going through massive reinvention, uh, you know, again, 5g with telco renewables, uh, with energy and then financial services where everything is kind of moving to an online model and digital model with different types of currencies that they have to deal with. It's, it's really perfect for cloud and what we offer. So I think the opportunity, um, to dive in and really partner with these industries and aerospace and Salado. Oh my gosh. It's just, I have to say, I really do believe cloud computing is, um, the perfect kind of step forward with all these industries for reinvention and innovation, which they're all moving towards. >>Well, Theresa, you're a re-invention leader. Uh, we've covered it. And now we've got all new territory for you to work on. Um, bring your playbook, you know, people-centric partner results are charging Theresa, thank you for your time. Great to have you on. Great to see you. Wish you, we were in person in real life again soon. Thank you for coming on. >>Yeah, John, thank you. Happy holidays. I look forward to seeing you next year. >>Okay. This is the cubes coverage of AWS reinvented. We have Teresa Carlson, she heads up the public sector. She's the chief of the whole public sector, and now taking on other industries to bring that playbook, the reinvention to the industries, really a big part of the Amazon web services, vision and cultural change. That's going on with the pandemic reach rechanging and reformatting and refactoring industries. That's what's going on in the big picture and a lot of gay tech under the hood. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>>Well, welcome everybody to our last session of the day. I want to introduce you to Sean O'Meara. Orfield Cto. Hey, Sean. >>Hey, Nick. Good afternoon. It's been a crazy day. It has. It's been a busy run up to today in a busy day with a lot of great things going on. You know, we've heard from Adrian on his strategy this morning. The great way the Marantz is moving forward. We announced our new product line. You know, we spoke about the new doctor Enterprise Container Cloud line, New future for Mirant. Us. We had a great lineup of customers share their story. We introduced lanes following on the lanes launch a couple of weeks ago. Andi, we're introducing new great projects like our mosque project. New way to deliver open stack going into the future on then in parallel sel. This We ran a great tutorial tracker teachers you all about how to use these new products, and hopefully you'll go and everyone had opportunity to go and look through guys. Yeah. What's next? What is next? Yeah, lots going on. A lot of new things that we're thinking about for the future. Obviously, a lot of work to do on what we have right now. A lot of great things coming. But, you know, we've had this opportunity to talk about all these cool things that are coming down the road. And everybody these days seems to be talking about topics like edge computing or hybrid cloud. Or, you know, hyper scale data centers, even things like disaster recovery is a service. Andi, you know, we talk a lot about things like hyper converged, but frankly, it's boring. It's one thing a little. Good morning. Uh, you know, you and I have been talking about these topics for a while now, and I think it's about time when we spoke about some of the cool things that we're thinking about for the future, not necessarily looking out for the road map, but ideas for the future. Things that may could have an impact on the way we do business going to. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about things like pervasive computing. A nick, what is pervasive computing. >>Well, basically pervasive computing is when everything that you interact with, for the most part, is computerized. So in some ways, we're already there in that You know your phone is a computer. Your refrigerator may have a computer in it. Um, your smart watch your car has a computer in it. And the the most obvious sign of that is this whole Internet of things where, you know your vacuum is, uh is connected to your phone and all of that. And so pervasive computing is this, uh is this sense of you don't even really think about it. You just kind of assume that everything is computerized. >>So how is that different from ubiquitous computing? >>Oh, God. You hit, You hit my hot button. Okay, so if you look, there are a lot of places that will say that pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing are the same thing, but not the same thing. Don't use them interchangeably. They're not the same thing. You big. What is computing is where you can do your computing virtually anywhere. So, for example, you know, I've got, uh I've got a document. I started it on my laptop. I can then go and finish it sitting on the beach on my phone. Or, you know, I can go and do it in a coffee shop or a library. or wherever. So the idea of ubiquitous computing is similar in that, yes, there's computing everywhere, but it's more about your data being universally accessible. So essentially it is cloud computing. That is what this whole ubiquitous computing thing is about. >>Okay on that then differs from pervasive computing in the fact that pervasive is the devices that we have all around us versus the access to those devices. >>Exactly. It's it's really it's more about the data. So ubiquitous computing is more about My data is stored in some central place, and I could hit it from anywhere. There is a device, whereas pervasive computing is there is a device almost everywhere. Okay, so yeah, >>So why Why do we as Moran takes care about the vice of computing? >>Well, pervasive computing brings up a whole lot of new issues, and it's coming up really fast. I mean, you last night I was watching, you know, commercial where you know, somebody a woman's coming out and starting her car with her phone. Um, which sounds really cool. Um, but you know what they say Anything that you can access, you know, with your computer is hackable. So, you know, there are security issues that need to be considered when it comes to all of this, but that's that's the downside. But there's just this huge upside on pervasive computing that it's so exciting when you think about this. I mean, think about a world where remember I said your refrigerator might be attached to the network. Well, what if you could rent out space on your refrigerator to somebody someplace else in a secure way? Of course. You know what? If you could define your personal network as all of these devices that you own and it doesn't matter where your workloads run or, you know, you could define all of this stuff in such a way that the connectivity between objects is really huge. Um, so you know, I mean, you look at things like, you know, I f t t you know, it's like get a notification when the International space station passes over your house. Okay? I don't know why I would need that. Um, but it's the kind of thing that people >>would have a nine year old. You can run him outside and show Z. Oh, >>there you go. There you go. So I mean, that kind of level of connectivity between objects is really really it gives us this new level off. Uh, this new level of functionality that we would never even considered even 10 years ago. Um, it also extends the life of objects that we already have. So, you know, maybe you've got that, uh, that computerized vacuum cleaner, and you don't like the way that it you don't like the pattern that uses in your house. So you re program it or, uh Or I watched. I watched a guy decide that he didn't want to buy multiple vacuums for his house. So he programmed his programa will act Hume to fly between floors. It was actually pretty funny. Um, I it's some people just have too much time. >>It's driving the whole world of programmable at all levels. Really? Like the projects coming out of the car industry of creating a programmable car would fit into that category. Then, I >>suppose absolutely, absolutely needs developer tool kits. Um, that make it possible for anybody to re program these devices that you never would have thought of reprogramming before. So it's important. So do >>we want to talk about the questions. We would love people to give us some feedback on at this stage. >>I would love to talk about these questions. So what we did is we put together, uh, we put together a place for you to answer questions. If you're not watching this live. If you're watching this live, please go ahead. Drop your ideas in the chat. We would love to discuss them, you know. Do you want to see more of this? Or does it? Conversely, Does it scare you, Sean? You What? >>What do you >>think about these questions? >>Well, I mean, for me, the idea of the connected world at one level, the engineering me loves the idea. Another level. It comes to these questions of privacy. Vegas questions off. How do I control this going into the future? What prevents somebody from taking over my flying vacuum cleaner? I'm using it, you know? So it's an interesting question. I think there's a lot of cool, cool ideas. Yeah, and a lot of work to be done. I really want to hear other people's ideas as well and see how we can take this into the future. >>Definitely, definitely. I mean, look I mean, we're joking about it, but, you know, when somebody hacks into your grandmother's insulin pump, maybe not so funny. >>Yeah, a very real risk. >>A very real risk. A very real risk. But yeah, I mean, we'd love Thio. We'd love to hear how you'd like to see this used. So that's that's my That's kind of what I've been thinking about thes days. Um, but, you know, Sean, uh, now, you I know you are really concerned about this whole issue of developers and how they feel about infrastructure. So I would love to hear what you've got to say on that. >>Yeah, I'd like to sex, but a bit about that. You know, we we've done a lot of work over the last few years looking at how developing our history has been very focused on