(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)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)