operations, but without big drive towards supporting developers providing better infrastructure for developers. One of the interesting things that keeps coming up to the four on Do you know, the way the world is changing is that big question is, do developers actually give a damn about infrastructure in any way, shape or form? Um, you know, ultimately more and more development languages and tools abstract that underlying infrastructure. What communities does is basically abstract. The infrastructure away, Um, mawr and more options. They're coming to market, which you can quite literally creating application without out of a writing a line of code. Um, so this morning, way Dio, we're doing it all the time, sometimes without even realizing it on. I think the definition of what a developer is is also changing to a certain extent. So you know the big question, which I have on which I'd like to understand Maureen, from talking to low developers is due. Developers care about infra What is it that you expect from infrastructure? What do they want going into the future? How are they going to interact with that infrastructure? I My personal opinion is that they don't really care about infrastructure, that they're going to find more ways to completely abstract away from that. And they just want to focus on delivering applications faster and getting value to market. But I might be wrong, and I'd really like to hear people's impact ideas and thoughts on that >>on. And that's exactly and that's why we're asking this question. Developers out there. Do you care? Or do you just want the whole thing completely abstracted away from you >>on? If you do care why, If you don't, what would you like to see? Another. It's a couple of questions to ask, but really like to hear those opinions on bond. You know, Do you just want the operations guys to live with it? You never want to hear about it again, just fine. It's actually good to say that we'll work it out. >>Yes, and that there's nothing. There's nothing wrong with pushing that up stack >>pretty much what we're trying to do here. >>Well, it is what we're trying to do. But at the same time, we want to do what's good for developers. And if you developers or like No, don't don't do that. Well, we want to know because, you know, we don't wanna work away here and some ivory tower and wind up with something that's not good for >>you after school. So cool. So, yeah, there are some other interesting things we're talking about. >>I know, I know. This is This is one of my favorites. This is one of my favorites. >>Zoo this? Yes. While >>we're on the subject of not getting involved with the infrastructure. Go ahead, Sean. Tell us about it. >>Thing is a pet topic of mine and something that that we've spoken about a lot. And thanks something that we we have spent many nights talking about. The idea is AI ops using artificial intelligence to drive operations within our infrastructure. And so a lot of people ask me, You know why? Um, essentially, What the hell is a I out on? I have answered this question many times, and it does often seem that we all take this AI ops thing for granted or look at it in a different way. To me, it is essentially, it's it's automation on steroids. That's what it boils down Thio. It's using intelligence systems that to replace the human cerebellum. I mean, let's just be blunt about this. We're trying to replace humans. Onda reason for that is we humans less meat sacks are airplane. We make mistakes all the time and compared to computers were incredibly slow. Um, you know, that's really the simplest point with the scale of modern infrastructure that we're dealing with the sheer volume. I mean, we've gone from, you know, thousands to tens of thousands of the EMS to now hundreds and thousands of containers spread across multiple time zones. Multiple places. We need to come up with better ways of managing this on the old fashioned stick through mechanism of automation. It's just too limited for that. Right >>when we say we want to replace meat sacks, we mean in a good way. >>We mean in a good way. I know it's a bit of a harsh way of putting it. Um, ultimately, humans have ability for creativity that machines just don't have. But machines can do other things, and they could do analysis of data a lot faster than we can. Quite often, we have to present that data to humans to have invalidate that information. But, you know, one of the options for us is to use artificial intelligence, quantified data, um, correlated, you know, look for root cause and then provide that information to us in such a way that we can make valid decisions based on that information a lot faster than we could otherwise, >>right? So what are the what are the implications? What are the practical implications of doing this so >>practically we can analyze massive amounts of data a lot faster than a single human. Could we even just a normal type system that's searching? We We have the tools to learn by looking at data and have machines do it a lot faster than we can. We can take action faster based on that data, because we get the data foster. We can take action and much more complex action that involves maybe many different layers of tasking much, much faster. Um, on we could start to do maintenance operations and maintenance tasks without having to wait for human beings to wake up or get to an office. But more importantly, we could start making tasks happen very complex tasks in a very specific orders, with much less potential for error. And those are the kinds of areas we're looking at. >>That's that's true. So how do you kind of see this moving forward? I mean, obviously, we're not gonna go from nothing to Skynet, and hopefully we never get to Skynet. Well, >>depends if you are in control of Skynet or not. Ultimately, Dionysus little computer. Um, practically speaking, we have a few things Thio hoops to jump through our suppose before we can look at where else is going to be really effective on the first one is a trust issue. We have to learn to trust it. And to do that, we have to put in a position where it can learn and start providing us that data analysis on that inference and then having humans validated. That's practically the very first step. No, it's a trust issue. You know, we've seen been watching sci fi for the last 30 years. Class on. Do you know the computers take over? Well, ultimately, is that real or not? Um, if we look at how we gonna get there? Probably midterm. Adaptive maintenance, maybe infrastructure orchestration. Smart allocation of resource is across cloud services. Well, >>we can talk for a minute About what that would would actually look like. So, I mean, we could talk about, you know, abs, midterms. I mean, in a practical sense, how would that actually work? >>Yeah, Okay. It's a great question. So, practically speaking, the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to start to collect all this data. We're gonna find all this data. I mean, the modern computer systems that we have infrastructure systems. We are producing many hundreds of gigabytes, sometimes terabytes of logging data every day. The majority of it gives far 13. I mean, we throw the majority of their logging information away or if it's not thrown away, it's stored some way for security purposes and never analyzed. So let's start by taking their data and actually analyzing it. To do that, we have laid and correlated, >>so we >>gotta put it all together. We've got a match it and we've got to start building patents. We're going to start looking for the patterns. This is where I is particularly good at starting to help us. Bold patterns start to look for those patterns. Initially, humans will have to do some training. Um, once we have that patent, once we've got that working, we can now start having the AI systems start to do some affairs. E, here's the recalls. So we the system can tell us based on the data based on the patterns we've been learning. We know from the past debt. If those three network links get full bad example, we're gonna have a failure in Region X, right. So start telling us while those network links of filling up tell us before they fall rather than after their full always they're falling up as we see trending information now seems like a simple I could do trending information with just normal monitoring systems. But if I can start to correlate that with greater users in, you know, Beijing Office versus Users in California office filling up those links and different times of the day, I can now start to make much more clever decisions, which is a human on its own, to try and correlate that information, which is be insane once you've done that way to go to the next stage, which is not to have the system act do actions for us. Based on that information right now, we're starting to get close to the scan it. Speaking of this doesn't have to be a big, complex pile of change. Smart ai solution. I have data on that AI solution is talking to my existing automation solutions to action. That change. That's how I see this moving forward, >>right? So essentially you, instead of saying, you know, deploy this too. Uh, this workload to AWS, you would say deploy this. Yeah, And then the system would look and go. Okay, It's this kind of workload. At this time of day at this size, it's gonna interact with this and this and this. And so it's gonna be best off in this region of this cloud provider on then. Uh, you know, two days from now, when the prices drop, we're gonna put it over there, >>even taking a different different. Spoken exactly that it could be. The Beijing office is coming online. Let's move the majority of the workload to a cloud that's closer to them. Reducing the network bandwidth. Yeah, and inference. Andi Also reducing the impact on international lines as Beijing winds down for the day, I can just move the majority of the workload into California on board Europe. In between, it's very simple examples, but have humans do that would be very complex and very time consuming >>exactly. And end. Just having humans notice those patterns would be difficult. But once you have the system noticing those patterns, then the humans could start to think, How can I take advantage of this, you know, So as you are talking about much longer term in the actual applicant patients themselves. So you know, everything can be optimized that way so >>everybody may optimized way can optimize down to the way we even potentially write applications in the future. Humans were still deciding the base logic. Humans were still deciding the creative components of that. Right as we as we build things, we can start to optimize them, breaking down into smaller and smaller units that are much more specific. But the complexity goes up. When we do that right. I want to use AI and AI solutions to start to manage that complexity across multiple spaces. Multiple time zones, etcetera. >>Exactly. Exactly. So. So that's the question, you know. What do you guys think? You know, we really want to know >>on Dhere again. You know, we mentioned this around the beginning, but do you think you could trust in a iob sedition? What would it take for you to trust in our absolution? And where do you practically see it being used in the short term? >>Yeah, that's that's the big question is where do you see it being used? Where would you like it to be used, you know? Is there something that you don't think would be possible, but you would like to see it, you know. But the main thing is, on a practical matter, what would you like to see? >>Let me ask. The question is like a different way. Do you have a problem that we could solve within a isolation today? E, They're really well >>right. A re a world problem. And And assuming that, you know, we are not gonna, you know, take over the world. >>Yeah. Important. My evil plan is to take over the world with >>man. I'm so sorry. First >>had to let that draw. >>I did. I did. I'm so sorry. Okay, Alright. So that's so That's a I ops. And we like I said, if you're watching this live, throw in the chat. We want to hear your ideas. If your, um if you're doing this, if you're watching this on the replay, go to the survey because we way, we really want to hear your ideas and your opinions. All right, So moving right along. All right. What the heck are you know, kernels? >>Uh, lovely questions. So, you know, the whole world is talking about containers today way we're talking about containers today. But containers like VMS or just one way to handle compute Andi. They're more and more ideas that are out there today, and people have been trying different ways off, shrinking the size of the compute environment. COMPUTER Paxil Another cool way of looking at this and saying That's been around for a little while. But it's getting your attraction to learn to sing called unique kernels, and what they are is they're basically highly optimized. Execute a bles that include the operating system, Um, there on OS settle libraries, um, and some very simplified application code all mixed into a very, very tiny package. Easiest way to describe them. They're super simplified. And I were talking about in the eye ops discussion this idea off taking everything into smaller and smaller individual functions but creating a certain level of complexity. Well, if we look at uni kernels, those are those smaller and smaller bundles and functions. They interact directly with the hardware or through a hyper visor. Um, so actually, no overhead. I mean the overhead If you just look at what a modern you clinics operating system is made up of these days, there are so many different parts and components. Even just the colonel has got anything from, you know, 5 to 7 different parts to it. Plus, of course, drivers and a boot loader. Then we look at the system libraries that set on top of that, you know? And then they're demons and utilities and shells and scream components and, you know, additional colonel stacks that go on top of that for hyper visors. What we're trying to say is, what, This text of space, I'm >>getting tired. Just listening, >>Thio. I'm tired talking about it. You know that the unique colonel, really, it just takes over their complexity. It puts the application the OS on the basic libraries necessary. That application in tow, one really tiny package. Um, yeah. Give you an idea what we're talking about here. We're talking about memory footprints or time package footprints in the kilobytes. You know, a small container is considered 100 make plus, we're talking kilobytes. We're talking memory utilization in the kilobyte two megabytes space because there's no no fact, no fluff, no unnecessary components. And then only the CPU that it needs. >>So Bill Gates was right 6. 40 k is all anybody will ever need >>Potentially. Yeah, right. E, there was there was an IBM CEO who said even less at some point. So we'll see >>how that go. What goes around comes around. >>But one of the really interesting things about this small size, which is really critical, is how fast they can boot. Yeah, we're talking boot times measured in 30 seconds. Wow, We're talking the ability to spin up specific functions only when you need them. Now, if we look at the knock on effect of that, we're looking at power saving. Who knew? Run the app when I need it because there's no Leighton. See to start it up. The app is tiny so I can pack a lot mawr into a lot less space game power seconds. But when I start looking at where you were talking about earlier, which the basic compute idea in the world all of a sudden that tiny little arm chips it in my raspberry pi that's running my fridge, My raspberry pi equivalent that's running my fridge no longer has a fact operating system around it. I can run tens thousands, potentially off these very tiny specific devices when I need them. Wow, I'm kind of excited about it. I'm excited by the idea. You >>can hear that >>I'm a hardware geek from from many, many moons ago on DSO. I kind of like the idea of being able to better utilize along this very low powered hardware that we have lying around and really take it into the future. Well, that's good. Yeah. So I'm not going to kill, not going to kill containers. But it is a parallel technology that I'm very interested in >>that that is true. Now what does it I mean in terms of, like, attack surface. That means it's got a much smaller attack surface, though, right? >>Yeah. Great. Great point. I mean, there's no there's no fluff. There's no extra components in the system. Therefore, the attack surface is very, very small. Um, you know, and because they're so small and can be distributed much, much faster and much more easily updating and upgrading them as much easier way can we can upgrade a 60 k b file across a GPRS connection on which I certainly can't do with 600 make, uh, four gig VM 600 made container. You know, just unrealistic. Um, e >>I was just going to say so. So now these. You know, kernels, they're they're so small. And they have on Lee what they absolutely need. Now, how do you access the hardware? >>So the hardware is accessed via hyper visor. So you have to have some kind of hyper visor running on top of the hard way. But because Because we need very little from their type adviser, we don't actually need to interact with that very much. It could be a very cut down operating system. Very, very simplified operating system. We're also not trying to run another layer on top of that. We're not We're not ending up with multiple potential VMS or something underneath it were completely removed. That layer, um, the the drivers, the necessary drivers are built into that particular colonel device. >>Oh, okay. That makes sense. >>Tiny footprint easily distributed, um, and once again, very specialized, >>right? Right. Well, that makes sense. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I guess so. These these individual stacks, you know, comparing virtual machines to containers to unit colonels, there just a completely different architecture. But I can see how that would How That would work where you have the hi perverse. A little hyper buys are on top of rented teeth. OK, so moving right along certain. Where do we see these being used? >>Um, it's early days, although there are some very good practical applications out there. There's a big, big ecosystem of people trying different ways for this I o ts off the obvious immediate place. I i o t s a quick, easy place for something very specialized. Um, what's interesting to me? And you mentioned this earlier. You know, we're talking about medical devices. We're talking about potentially disposable medical devices. Now, if I can keep those devices to run on really low power very, very cheap, um, CPUs and all of a sudden I've got a device that is available to a lot more people. I don't need a massive, powerful CPU. I just need saying that runs a very specific function really fast, A very small scale. I could do well disposable devices. I can build medical devices that are so small we can potentially swallow them and other areas which are really interesting. And I spoke a little bit about it, but it's energy efficiency. Where We need to be very, very energy efficient. No. And that can also impact on massively scalable systems where I want to deal with tens of thousands of potential transactions from users going into a system. I can spin them up only when I need them. I don't need to keep them running all the time again. It comes back to that low latency on then. Anyway, that an incredibly fast food time is valuable. Um, a car, you know, Think about it. If if my if my electric car is constantly draining that battery when it's parked in the garage and I'm traveling or if it takes 20 minutes from my car to boot up its clinics. Colonel, when I wanted, I'm going to get very irritated. Well, >>that and if you have a specific function, you know, like, identify that thing, Yeah, it would be good if you haven't smashed into it before. Identified it as a baby carriage e dark today. Yes. >>So, Nick, you know, these is all really interesting topics. Um, yeah. We spoke about air ops. We spoke about the impact is gonna have on humans. Um, all of these changes to the world that we're living in from computer systems, the impact it's having on our lives biggest. An interesting question about the ethics of all of this >>ethics of all of this. Yes, because let's be let's be realistic. There are actual riel concerns when it comes to privacy, when it comes to how corporations operate, when it comes to how governments operate. Um, there are areas of the world's where, how all of this has has moved, it's absolutely I'll be honest, absolutely terrifying the economic disparity. Um, but when you really come right down to it, um, it's all about the human control over the technology because all of these ethical issues are are in our hands. Okay, we could joke about Sky Net. We can joke about things like that, but this is one place that technology can't help us. We have to do this. We have to be aware of what's going on. We have to be aware. Are they using facial recognition? Uh, you know, when you go to X y Z, are they using recidivism algorithms in sentencing? And how is that? How is that going? Is it? Are those algorithms fair? Certain groups get longer sentences because historical data, uh, is skewed. Be educated. Know how this works? Don't be afraid of any of this. None of this is, uh, none of this is rocket science. Really? Come right down to it. I mean, it's it's not simple, but you can learn this. You can do it. >>Ask good questions. Be interested to be part of the part of the discussion. Not just a passive bystander. >>Exactly. Don't just complain about what you think is going on. Learn about what is actually going on and be active, where you see something that needs to be fixed. So that's what that's what we can do about it. We need to be aware that there's an issue or potential issues, and we need to step in and fix it. So that z myself box, I'll step down zone >>important topic. And it's one that we all can have influence on on bits one. Those who are us who are actually involved in building these systems for the future. We can help make sure that the rules are there. That's right. Systems are built correctly on that. We have open dialogues and discussions around these points and topics and on going away, was she? I think we're coming to the end of the time on hopefully we've kept everybody interested in some of the things that we think are cool for the future. And we're putting our efforts into E O. But I think we need to wrap this up now. So, Nick, great chatting to you is always >>always, always a pleasure, Sean. >>It's been an amazing week. Um, been amazing. Couple of weeks, everybody leading up to this event on bond. No, thank you, everybody for listening to us. Please go and download and try. Dr. Enterprise, Uh, the container card is available. Will post the links here to better understand what we've been doing. Go and have a look through the tutorial track. You'll hear my voice. I'm sure you'll hear next voice and make other people's voices through those tutorials. Hopefully, we keep you all interested and then going download and try lens, Please. Finally, we want your feedback. We're interested to hear what you think would be the great ideas. Good, Bad. Otherwise let us know what you think about products. We are striving to make them better all the time. >>Absolutely. And we want your involvement. Was it all right? Thank you all. Bye bye. Yeah,

>> Pomp YouTubers. Welcome to another cube conversation from ours, the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California In this conversation, we're going to build upon some other recent conversations we've had which explores this increasingly important relationship between Senate conductor, memory or flash and new classes of applications that are really making life easier and changing the way that human beings in Iraq with each other, both in business as wells and consumer domains. And to explore these crucial issues. We've got two great guests. Brian Kumagai is the director of business development at Kashima Memory America. Scott Beekman is the director of managed flashes to Sheba Memory America's Well, gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. And yet so I'm gonna give you my perspective. I think this is pretty broadly held generally is that as a technology gets more broadly adopted, people get experience with. And as designers, developers, users gain experience with technology, they start to apply their own creativity, and it starts to morph and change and pull and stretch of technology and a lot of different directions. And that leads to increased specialization. That's happening in the flash work I got there, right? Scott? >> Yes, you know the great thing about flashes. Just how you because this it is and how widely it's used. And if you think about any electronic device it needs, it needs a brain processor. Needs to remember what it's doing. Memory and memories, What? What we do. And so we see it used in, you know, so many applications from smartphones, tablets, printers, laptops, you know, streaming media devices. And, uh and so you know, that that technology we see used, for example, like human see memory. It's a low power memory is designed for, for, like, smartphones that aren't plugged in. And, uh, and so when you see smartphones, one point five billion smartphones, it drives that technology and then migrates into all kinds of other applications is well, and then we see new technologies that come and replace that like U F s Universal flash storage. It's intended to be the high performance replacement. Mm. See, And so now that's also mag raiding its way through smartphones and all these other applications. >> So there's a lot of new applications that are requiring new classes of flash. But there's still a fair amount of, AH applications that require traditional flash technology. These air not coming in squashing old flash or traditional flasher other pipe types of parts, but amplifying their use in specialized ways. Brian Possible. But about >> that. So it's interesting that these days no one's really talks about the original in the hand flash that was ever developed back in nineteen eighty seven and that was based on a single of a cell, or SLC technology, which today still offers the highest reliability and fastest before me. Anand device available in the market today. And because of that, designers have found this type of memory to work well for storing boot code and some levels of operating system code. And these are in a wide variety of devices, both and consumer and industrial segments. Anything from set top boxes connecting streaming video. You've got your printers. You, Aye aye. Speakers. Just a numerous breath of product. I >> gotta also believe a lot of AA lot of i o t lot of industrial edge devices they're goingto feature. A lot of these kinds of parts may be disconnected, maybe connected beneath low power, very high speed, low cost, highly reliable. >> That's correct. And because these particular devices air still offered in lower densities. It does offer a very cost effective solutions for designers today. >> Okay, well, let's start with one of the applications. That is very, very popular. Press. When automated driving autonomous funerals on the work, it's it's There's a Thomas vehicles, but there's autonomous robots more broadly, let's start with Autonomous vehicle Scott. What types of flash based technologies are ending up in cars and why? >> Okay, so we've seen a lot of changes within vehicles over the last few years. You know, increasing storage requirements for, like, infotainment systems. You know, more sophisticated navigations of waste recognition. Ah, no instrument clusters more informed of digital displays and then ate ass features. You know, collision avoidance things like like that and all that's driving maur Maureen memory storage and faster performance memory. And in particular, what we've seen for automotive is it's basically adopting the type of memory that you have in your smartphone. So smart phones have a long time have used this political this. Mm. See a memory. And that has made you made my greatest weigh in automotive. And now a CZ smartphones have transition been transitioning do you? A fast, in fact, sushi. But it was the first introduced samples of U F U F S in early two thousand thirteen, and then you started to see it in smartphones in two thousand fifteen. Well, that's now migrating in tow. Automotive as well. They need to take advantage of the higher performance, the higher densities and so and so to Chiba. Zero. We're supporting, you know this, this growth within automotive as well. >> But automotive is a is a market on DH. Again, I think it's a great distinction you made. It's just not autonomous. It's thie even when the human being is still driving. It's the class of services that provided to that driver, both from an entertainment, say and and safety and overall experience standpoint. Is driving a very aggressively forward that volume in and the ability to demonstrate what you can do in a car is having a significant implications on the other classes of applications that we think for some of these high end parts. How is the experience that were incorporating into an automotive application or set of applications starting to impact? How others envision how their consumer products can be made better, Better experience safer, etcetera in other domains >> uh, well, yeah, I mean, we see that all kinds of applications are taking advantage of the these technologies. Like like even air via air, for example. Again, it's all it's all taking advantage of this idea of needing higher, larger density of storage at a lower cost with low power, good performance and all these applications air taking an advantage of that, including automotive. And if you look it automotive, you know, it's it's not just within the vehicle. Actually, it's estimated, you know, projected that autonomous vehicles we need, like one two, three terabytes of storage within the within the vehicle. But then all the data that's collected from cameras and sensors need to be uploaded to the cloud and all that needs to be stored. So that's driving storage to data centers because you basically need to learn from that to improve the software. For the for, Ah, you know, for the time being, Yeah, exactly. So all these things are driving more and more storage, both with within the devices themselves, like a car is like a device, but also in the data centers as >> well. So if we can't Brian take us through some of the decisions that designer has to go through to start to marry some of these different memory technologies together to create, whether it's an autonomous car, perhaps something a little bit more mundane. This might be a computing device. What is the designer? How does is I think about how these fit together to serve the needs of the user in the application. >> Um, I think >> these days, you know a lot of new products. They require a lot of features and capabilities. So I think a lot of input or thought is going into the the memory size itself. You know, I think software guys are always wanting to have more storage, to write more code, that sort of thing. So I think that is one lt's step that they think about the size of the package and then cost is always a factor as well. So you know nothing about the Sheba's. We do offer a broad product breath that producing all types of I'm not about to memory that'll fit everyone's needs. >> So give us some examples of what that product looks like and how it maps to some of these animation needs. >> So we like unmentioned we offered the lower density SLC man that's thought that a one gigabit density and then it max about maximum thirty to get bit dying. And as you get into more multi level cell or triple level cell or cue Elsie type devices, you're been able to use memory that's up to a single diet could be upto one point three three terror bits. So there's such a huge range of memory devices available >> today. And so if we think about where the memories devices are today and we're applications or pulling us, what kind of stuff is on the horizon scarred? >> Well, one is just more and more storage for smartphones. We want more, you know, two fifty six gigabyte fight told Gigabyte, one terabyte and and in particular for a lot of these mobile devices. You know, like convention You f s is really where things were going and continuing to advance that technology continuing to increase their performance, continuing to increase the densities. And so, you know, and that enables a lot of applications that we actually a hardman vision at this point. And when we know autonomous vehicles are important, I'm really excited about that because I'm in need that when I'm ninety, you know can drive anywhere. I want everyone to go, but and then I I you know where I's going, so it's a lot of things. So you know, we have some idea now, but there's things that we can't envision, and this technology enables that and enables other people who can see how do I take advantage of that? The faster performance, the greater density is a lower cost forbid. >> So if we think about, uh, General Computer, especially some of these out cases were talking about where the customer experience is a function of how fast a device starts up or how fast the service starts up, or how rich the service could be in terms of different classes of input, voice or visual or whatever else might be. And we think about these data centers where the closed loop between the processing and the interesting of some of these models and how it affects what that transactions going to do. We're tournament lower late. See, that's driving a lot of designers to think about how they can start moving certain classes of function closer to the memory, both from a security standpoint from an error correction standpoint, talk to us a little bit about the direction that to Sheba imagines, Oh, the differential ability of future memories relative Well, memories today, relative to where they've been, how what kinds of features and functions are being added to some of these parts to make them that much more robust in some of these application. >> I think a >> CZ you meant mentioned the robustness. So the memory itself. And I think that actually some current memory devices will allow you to actually identify the number of bits that are being corrected. And then that kind of gives an indication the integrity or the reliability of a particular block of memory. And I think as users are able to get early detection of this, they could do things to move the data around and then make their overall storage more reliable. >> Things got way. Yeah. I mean, we continue, Teo, figure out how to cram orbits within a given space. You know, moving from S l see them. I'll see the teal seemed. And on cue, Elsie. That's all enabling that Teo enabled greater storage. Lower cost on DH, then, Aziz, we just talked from the beginning. Just that there's all kinds of differentiation in terms of of flash products that are really tailored for certain things. Someone focus for really high performance and give up some power. And others you need a certain balance of that. Were, you know, a mobile device, you know, handheld device. You're not going to play. You know, You give up some performance for less power. And so there's a whole spectrum. It's someone you know. Endurance is incredibly important. So we have a full breast of products that address all those particular needs. >> The designer. It's just whatever I need. I could come to you. >> Yeah, that's right. So she betrays them. The full breath of products available. >> All right, gentlemen. Thank you very much for being on the Cube. Brian Coma Guy, director of business development to Sheba Memory America. Scott Beekman, director of Manage Flash. Achieve a memory. America again. Thanks very much for being on the Q. Thank you. Thank you. And this closes this cube conversation on Peter Burress until next time. Thank you very much for watching

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, the Intel Tech Lounge for a one on one conversation with Kane Lee, who's the head of content at Baobab Studios in California. Thanks for joining me here at the Intel Tech Lounge. >> Really excited to be here. >> You know we just had a panel on the new creative here, and Intel is showing some great technology. Things like volumetric, all kinds of really hardcore tech. Really powering some of the VR, AR, mixed reality, all the trends that are happening around user experience. But, a new creative artist is out there. A new storyteller. It could be a 12 year old to a 50 year old. You're in the middle of it. You're an award winning producer. So you're building the stories, you're building the content. What's the biggest thing happening here at Sundance? >> I think it's really interesting, because content has always been my passion. Good storytelling. And growing up, it was always books and films, and all these traditional mediums that inspired me to sort of dream, and right here in Sundance, we're in the middle of a great sea change going on, because technology and art are coming together in such a fast pace, to really usher in the new generation of storytelling, and we're all very fortunate to be in the middle of that. This is a very unique period in our history as humans, and our culture, to challenge what storytelling really means, because VR, for us at Baobab, is the next great medium. And Sundance recognizes that. Technology companies like Intel recognize that. So we're all coming together at the film festival, and working together to define what that will mean. >> Kane, you're an Emmy award winning producer. Baobab's doing some cutting edge work. Take a minute to talk about what Baobab is doing, and why is it so relevant? We know it's cool. We've interviewed the CEO and Founder before. Share with the audience, what is Baobab doing? Why is it so relevant? >> So, we formed a couple years ago, and at the time, VR was, and it still is, in its very nascent stage. One thing that we recognized, was an opportunity to try to create content that would appeal for people from the ages of five to 105. There was a lot of documentaries, there was a lot of experiential art house type of material. And there was a lot of gaming type of content for VR. For us, we're big lovers of animation and how that unites families, kids, grandparents, teenagers, and we saw an opportunity to try to create content that could appeal to all of these different types of people through animation. So that's sort of our mission, is to inspire your childlike sense of wonder, using two mediums that are so meant for each other, which are animation and VR. >> I'd like to talk about some of the work you got going on a little bit later, but I want to talk about that 12 year old in his room, or the 16 year old that's got a full rig, tricked out with the keyboard, they're laying down music, they're building music, they're gaming, they might be creating art. They are a living, breathing creative. And, they're self learning. They're jumping on Youtube. They're jumping into VR meetups and groups. They're self learning. >> Kane: Absolutely. >> How do you connect to them? What do they do? What's the playbook? How do these people go to the next level? What's the industry doing around this? >> I think, one example I'll give is, I was at Annecy Film Festival, and that's one of the biggest animation focused film festivals in the world, and I was showcasing our very first piece, it was called Invasion, starring Ethan Hawke, where you're actually in the body of a bunny rabbit, and you meet another bunny rabbit. You create a bond. And together you thwart an alien invasion on Earth. What was so interesting to me, was I had never seen that sort of, that demo, that teenage demo, where young boys and girls would actually bring their parents back to the experience, and say this is what I want to study in college. This is what I want to do in art school. So, I think that they, growing up with all this new technology, really sort of get the idea of being in realtime, and having storytelling in realtime. And seeing that level of interest from that age group was very sort of affirming to us that we're on the right track, in terms of the next generation of storytelling. >> Well you guys are definitely on the right track, I can say that. But I think what your point confirms, and connects the dots for people that might not be in the industry is that the old tech world was, the geeks did it, software was an art and you had to be in that CS club. The democratization is a big trend here, and what you're talking about is, people are humanizing, they can see real emotional, practical examples. So the young guns, the young kids, they don't have baggage. They look at it with a clean slate and going, I want that. I can see myself using this. I can self actualize with this. So really kind of tips the scales, and proves the point. >> Absolutely. We world premiered Asteroids, our second VR experience, starring Elizabeth Banks, and one of the biggest millennial stars, Ingrid Nilson, last year at Sundance. Even had the first red carpet VR premiere in Sundance history. And watching the younger generation, it was our first piece where we actually used the controllers that had just come out in that past year. And watching them go in with no preconceived notions on what using controllers could be, to be a character in the experience, it was just fascinating, because they picked it up faster than anyone, and learned the language of being a character, and having hand controllers as a robot, so you could play fetch with an alien dog, or you could mirror their actions, or they might mirror yours, and creating these bonds and these experiences. So, that sort of fresh perspective is really exciting. >> Talk about the role of these experiences, and how they connect people, because one of the big trends also online today, in today's, I would say, yeah the peg the evolution is, you're really getting into the immersive experience, I believe that. But, content creates bonds between people, and good experiences creates glue between relationships, and forges new ones, maybe enhances existing ones. This is a big part of the media. >> Absolutely. For us, emotional connection is the key to getting people to put on headsets, and to come back to our experiences. And that emotional connection for us, is what we've witnessed, in terms of people forming bonds with our characters. So, everyone knows that VR can bring you to brand new worlds, and exciting places, and immerse you in places that you can never go. But, the one thing that I think we learned in our experience with VR, is that if you can create a bond between the user and other characters in the experience that they believe is real, and we use psychology, technology, and storytelling to do that, then they want to come back again and again. So, one of the trickiest parts of VR is trying to get people to have repeat views. And the feedback we've gotten from a lot of the technology platforms is people come back time and time again, and it seems to be because they actually believe these characters are real, and that they're friends. >> So talk about your journey, because you're at the front end of this wave, and you're participating, you're creating art, you're creating work product. You're building technology with the Baobab Studios. What would you do if you were 16? If you were a sophomore in high school, knowing what you know, and you could go back in time, or you could be today what you know at 16, what would you do? >> When I was 16, I had no idea what I was going to do. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I was going to do. But what I will say is, VR is really unique because it's so interdisciplinary. So, it actually invites people from all different fabrics of society, and different types of education. The most, I would encourage 16 year olds to just be who they are, and to play. And if I talked to my 16 year old self, I would have just encouraged myself to follow my interest and pursuits more, because many years later, actually VR has brought me back to a lot of my roots, and different things that I studied growing up, and was fascinated by. >> So it ignited your passion. >> Absolutely. >> Or things that you were really into, that you might have forgotten. Is that- >> Yeah, I studied something called symbolic systems at Stanford University, and I had no idea what I was doing. It combined computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. And the first thing I did after college was pursue potentially a career as a lawyer. But now it all makes sense. VR makes, brings everything together. >> What could have been, you know? >> Absolutely. >> Well, a lot of neural network, symbolic systems, this is the underpinnings of this complex fabric that is powering this content market. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Is there a success formula that you're seeing emerging, I know there's no silver bullet yet. A lot of experimentation. A lot of new things happening. But as this technology, and the scaffolding around it is being built, while also original content is being built, it's still evolving. What's the success formula, and what's the pitfall? What to stay away from? >> I think it's about, it's really about good storytelling. And I think it's a time to be courageous and brave, and put forward stories that wouldn't have otherwise been told in the more traditional mediums. Our latest project in production that I'm so personally excited about, is called Legend of Crow. It stars John Legend as a beautiful bird with the most beautiful feathers, and the most gorgeous voice, who during dark and cold times, must go on a heroes journey to bring light back to the world. Something I feel like in this day and age, a lot of people can relate to. But, on top of this story being based upon a beautiful Native American legend that hasn't really been exposed to the world, we've taken the opportunity to take the themes of diversity and self sacrifice, and self acceptance, to create an all star cast of minorities and women, and that's something I feel the younger generations can really relate to, because having worked a lot in Hollywood as a producer in traditional TV and film, things take a while, and there's a certain way of casting and doing things that follow an older model, and I think younger audiences are excited to have a character like Moth in our experience who speaks both Spanish and English, because that's the way the world is today. >> So I got to ask you a quick, you brought up diversity and inclusion kind of in your comment. I got to bring this up, because you guys do hit a nice demographic that I think is super relevant and important, the younger generation. So I talk to a lot of young people all the time. I say things like, you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into this game. You can be super smart. You don't need to learn how to code hardcore coding to get into this. And they respond to that. And that's one kind of, I would say, narrative that conventional wisdom might not be right. And the other one is the diversity. So my son, 16 year old, says, "Dad, your generation is so politically correct. All this nonsense." So, the younger generation is not living what we're living in, in these dark times, I would say, certainly with diversity, but how does VR really equalize? And will the storm pass? Diversity, inclusion, all that great stuff that are core issues, certainly are being worked on. But, do we see hope here? >> Absolutely. I think disruption in the form of a new technology and a new medium is, while scary to some people, is actually the most exciting and fertile time to equalize. Our CEO, Maureen Fan, who is a college classmate of mine, always wanted to work in animation. And she finally saw the right opportunity when VR came, and we put on headsets for the first time, and saw how there could be a new wave of exciting animators, through this disruptive technology. Because everyone else in more traditional animation is so focused on the old model, and the old ways of doing things, of getting things off the ground, of financing, of creating certain kinds of content that have been proven over time, in the old sort of studio model. >> What were some of those things that were instrumental in this breakout, to forge this new ground? >> I think a lot of it is the technology finally being ready. Our CTO, Larry Cutler, actually studied virtual reality at Stanford a decade before Maureen and I were there, and he had always been waiting for the right time to go into VR. >> Does he preach down, hey kids, I used to walk in the snow with bare feet to you guys, or has he, what's his role, how's he doing? >> He's amazing. He was the head of global character tech for all of Dreamworks animation, and like I said, I think one thing that distinguishes us from some of the other people in VR is that we're so focused on characters, so focused on them making eye contact with you, or with their facial features reacting in realtime, and being very believable, and forging that bond between you and that character. So, for us, that character technology, and having the top people in that space work with us, is the long term thing that is going to differentiate us from the crowd. >> I'd like to get your reaction to my comment about the computer science, and that's mainly, mostly a Silicon Valley thing, living in Palo Alto, so, but people are struggling when they go to college. What should I major in? And there's a narrative right now, oh you got to learn how to code, you got to be a computer science major. You don't. You don't have to be a CS major. Some of the most creative and technical brilliance can also come from other disciplines. What's your reaction to that, and what's your advice? >> I think people should just follow their effort. Because, if you follow what naturally comes to you, what you're good at, and that also has meaning and interest to you, and something that you can get feedback along the way, which is the great thing about being in a growing space, you are going to just spend your, you're going to spend a lot of late nights doing that stuff, and you can always bring it into your career path when that happens. And I think, we're in a very DIY time in VR. No one knows anything. We're constantly making mistakes, but then learning from them. And that's the most exciting process of being where we are. So, to people who are of college age, I would just tell them follow your effort. If you're interested in VR, it's an exciting time to just do it yourself. Learn from your mistakes. And then, and try to create something new. >> What does the new creative mean to you. When you hear that, new creative, what does that mean to you? >> You know, it's interesting being at these talks and panels, and at all these festivals, because I feel like a lot of people are looking for that new innovator who comes out of nowhere, and sort of just redefines the industry. And that could very well happen. But I actually think what's really exciting about right now is, it's more about having, understanding the bridge between all the different mediums and disciplines. I think new things are created when you combine areas that have not been traditionally aligned. So for example, Orson Welles arguably created one of the first great cinematic masterpieces in Citizen Kane, but he was able to do so by bringing values from theater, and from radio, and areas where he sort of learned the art of storytelling. And he was able to combine them in new and interesting ways that people hadn't seen before. So, for me it's less about looking for that silver bullet of a creative person who comes out of nowhere, but these younger generations who understand these different mediums, combining them and creating connections with them in an exciting way. >> Brooks Brown from Starbury Studios said on the panel, the next breakout star is going to be the kid in the basement that no one's ever heard of. >> Very possibly, but that kid in the basement, he needs to be passionate about a lot of different disciplines. So, what we've tried to emulate in doing so, is bringing the best people in gaming, bringing the best people from traditional film, bringing people who had interests in a lot of different areas, different art forms, and letting them kind of play together and learn from each other. Argue with each other, you know? And then come up with something that no one's seen before. >> We're going to have to come up with a camera, so that could be like an experiment. Like it's just a reality show in and of itself. All that talent, multi discipline together. >> Absolutely. >> John: It's like dynamite ready to explode. >> It's the challenge, it's the blessing, it's the curse and the blessing of our medium right now, because there's so much more to discover, but if people come in and have an open mind, and are willing ... If the people from Hollywood are willing to learn from the people who do gaming in Silicon Valley, who are open to learning from the people in New York who grew up on live theater, I feel those, finding that intersection, finding those beautiful intersections are where we're going to thrive. >> Well you guys highlight that multi disciplinary thing, but also highlights why diversity is so important. Diversity brings the most perspectives to the table, the most data, most contribution. It might be a little bit longer to work through the arguments, right? You got to be patient. >> Absolutely you have to be patient. We're really lucky to be working with John Legend on our VR piece. He had actually been looking for several years to find, wanting to play in this space, but not wanting to do it with the wrong partner at the wrong time. So, it's, there's an art to timing in everything that we do right now, and when we presented to him the story we're doing with the Legend of Crow, it felt like the perfect sort of match. >> Legend of Crow coming out. Head of Content, Kane Lee here, Baobab Studios. Thanks for spending the time here on the Cube Conversation. What's the timing of the release of the program? >> Probably late spring, but we're going to be announcing some news around that soon, and we have some more exciting updates about it that I can't wait to share. >> Alright, we are here at the Intel Tech Lounge as the Cube's Conversation at Sundance Film Festival, part of our coverage of Sundance 2018. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here, in San Francisco, for day two. We're winding down day two of two days of wall to wall coverage, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier the founder, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media (mumbles) the Cube our next guest Larry Cutler, co-founder and CTO of Baobab Studios. >> You got it right. >> And you're co-founder and CEO Maureen Fan was at our Grace Hopper event. >> Larry: Yes. >> Well thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys are doing great. Love the story-telling, gaming, tech culture coming together here at Samsung. >> Yep. >> And seeing the future. The future, if you connect the dots, is augmented reality voice-activated, headphones that can be hacked and programmed and customized. You guys are doing some interesting things, you've got some good awards. Take a minute to talk about your studios. What are you guys doing, what's the aha moment for you guys. What should people know? >> So we at Baobab Studios, we're reinventing animated storytelling using VR. And so what we've, our aha moment was feeling that you could completely immerse yourself in the world in VR. And when we started thinking about well what is so special about an animated film, it's really about transporting you to faraway worlds, and making those worlds so real that you could like reach out and touch them. And then if you think about VR, that's kind of the same thing, where VR's promise is being able to transport you to incredible places and to make you really feel like you're in those worlds and you're part of those worlds. >> And to relax and chill a little bit too. >> Well relax and chill as well. >> Or entertainment or to be thrilled. >> So in our case we wanted to take all the experience that we have telling stories at places like Pixar and Dreamworks and apply that into this new medium. And so we found that VR is an incredibly powerful medium, and it really is one that's unlike film and unlike games. So, you're talking about bringing together the expertise of people from films, and people from games. That's critical to what we're doing, and yet at the same time, the experience is something that's totally different. >> Yeah we were commenting with some of our guys in our office how Twitch was experimenting with using the comments to drive the game behavior. You start to see new kinds of game systems develop around the storytelling as more of a behavioral dynamic, not the boring game I figured out, or the multi-player game with my same friends, or whatever that's going on, you're seeing a whole new level of creativity going on, one. Two, the other question is how much does it cost to make these things, 'cause Dreamworks and these guys are spending a lot of dough to do animation. >> Larry: Yes. >> I mean it's not cheap, so how do you guys crack the code on keeping it low, not low-budget, but low-cost and also intelligent is that the secret sauce? >> Yes well that's certainly super important for us. You know we're a start-up company, so obviously we need to be able to have a pipeline that if we run efficiently and you know for us, I think what we've done is we've brought together some of the best people, you know. So we've hired our friends, we've hired people who are really experts in the field, and we're really creating a next-generation VR platform so that we can actually create these animated experiences, be able to experiment in this space. You know, sort of try out different techniques and storytelling methodologies and at the same time do it in a way that we can, you know, sort of experiment as much as possible. >> John: Talk about some of the awards you guys had, I mean, you guys done some things. Share some of the accolades you've gotten. >> Yes, so, I mean what's amazing is that we started with our first piece of content Invasion!, and we premiered it last year in April at Tribecca Film Festival, and it's really gone on to, first of all, from a consumer standpoint, it's one of the most popular downloaded pieces of content on all the VR platforms, and at the same time it's been shown at a number of different film festivals, and it recently won an Emmy, so we're very excited about that, and, you know, what we realize is that audiences just fell in love with this bunny character Chloe. So Invasion! is this story about two aliens that try to take over Earth, and they're thwarted not by humans with powerful weapons, but by cute little woodland creatures. In the first episode in Invasion! they're thwarted by this cute little bunny Chloe, and what happens is that at the very beginning of the piece, Chloe like hops up to you, and if you look down you're a little bunny in the scene, you've got bunny legs, you can hop around. And audiences, you know, the viewer just reacted in ways that you would never do in a film, like people are waving at Chloe, a lot of people reach out and try to pet Chloe, a lot of people mimic what Chloe's doing, and in short people are just treating Chloe as if she's real. And it made us realize that there's something really powerful here that is really worth kind of leaning in and digging deeper into. >> And what was the next step after that, so you went what you went, some development, was it the game, was it the character development? How do you double-down on them, I'm just kind of curious on thinking about how the, on the thinking behind it. >> It was really interesting because we, in Invasion! we were kind of the first to make you a character in the story, but at the time there really weren't hand controllers, or any of the devices so that you could actually really have sort of a more like increased role in the story. And so at the same time, people really felt that they were front and center, and they felt this sense of protecting Chloe from the aliens 'cause you're placed right in the center of the story. And so with Asteroids! when we started, we just wanted to dive deeper into that idea of you playing an active role in the story. And so in Asteroids! we focused on the two alien characters Mac and Cheez and their relationship, and you're a helper robot on the ship, so you have. >> So how do I get involved and get these stories, do I have to have a VR kit? So I don't have, I haven't bought anything yet VR-wise, so for me, how do I engage with you guys, what do I do? Do I buy Oculus Rift, or certain headsets? >> So our stuff is meant to be available for everyone. We really want to have as many people be able to see our content as possible. And so first of all, if you have a VR headset of any type, our, Invasion! is available on all those platforms, so that's the high-end headsets like the Rift and Vive, the PlayStation VR for Sony, as well as if you have a mobile phone like a Samsung phone, you can plug it into your VR. At the same time, we also have a Baobab Cardboard app, so you don't even need to have VR to see our product. So you just get an IOS or Android app, a Baobab app. >> So I'm in the market to buy a headset, I'm not price sensitive, what should I buy? What would you recommend? (Larry chuckling) >> Well there really are so many options, so you know obviously at the high >> John: What would you get? >> Well at the highest end, you know, getting a Rift or Vive really gives you the full VR experience because it's really tracking your position and orientation so you can actually walk around a space, the characters can react to you in believable ways, and it's all happening in real time. And on the other hand, the Sony PlayStation VR's are really affordable if you've got a Sony Playstation, you just buy the PSVR headset, you plug it right in and you're ready to go. I'm really excited looking forward to a world where you're not tethered to your computer, and so it's really exciting to see these stand-alone headsets that are going to come out that basically there's no tethering to a computer and yet you have that same inside-out tracking so that >> And this is the Samsung vision, right? The Samsung vision is to use their displays. >> Yes, exactly. See right now what you have, which is, which is already really exciting, is you take your Samsung phone, you plug it into a Gear VR, and the one thing that's missing is that you're not able to track both the position and orientation of where you are, and so the next generation headsets are going to have that. And the experiences will be much higher feeling. >> Alright cool, so then I, I'll actually download all of this stuff. So as the CTO of the venture, your job is to kind of look over the landscape. You have to have the 20 mile stare of the future, not screw it up, but you've got to win the present. >> Larry: Yes, we're all about being able to deliver in the present and look forward to the future. >> And that's the key, and you have that unique skill as an entrepreneur. What are you guys doing now technically and with the product, what are some of the key things that people should know about, because I mean I look at the CG and the animation world, and you see the Moore's law kind of coming that way, right, so you go wow, as someone with a live video, I would love to have a bunny and the cube set right here, right? So we see a future where I want to immerse myself with characters, not just stickers. >> We of course see that as well, so you know, obviously. >> John: Is expensive I mean it must be, 'cause in the old days what, you had the artists, monster storage, tons of compute, what's it like now? >> Well we're a really small start-up company, so we are not a, you know, 300 person organization that is producing a full animated film. We're a small team of artists and engineers working together in the same way that we had that same excitement in the early days. I started my career at Pixar in some of their earlier films, and it was that same >> John: Power work stations, you had that high-end gear. >> Yeah so it was that same excitement in those early days, like we just had to figure out like how are we going to actually create this shot, how are we going to like, you know, build this character, how are we going to like finish this on time. And we have that same exact excitement in the office. >> When were you at Pixar, were you there for the Toy Story kind of thing? >> Yeah, so I worked on the Toy Story films, and A Bug's Life and Monster's Inc., and then I went over to Dreamworks and headed up all of their character technologies on their various films. >> Okay so you guys do anything different than those guys, or are you guys more focused more simple? >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting is that this is really a new medium and it's a new skill set, because what's happened is that you are part of the world, and for us the thing that's most exciting is that by you being a character, first of all, the other characters are not just able to have, you know, sort of high-quality animation, but they're able to react to you, and so there's there A. a number of technical innovations that you need to overcome so that we can have that same high-quality character performance that I would expect from a Pixar or Dreamworks film happening, running in real time at 90 frames a second on my headset, and at the same time also be able to have those characters react to you and respond to what you're doing. And you know, so we've scratched the surface on that. So one of the things that's really interesting is how two people will actually have all these subconscious communication cues, you know, whether it's eye contact or whether it's two lovers sitting across the table and mirroring each other's behavior, that's the type of thing that we can add into our animation. And at the same time, we have stories where depending on what you do, whether you choose to participate or not, that actually affects the outcome, and affects the way that characters respond to you. And so having much smarter character performances is certainly one area that I think is really exciting. >> And that's going to be interesting for you guys because you have some structured ways to do that, and then some unstructured ways to do it with community data, machine learning, and then you can use bots in a way to help you get data, but you almost could have character developments be dynamic. >> You definitely could, and you know for us I think the thing that is always the biggest point that we come back to is story. And so on one hand we want to tell one story that's really told well, not ten different stories, and on another hand, because you're part of that story, depending on what you do, that's actually going to affect how the characters respond to you, and that could be in a really nuanced way, and so, you know, building up AI systems, and building up the smarts so that you can actually have that type of response, and yet still feel like these characters are alive and breathing. >> Well the Chloe example on Invasion! is great example, you'd love to have that automated, so when you see those magical moments, the story could evolve, you can kind of give it that programmable policy-based taping. (John laughing) >> Yeah exactly so you know, so this is the type of thing. >> We're geeking out here on the set, Larry, great to have you on, super informative content, and I love the world you're in, I think the world's changing, I think you're going to see some interesting dynamics coming, you certainly have the historical view, Pixar and Dreamworks, old school, if you call that old school. >> That's right. >> Now the new school's coming in, certainly AR looks good too. >> Yeah, we're really excited about AR as well. When we think about stories, you know, VR is about transporting you to a different world and having a story take place there. AR is about the characters being alive in your world, both are really exciting. >> Have you seen the Magic Leap demo? >> Larry: Yes, yeah. >> What's it like, can you tell us? >> I'm not allowed to tell. >> John: Is it good? >> Yes, yeah. >> So it's worth half of another half a billion, oh I can't wait. >> That I can't say, you know. I can't comment on their business, but. >> It's a freaking award chest. >> I think there's a lot of exciting things you know, AR. >> They must have a killer demo, I want to find out, I want to see this demo. Magic Leap, I want to to see your demo. All seriousness, great to have you on, and certainly come down to our Cube studios. I want to follow your story, I think you guys are on the cutting edge of a new user experience that's going to bring computer animation, computer graphics, into a new persona as a storytelling, so congratulations. Larry Cutler, how do you say the. >> Baobab. >> Baobab, B-A-O-B-A-B Studios in Redwood City, California. It's the Cube live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier, more after this short break. (peppy music)